Composer Interview: Alstad

Talking family life, creative process, and J.S. Bach with the contemporary Canadian composer and musician

Cory Alstad’s music has been streamed 65 million times across all major listening platforms, and I have been happily contributing to that number via Spotify over the past year. I reached out to Cory for my research project on the family life of J.S. Bach, hoping to gain his perspective on the process of composing amid (perhaps even in response to) the joys and struggles of family life. I am delighted to share some transcribed excerpts from our subsequent Zoom conversation and introduce you to Cory’s work if the name Alstad is new to you. Enjoy!

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Family and Career Journey

Cory: Thanks for inviting me to do this. These are all things that are close to my heart, for sure. So yeah, I’m married, we have three kids, and we live in the Vancouver area. Our oldest son Isaac is 25, my daughter Ruby is 22, and then my son Max is right in the middle so he’s 24.

Alex: So you packed them in there pretty quickly, then!

Cory: Yeah, we did. The boys are 13 and a half months apart, so that was a bit of a surprise, in a nice way, but we were like, “Oh, cool!” So, yeah, they’re really close. We’re all close together, which is nice; so far, they’re all here still and it seems like for the foreseeable future they will be. My daughter is interested in doing her Ph.D. in Oxford possibly or St. Andrews. She’s still got a master’s to do, but that’s her goal.

Alex: 25 years ago, where were you at? Were you writing music?

Cory: Oh, so I’ve actually been a worship pastor for most of the past 25 years. I’ve been here at the church here in Langley for 20. I’ve loved it, but my music work on the side has kind of taken over. I just don’t have the margin to do kind of two full-time jobs.

My wife and I have been married for 27 years. We lived in Toronto for our first three years of marriage. And then we moved to Winnipeg where we both grew up, and we lived in Winnipeg for five years. We had Isaac, our firstborn, in Toronto, and then we had the other two in Winnipeg, and then we ended up moving out here around 2005 or somewhere in there.

We came out here for me to do a worship pastor role, and I was also doing a director of music and arts in Winnipeg before that. So yeah, my life until this point has been mostly ministry in the church, overseeing the music and tech teams and all that stuff. And then the last five years this other thing on the side has really grown into a career. So, yeah, that’s a bit of a nutshell version.

Johann Sebastian Bach

Alex: What do you think about Bach? Do you like Bach or gain inspiration from him?

Cory: For sure. So, I did a Bachelor of Music. And, of course, growing up I did the formal piano lessons through the Royal Conservatory of Music. My final piece was a Bach Prelude and Fugue to do my Bachelor of Music. I forget which one it was, but so challenging to do the five-voice fugue or four-voice fugue, whatever it was. And I remember just having such an appreciation for him. He requires just such precision and careful voicings. So yeah, I have a great appreciation for Bach. To be honest, I’m not immersed in that world as much as I was earlier in my career, but I actually really love it. I love Baroque music, and I love putting on Bach’s cello stuff or his or piano stuff, or now piano stuff, you know.

Alex: Yeah, it’s quite a library of music that we have from him. I was also immersed in classical music from childhood through my master’s degree. I got pretty burnt out, though, honestly, so I kept playing and I kept trying to see what God wanted me to do with it, but I mostly listened to worship music for the next several years, you know?

Cory: Yeah, yeah, right!

Alex: It’s actually been through sharing music with my daughter and through research for this project that now I’m back to listening to Bach all day long. I’ve been exploring his pieces and finding ones that have themes of fatherhood or themes of grief. I’ve lined up all of his 20 children, their births and their deaths, and put them on a spreadsheet where I can see, if a piece was written in a certain year, exactly what was going on in the home. That’s giving me a lot of insights, and nobody else that I can find has tried to put this together.

Cory: Yeah, that’s really cool. Yeah, that’s quite meaningful. I think that’s a great project. I really like that.

Musical Expression

Alex: So when you think about being a dad and being a composer do your children kind of show up in your pieces? I know one piece of yours was maybe an apology to a friend, and another was about someone you went to high school with who had an early death. So, how do you express grief as a composer? And do the joys or sorrows or complications of fatherhood find their way into your music?

Cory: Yeahh, oh, thanks for asking. These are great questions. Yeah, for sure. So, in general for me, I grew up in a great home but probably one of the things that my parents would have leaned more towards would be less emotions. You kind of keep it together, you know, we don’t trust emotions—I kind of had a bit of that. And so I think my journey has actually been learning to trust my emotions more and express them more in probably, hopefully a reasonably healthy way. But music has been an emotional outlet for me, I think, throughout my life. And so a lot of my music is very emotional because it’s a way that I can safely express emotions. That’s something that I have realized over the last couple of years.

