Carla Gillis and her sister Lynette have always been in a band. In high school, it was Plumtree: a youthful collision of the Gillis sisters’ metal influence and their classmates’ pop sensibilities. On their second album, Predicts the Future, Plumtree released an infectiously-catchy, if lyrically-minimalist, song by the name “Scott Pilgrim.” You might have heard this story: Plumtree split up after their third album in the year 2000, and four years later, that song became the title of friend and fan Bryan Lee O’Malley’s hugely popular graphic novel series and, eventually, film. But Carla and Lynette did not stop being in bands.
The Gillis sisters had moved from Halifax to Vancouver around the time O’Malley started working on Scott Pilgrim. Having been a musician since middle school, Carla enrolled in UBC’s master’s in creative writing to further develop her skills.
“This batch of songs I got to write in the program were really just me, writing all by myself,” Carla said. “Plumtree often co-wrote songs. So it was a great chance to find my voice, to experiment.”
The shift in artistic environment to a classroom setting forced Carla to write in directions she’d never considered before. She started asking herself questions, probing into what it was she really loved to write about and what throughlines she could find in her art. The answer was, decidedly, family.
“I remember my parents sold our childhood house while Lynette and I had moved to Vancouver. We had lived there for … 20-some years, and the band Plumtree always practised there.”
The loss of this space brought Carla into writing more intentionally about family. “It was always in my dreams.” The support of her parents and the collaboration with her sister always anchored her music in Halifax and in that family home; when it was gone, she noticed just how much family came up in her writing. She started to write about Cape Breton, where her parents were from. “They are Cape Bretoners who loved fiddles and square dancing. My sisters and I grew up in Halifax, and weren’t interested at all in that, but then you move away from home.”
Carla grew up in a busy, vibrant home. There were the four Gillis children who lived there, along with the other kids their mother babysat. Friends came over a lot. They had band practice in the basement, pets running around. “It was quite a chaotic environment,” Carla recalls. They were a big family in a tight space, which often makes for a tight family. In 2008, Carla and Lynette lost their older sister, Darlene, in a car crash. “How do you process that? How do you kind of make sense of it, or come through it?”
For Carla and Lynette, they found their answer in each other and in their music. In 2015, under the name Overnight, the Gillis sisters released Carry Me Home. It is a much heavier album than anything they had produced, almost unrecognizable next to the youthful trilogy of Plumtree records. Having grown up with metal, Carla and Lynette embraced this new sound, and in creating this album, worked through their grief — together. “It can take so long, but I think writing a lot of those songs helped us do something with those feelings. And I think that’s what music is for us, in a big way.”
Between Carry Me Home and Overnight’s newest release, Put Me In Your Light, Carla and Lynette had strikingly identical changes in career. “Lynette and I went to therapy school, and I was doing a ton of personal therapy in those 10 years, and still am,” Carla said, “and I think that that’s been really helpful for making sense of things.” After her master’s, Carla moved to Toronto and became the music editor for the Toronto Alt-Weekly newspaper. Unfortunately the print media industry was declining quickly at the time, and what started as a fruitful career opportunity became rather unstable. “Everyone was doing the job of 10 people.” Eventually, the Gillis sisters needed a change, and as fate would have it, they would again be pursuing the same dream. Carla’s creative background lent a lot to her new clinical work. “A lot of my clients are musicians and artists,” Carla said. “All of that life experience has ended up being very useful in this career as well.”
The same was true in reverse: becoming therapists helped Carla and Lynette process music in new ways. Put Me In Your Light, like the album before it, is built out of the loss of a family member: Carla and Lynette’s father, who passed away in 2020. Added to that grief was their move back to Halifax, away from Toronto and their pre-pandemic community. Despite all this turbulence, however, the tone of this new album is exceptionally optimistic and bright. It dives into some dark points on tracks like “The World to See” and “Wind + Trees,” but it is also full of lively songs braiding together joy and sorrow, as in “Pothos” and “Strong + Good.” Carla said that her and Lynette’s education and experience in the world of clinical therapy has been foundational in this more optimistic approach.
Carla and Lynette have always been in a band. There was, as there often is for young musicians, a drive to “make it” as artists. Plumtree has seen a good deal of posthumous popularity thanks to the Scott Pilgrim books, film and animated series. “I don’t think we thought of that as, ‘Oh, we’ve made it,’” she said. “I think because it looked extremely different than what we thought making it would look like, which was more like being a full-time musician, which we weren’t.” Despite this, the sisters stayed together and continued to make music. Family is at the heart of Overnight and has been a persistent theme in Carla’s writing since her days at UBC. Her family has changed over the years and her career has bounced between entirely disparate industries, but she is still in a band with her sister.
“You know, you get older, you sort of fade to the background, you become more and more invisible. And we’re like, well, let’s push against that. Let’s keep putting our voice out there. We have no idea if people will be interested but it feels very important to us to keep doing it.”
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