Billy Talent released “Fallen Leaves” as a single on November 19, 2006. The third single from their second studio album, Billy Talent II, told a story rooted in heroin addiction and the experiences of friends who had moved across Canada. Guitarist Ian D’Sa also helped shape its accompanying video.
Drummer Aaron Solowoniuk explained the personal connection in a May 2006 interview with The Punk Site. The song was loosely based on two friends who had grown up in Ontario, moved to Vancouver and become caught up in heroin addiction. In a separate conversation with Matt Schichter, the band said those friends had gone west hoping to start new lives. They eventually stopped using heroin and returned home. The song drew from their experiences without following their lives exactly.
The lyric names Pigeon Park, giving the story a specific Vancouver setting. Its narrator struggles with homelessness, dependence and isolation, repeatedly promising that another hit will be the last. The first-person account keeps the focus on someone caught inside that cycle, including his uncertainty about whether he abandoned his friends or they abandoned him.
For Solowoniuk, the music had an immediate appeal as a performer. In that same pre-release interview, he called “Fallen Leaves” his favorite song to play live and emphasized how readily people could dance to it. Gavin Brown and D’Sa produced the recording. Discussing Brown’s work on Billy Talent II, Solowoniuk credited the producer with recognizing when the band was doing too much and encouraging simpler arrangements. His description of playing “Fallen Leaves” captured the other side of its bleak subject: a rhythm he enjoyed getting behind onstage.
The video gave the song a setting full of strange characters. Co-directed by Dean Karr and D’Sa, it follows the band into a gathering of creatures, with a woodland journey and an unsettling dinner party surrounding the performance. The invitation to play comes from the monsters around them. That fantastical treatment gives the song a visual story of its own, with the musicians appearing as visitors who have wandered into unfamiliar company.
D’Sa had already worked professionally in animation. After graduating from animation school in 1999, he worked on an IMAX feature in Montreal, returned to Toronto in 2000 and worked on the children’s series Angela Anaconda. Speaking to NOW in 2007, he explained that he had wanted to direct short films, but the band’s increasing workload had drawn him further into songwriting and recording. “I’ll always love working on the creative concept side of the band’s videos,” he said. Co-directing “Fallen Leaves” connected that visual background with his work in the band.
“Fallen Leaves” won Best Video and MuchLOUD Best Rock Video at the 2007 MuchMusic Video Awards.
