2021 , Untourable Album- Men I Trust ,
Songwriter ： Jessy Caron , Dragos Chiriac ,
Emmanuelle Proulx
🍃 Men I Trust make music that doesn't rush you. The Montreal trio has always had this quality — a kind of patience in the sound, like they're okay with you taking your time to feel it. "Tree Among Shrubs," the fifth track from their 2021 record Untourable Album, might be the purest expression of that instinct.
🎤 Emmanuelle Proulx's voice is doing something subtle here. It's unhurried, almost detached — but not cold. There's a warmth underneath it, like someone telling you something important very quietly because they trust you to lean in and listen. She doesn't sell the emotion. She just places it there and lets it breathe.
🌿 The lyric at the center of the song is deceptively simple:
"You had a lonely past
The pain and strengths so vast
But I see a tree that's standing high among the shrubs"
🌲 That image — one tree rising above a field of low shrubs — does a lot of quiet work. It's not a triumphant image. It's a lonely one, actually. A tree that tall didn't get there easily, and it probably spent a long time not quite fitting in with everything around it. The song seems to be addressed to someone like that: a person who's carried a lot of pain, kept a lot of strength hidden, and maybe never had someone look at them and say, I see what you actually are.
🌙 That's what this song is, in the end — an act of seeing. Not fixing, not saving. Just witnessing. "I see a tree standing high" is one of the most quietly powerful lines in Men I Trust's catalog, because it turns loneliness into something else: proof that you were always more than you were given credit for. The dreamy, slightly weightless production wraps around that idea perfectly. By the time the song fades, you feel like someone just placed a hand on your shoulder, very gently, and walked away.
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SOME ALBUMS FIND YOU. THIS ONE WAITED FORTY YEARS.
There are records we hear, and records that hear us — that somehow know we aren't ready yet, and hold their secrets until we are.
Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants is that kind of record.
When I first came to this sprawling 1979 double album, I was looking for the Stevie Wonder I already loved — the architect of Innervisions, the genius behind Songs in the Key of Life. What I found instead stopped me cold: something vast, unhurried, and deeply strange. Music that seemed less composed than grown. I didn't understand it. I put it away.
Forty years later, I came back.
What I heard this time shook me. Not an artist chasing relevance, but one who had quietly stepped beyond it — tuning instead to frequencies older than fame, older than genre, older than language itself. This book is my attempt to follow him there.
Written across more than a hundred pages, it moves track by track through all twenty pieces — not as a musicologist, but as a listener who needed four decades to catch up. Part personal essay, part meditation, part love letter to a misunderstood masterpiece, it asks a question that may resonate with you too: what does it mean when a piece of art has to wait for you to grow into it?
If you've ever returned to something years later and found it transformed — or discovered that you were the one who had transformed — this book was written for you.
Available now on Kindle. Free for Kindle Unlimited members.
The most profound music never rushes. Neither does the reader it's waiting for.
— Toshiro Mori
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