Michael Cormier-O'Leary

Words by Sammy Maine

The slender spirals of familial tendrils pervade our perspectives, inching us closer to understanding our true natures. Before we’re born there’s already a path of sorts, one that may be followed entirely––step-by-step––or with a few stepping stones lifted to form our own. Michael Cormier-O’Leary became fascinated with this idea of family roots, blending biography with fiction to piece together a family drama across his new six-song EP Proof Enough. Following these tendrils between each character crafted a story that attempts to grow from generational pain but also tries to understand the people who planted its seeds.

The release of Proof Enough follows Cormier-O’Leary’s 2021 full length More Light!! and 2023’s LP Anything Can Be Left Behind, alongside his work as composer and bandleader of the instrumental ensemble Hour, founder of Dear Life Records, and member of bands Friendship and 2nd Grade. As these projects and releases swirled, Cormier-O’Leary returned to his solo ventures, beginning Proof Enough in the basement of his home in 2022. Recently married and not yet a father––although the latter would transpire in the coming years––the collection of songs created a language to fold life into time and time into life. Some narrators are young enough to be honest, and others old enough to be wise and unrelenting, sauntering across a tapestry of generational patterns.

“Del,” named after his paternal grandfather and the first song written for the EP, searches for intimacy and connection, despite the cacophonous silence that can bubble between father and son. Inspired by a memory from his own father, it speaks of striving for generational empathy, understanding that reservation can often be a form of protection for ourselves as for others. “Silence means safety / From all the harmful / Words he could say,” he sings over sparkling acoustics and child-like percussion, as titles of beloved country songs ring out from the radio. These songs fought to fill the stillness between a father and son, later becoming a taunting jeer, a tirade, listing all the ways the relationship was never able to blossom. “There's some way even though it's unspoken, that a kind of bond could occur with these two people that can't really talk to each other,” Cormier-O’Leary explains. “They're both internalizing the same songs.”

There’s a preciousness to Proof Enough. Chronicling those private, innermost desires for a picture-perfect family as well as an assured independence, the instrumentation dances between a cheeky playfulness and a deliberately limited palette, toying between naive optimism and present-day realizations. Cormier-O’Leary used the demo-versions of every arrangement, only re-recording his vocals for the final iterations, which speaks to these characters trying to stay in the present, to capture something despite the knowledge that nothing ever stays the same. “Pressed Flowers” was written a year after Cormier-O’Leary’s wedding and its melodies oscillate like a well-worn nursery rhyme, trying to hold onto the glow of a particular day, hoping it’ll stay preserved between its witnesses as the years pass by.

Losing these witnesses looms over “Sky Is Blue,” as a character details what dying is like to a loved one. Cormier-O’Leary’s affinity for odd key changes and surprising chord-shifts adorn this spiritual, eerie exchange with an empathetic ear. “Don’t fear / What remains / Or Welcome / Resentment,” he sings, detailing advice that so many would welcome from a soul no longer here. Death pours into the next song, “Gouache,” though it’s the death of identity, highlighting the opaque rigidity of generational habits and their hold on whoever sprouts next from the family tree. Piano and guitar follow the same melodic lines, sometimes slightly out of sync with each other, parent and child colliding.

Cormier-O’Leary is a prolific reader, and it was during a moment in Sense and Sensibility that the title for the EP came to fruition. As Elinor says to Marianne: “What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering? […] believe me, Marianne, had I not been bound to silence I could have produced proof enough of a broken heart even for you.” The context is romantic, but the need for others to see some sort of evidence of our experiences and emotions is universal, especially in a familial sense. They feel as if they already know us, and it’s as if without proof, their version is the only one that exists.

The EP is presented with a work-in-progress painting by Flore de Ris (musician Ada Lea), showcasing a family squished around a dining table during a not explicitly happy moment. It’s a reminder that the most intimate moments saturate so much of our daily routines that they can get lost in the ordinary. Rough strokes mimic the intimacy that infiltrates our rhythms and ways as we age, inheriting the traits of others to form a distinctive symmetry. A unique experience or obscure thought can become muted in the chorus of family, but Proof Enough’s characters attempt to etch their own markings, catching the emotions as they’re happening to form a sort of testament before they’re gone, or altered by a residual view.

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Releases on DLR:

DLRDG010 - Proof Enough (2026)

DLR 042 - Anything Can Be Left Behind (2023)

DLR 020 / OOF 014 - More Light!! (2021)

DLRDG 001 - Brief Hold: Instrumentals Vol. 1 (2020)

DLR 001 - Days Like Pearls (2019)

DLR 002 - M-F (2019)