So, yeah, I have expressed a lot of things like that. “Curtis, I’m Sorry” is that piece you talked about where I apologize to a friend. That was from a high school experience I had. “Tabitha’s Dilemma” is about a friend who had an illness. She was this beautiful person who everyone kind of idolized. I remember being like, oh, she’s perfect, you know, and then just discovered that she had like the worst debilitating disease that just tore her body apart basically. And so that was something that had a big impact on my life, just thinking through that stuff.

Her Forever

Cory: More recently, in answer to your question about my kids, I wrote a piece called “Her Forever” that I released, and I actually wrote that for my son’s wedding. My two older boys are both married, and my son Max got married in November. They asked me to write a piece for when his wife Delaney would walk down the aisle, so I wrote this piece for string quartet and piano.

I should say the recording is actually cellos; it’s all cellos. I had a cellist friend that I worked with, and I wanted it to sound kind of like a string quartet, so we did that. As a string player you’ll hear and be like, that’s not a string quartet! That’s a bunch of cellos! Maybe an octet of cellos—a lot of cellos. Anyway, that was a meaningful piece to be able to contribute to. I officiated as well, which was cool. So I played and then got up and went over and said, “Who gives this woman to be wedded to this man?”

I’m very close to my kids, as is my wife. So yeah, they take up a lot of emotional space for me in mostly good ways—not always in good ways, sometimes in very frustrating, annoying ways (ha ha, much like how I’m sure I’m often very annoying and frustrating to them!)—but for the most part in really good ways. So I think that all comes through, I imagine, in my writing and in my playing as well. I haven’t written a ton of specific pieces that are like, you know, for Max or for Isaac or for Ruby, but I would definitely say they’re very much a very present and big part of my world day to day. So they come through emotionally, I think, in the music.

Alex: Yeah, that’s cool to hear. With Bach, I’m not always trying to prove that he like sat down to write a certain piece to express something he was going through with his family as much as like you’re saying: they impact your world. A frustration with Bach is that he didn’t write a lot of letters, so people aren’t sure what his emotional life was. I mean, it’s right in some of these biographies: We don’t know how he felt about the death of his wife because he didn’t write (a letter) about it. It’s like, well, he wrote the Chaconne at the same time; he wrote all kinds of incredible music that we listen to as we go through our losses, and it touches us in special ways. And in a society that may have been even less about expressing your emotions than maybe what your parents grew up in, wouldn’t it make sense if it did show up in his music? So it’s like the music is a bit of a key to his emotional life as we compare that with what was going on in his family.

Cory: That’s cool. Yeah, that makes total sense to me. Yeah.

Healing Through Music

Alex: When you think of writing music as you are going through a hard time, do you see it as processing? Do you see it as memorializing? Do you see it as more of escaping or healing? Like, what type of words kind of come to mind when you think of that, or maybe all of them at different points in the process?

Cory: Yeah, it almost feels like all of them at different points in the process. It’s funny, you know, as a fellow Christian, the concept of speaking in tongues has always been for me—I don’t know your background on it—but I kind of grew up in a bit more of a traditional kind of church in a lot of ways, so I’m not necessarily wired in the way that that would feel like a natural thing to me. And yet, I feel, I remember someone said to me once, “Oh, when you play, it’s kind of like you’re playing in tongues.” And I was like, oh, that’s cool, I kind of like that.

I don’t want to over-spiritualize that, necessarily, but I think that there is something about that expression where there’s, like, the inner voice. There is some healing as you play, whether it’s, Oh, I’ve gotta get this out, or, I’m feeling very melancholy or very down today, or, I feel paralyzed right now, I don’t really know how to respond. Sitting at the piano has always been quite therapeutic for me. When I was in college, I would go to the chapel late at night and just play for an hour, you know, with all the lights out; just sit at the piano and play. And that was, I think, very healing and helpful in processing.

And then also I think memorializing is a good way of putting it, too; there are definitely some things where I don’t know what the song’s about until I’ve written it, or I’ve at least gotten far along and then it’s like, you know, this actually this makes me think about Curtis and that conversation. And then it almost helps me kind of shape it, hone in on it a bit more, weigh some things, and be like, yeah, I like that; that makes sense, and I’m gonna focus on that, and that’s how this piece is gonna take shape, you know? Yeah, that’s just kind of thinking out loud a bit about all of that. So, I think all the above maybe, yeah.

