Rich Aucoin is an indie-eclectic musician from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Since releasing his first EP in 2007, Rich has made it his life’s work to transform our fear into fun, anxiety into ecstasy, panic into pleasure. But making music is only half the story – each of his releases to date have been constructed in tandem with companion films made up of classic movies and public-domain footage, edited by Rich himself to sync up perfectly with his songs. Those visuals form the backdrop to a now-legendary live spectacle that is less a rock concert than a secular big-tent revival, uniting congregations under giant rainbow parachutes and thunderclouds of confetti. His three albums, We’re All Dying to Live, Ephemeral, and Release are a trilogy examining different facets of mortality. The final album was inspired by The Worm at the Core and The Denial of Death.
Follow Rich’s music at RichAucoin.ca
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When did you first discover Ernest Becker and Terror Management Theory (TMT)?
When I set out to make my third record, I wanted to make a record about death. My dad had died while I was making the first record. Then the second record was kind of leaning into death, and recentering how you value your time. And then I said, “okay, I want to go a step further.” So I literally searched “best books on death.” And thank you Google, it brought me to Becker. I read The Denial of Death and The Worm at the Core. They were great, and I read a few other things, like some like ancient Greek stoicism and some existentialism. Reading TMT and Becker’s work really resonated, and I thought “yes, this seems like an accessible and a strong work to build a record around.”
Your albums, We’re All Dying to Live, Ephemeral, and Release are a trilogy about mortality, but each takes a different approach. Looking back, if you had read about Becker before the first two, do you think that the trilogy would have turned out differently?
If I had read Becker earlier, it would have changed everything. But I’m glad I discovered the work when I did because with the first record I was making, my dad had been diagnosed with cancer, but it had gone into remission for 10 years. So the first record still had this joie de vivre, live-in-the-moment feel. It saw that shit’s on the horizon, but it wasn’t quite in sight. Then the second record was more of a first look at mourning and the pain and loss. Then after reading Becker it was taking a step back, zooming out and looking at the why, what this means to us all, and how it’s the basis for so much. So much is explained by this deep sense of anxiety and wanting to manage the terror. So the final album, Release, looks at the way mortality affects how we operate towards one another and society rather than just the very personal level of loss and death. This explanation of why we’re so married to our ideas just connected for me one day. I’m a subscriber to how the unconscious is decision-making in our day-to-day. It explains how someone can connect with an idea and identify with it so hard that they get emotional, or violent, or horrible to other people because they decided something one day, and now they have got to stick to it for their own psychological security.
How does your use of Alice in Wonderland imagery in Release tie in with Becker and TMT?
I cut the ending of the movie off so that it ends at the dark night of the soul part. Alice is alone in Wonderland and everything she’s ever known and loved starts disappearing around her. There are lyrics in “The Change” that say how we all each build our own individualized kind of wonderlands. And they’re kind of like our safety blanket. So I use Wonderland as a metaphor for TMT.
Do you think that contemplating death improves our lives?
Yes. My big takeaway and what I was trying to say with the record, drawing on The Denial of Death and The Worm at the Core, is that the more we face these things, than the more we can train ourselves to not let our unconscious go to a place that could be prejudiced or acting out of fear, and doing shitty things to one another. If we can keep that in mind, then we can train our minds to be comfortable with living in a space of doubt, which is what you want to be as a scientist or human anyway. Because then we can watch as we feel and think different things and see them as thoughts passing through us instead of being emotionally controlled by them.
When we think about things like that, we can feel so free. And it’s often so fleeting, such a short moment of feeling this clarity and one with the universe. And once you stop thinking about it, our unconscious says, “Oh, I’m gonna take the driver’s seat again.” It’s kind of like a muscle you have to train, like meditation and mindfulness. We have to remember that we’re just like everyone. This should be taught in school. This should be a big thing early on to say, “Hey, we can fix a lot of human bullshit by just thinking about where our motivations are coming from, and make sure that it’s not fear in the driver’s seat.” That way we don’t just act like a like zombies to stimuli.
My big takeaway and what I was trying to say with the record, drawing on The Denial of Death and The Worm at the Core, is that the more we face these things, than the more we can train ourselves to not let our unconscious go to a place that could be prejudiced or acting out of fear, and doing shitty things to one another.
How do you see yourself incorporating these ideas in your music and life in the future?
I think it’s the kind of thing that I will always be interested in writing about. It’s funny, because I have such a jovial show with confetti and parachutes, and everyone’s singing along. Some people are interested in the lyrics of the songs and some people just want to enjoy the party or show aspect. My show offers both. When I’m playing in Europe, or somewhere where I know a lot of the lyrics aren’t jumping out to the audience members, it makes me laugh because we’re singing these songs about death and having a fun time. I think it’s good and cathartic to sing about death and celebrate, but even if you don’t get those lyrics, I hope at least the universality of the music and the energy in the songs does the same thing.
Do you have personal thoughts about what happens after we die or how you feel about mortality?
I grew up religious but luckily got out of it unscathed, as in it never became capital “T” truth to me. I grew up Roman Catholic going to church every Sunday. And as a kid some friends would talk about having nightmares and being scared of hell. I’m glad I never took the priests seriously, if they did talk about it, or I just didn’t notice, because I was off in my own world. But I think when I was a kid, I was pretty into the idea of a physical-bodied afterlife. And then as I got older, I let that go and got more into thinking that the end of life is like the beginning of life. You don’t remember that, so you’re probably not gonna remember the end, but it would be very cool if there was something after, and I would love to be pleasantly surprised.