Alex: When you get feedback from people who connect with your music do you find that they catch that a lot and that they have similar experiences, or that a certain emotion you had while writing kind of connects with a similar emotion for them to where it’s like, ah, they get it, without you necessarily putting a title to it?

Cory: I think so; it seems like they do. It’s funny, I think that in the genre I’m in titles actually are often very helpful. I’m a big fan of fences, of clear fences, and I think art needs fences. I think you need to know the yard you’re playing in, and so I think that sometimes a title helps people understand in general what they’re listening to. So if they hear, “Curtis, I’m sorry,” I’ve got a lot of comments from people about that, and they’re like, “Yeah, I get this piece,” you know, or, “I don’t know what it’s about, but it did something inside,” you know, “I understand somehow.”

I have another piece called, “But You Left Us Too Soon,” and it’s very much a musical lament about a little girl who died in our community. Again, same kind of thing where people are like, “Oh, I think I understand this,” or just, “That piece has meant a lot to me in my journey with my marriage,” or, you know, “I’ve had some big struggles and stuff.” So, like I said, I do think that the title kind of helps contextualize it. But also at the same time, my hope is always that people will hear the music and be able to also just be like, “Oh, I find this, I find this healing,” you know, somehow, or, “I find this helpful as I process things.” I think any composer has that goal, you know, that you want people to hear it and resonate with it a little bit.

God has wired music in such a mysterious and sacred way. Like there’s something about it that I think—I honestly do think one day in eternity we’re all gonna be like, oh, my word, I had no idea that it was this layered, you know, that God had done that, and there’s magic here, you know, whatever it is.

Bonus Topic: Original Church Music

Alex: Well, I’ll ask you one more question. I think it’s great that you’ve served in the church for a long time, as Bach did. What thoughts do you have on church music today, perhaps on the importance of having original songs that are composed, on accessibility versus excellence in the craft, or how those things kind of balance well?

Cory: Yeah, that feels like a couple of books. I always think as a worship pastor there are a lot of things that you’re hoping to do. One of those things is actually encouraging the people that are gathered together, so I recognize there’s a lot of stuff they’re hearing on the radio that they find hopeful and helpful. If the lyrics feel honest and they feel legit as decent lyrics—there’s a discerning part of that—I think there can be excellence in all different genres of music. I do believe in excellence, but I’m also wary of pedestals in the church. When you have excellence, you have pedestals because people love it and suddenly the band becomes less and less touchable. It’s just like this weird thing, and I don’t love that.

I think it’s important for us to recapture the art of writing within your community, if possible, because I do think that there’s something unique and important about a church community. Not every church, in my opinion, has the same sort of specific calling, right? Some churches are way more, let’s say, focused on people that aren’t Christians yet, that wanna find a safe place to come in and hear some good news. Whereas there are other churches where their focus is much more trying to help Christians kind of become equipped to go into the world and be God’s loving presence in the world. And those are two different kinds of things, so even the worship music might be different. So I think it’s important to think through those things.

I do think it’s nice if you have local songwriters who are writing things that the community has gone through. I remember being at a service where someone had written a song; it was a bit more of a lament, which you don’t often have in church services. I think that’s probably a miss for us. I think it makes sense to have thoughtful lament. It’s a big part of Israel’s songbook, you know, the Psalms. It was a beautiful thing, though, to sing this song that I didn’t know, actually—it was a different church—but I was like, oh, they all know this song because one of their congregants had written it. It was also a good song, which helps, right?

That’s the other thing, too, is that I’m not into dishonesty. We should not be saying, “That’s so great, man,” and meanwhile we go home for lunch and we’re like, that was horrible. I think we’ve got to find a way to be honest, carefully and lovingly. It’s not loving to, you know, enable something we all know is actually not great. Anyways.

So, I think writing in context is great. I don’t have a problem leading songs that are in the top 10 if they’re songs where again I feel comfortable—if I’m putting prayers on people’s lips, I do want to be mindful of what it is that I’m asking them to pray musically.

Closing Thoughts

Cory: It’s been really great to chat with you and to hear about this project. I think it sounds really exciting. That’s a big project, and I wouldn’t have thought about this. I think about these themes that you’re talking about, but I wouldn’t have thought of this in Bach’s life, and even just what you’ve done as far as looking at dates and events in his life, and then like the coinciding music, you know, that’s really cool and beautiful. Yeah, I’m sure it’s gonna be very insightful. I’d love to be aware of how the book’s going and everything else. Thanks for thinking to me. Great to chat.

Alex: Thanks for your time, Cory. Thanks for your beautiful music. I’ll keep listening.