Neil Haverty Shares Brooding & Introspective Debut Solo Single, “Man Down”
Canadian artist Neil Haverty, known as the frontman of Bruce Peninsula and a film/TV composer, returns with “Man Down”—his first solo release in over a decade. Dark, intimate, and deeply personal, the track reflects on his 2011 leukemia diagnosis and the complicated road to healing.
Blending ghostly vocals, analog synths, and stirring strings by Mika Posen, the song was produced by longtime collaborator Leon Taheny. “Man Down” doesn’t glorify survival—it wrestles with it, offering a raw meditation on trauma, transformation, and the fragility of self.
First off, care to introduce yourself to our readers?
I’m Neil Haverty. Thanks for taking the time to read about me and listen to my new song. You might know me from my old band Bruce Peninsula, or if I’m lucky, you’ve kept up with my composing and enjoyed a movie I helped score like Wildhood or Sleeping Giant. I’ve been singing solo since I was 16, but Man Down is one of the first songs I’ve released widely. I’m looking forward to sharing more throughout the year.
“Man Down” is a stunning blend of analog synths, orchestral textures, and field recordings. What drew you to that specific sonic palette for telling this story?
I’ve always been fascinated with learning new instruments and making music with technologies I don’t understand at first. I started making electronic music with the first version of Fruity Loops, and eventually discovered Ableton Live, which opened everything up for me. All of my music starts there now, and I’m drawn to music that blends the synthetic and the organic.
For Man Down, I had basically programmed everything before getting to the studio with Leon, and then one by one, we replaced the midi mock-ups with real instruments. We ran my programmed arpeggios through many analog synths, and suddenly everything felt so warm. When we replaced the piano, the song was suddenly full of life. The strings and the drums made it larger than life. Over the course of a couple of weeks of experimenting, we ended up pretty far away from that demo, and the track became this sort of mountain, starting really small and building up to a high peak.
The track stems from your leukemia diagnosis in 2011. Looking back, how did that experience reshape your relationship with creativity?
Fully and completely. There are stories of musicians who go into the hospital and are suddenly inspired to make a magnum opus. I went in the opposite direction. Previously, I had lived as though music was the only important thing, but after I got sick, I started to think it was entirely insignificant. In the year and a half it took me to get into remission and on the way to recovery, I barely touched an instrument and sorta convinced myself singing was a silly thing that humans do. I was focused on surviving, then on getting the more tangible aspects of my life back on track, and music felt like a luxury for a while there.
In the subsequent years, though, that same thinking has been a source of a lot of gratitude for art and art-making. It is a privilege and a luxury to spend any of your time on this earth thinking deeply, creating, and sharing art with others. How lucky am I to get to sing and express myself? When your basic needs are threatened, you rightfully do have to focus up and get real. Now that I’m back to spending time in the creative sandbox, daydreaming and creating, I’m just so grateful to be afforded the time and energy to do it.
You reunited with Leon Taheny and Mika Posen on this release. What did their contributions unlock in the song that might not have been there otherwise?
Leon has helped to unlock the music-making process for me for almost two decades now. In the early days of Bruce Peninsula, we had all this energy and a sense of direction, but we weren’t sure how to practically get the ideas out into a format you can listen to. By the second or third recording session, he became more than an engineer and had joined the band, playing drums and really helping to shape the vision. He became a secret weapon for us over three records and a ton of shows.
Coming out of the fallow period after I got sick, he was a really important facilitator for this solo music. We had a familiar and positive working relationship, and getting started creating was so much easier because he was there. Daily, he’d be pushing me out of my comfort zone, asking me to sing something differently or forcing me to try some wrong notes for the vibes. The music really came to life as we collaborated and picked it apart.
Similarly, Mika is a genius and can create massive orchestral worlds, seemingly effortlessly. She had moved to the Ottawa area by the time I was asking her to contribute to these songs, but she would just send these zip files with violin/viola stacks that sounded incredible every time. I’m constantly astounded by the amount of musical talent there is in Ontario, and Mika has been killing it since way back to the Forest City Lovers days.
The lyric video is haunting and beautiful—how involved were you in shaping its visual language?
I shot the Man Down visual in my backyard about a week before I put it out. I wrote out every word of the lyrics for 6 frames each and then assembled them in a primitive little animation app. I dragged all my instruments out to the yard and shot with a little cheap drone I got online. It was very sunny that day, so I was sweating the whole time, and when I reviewed the footage, my fly was down for a few of my best shots… LOL. Gotta make do with what you get, I guess. I spent the weekend before editing it all, and got the video exported the night before Man Down hit the streaming platforms.
For the past 13 years, my day job has been helping to run the Prism Prize & MVP Project, which are initiatives dedicated to celebrating and supporting the Canadian music video community. I really believe in music video as an artistic format, and the lyric video and some of the adjacent social content were my attempt at supporting the release with some visuals without spending much/any money.
I admire anyone who puts dollars and energy into their music videos. I relied on the latter this time, and it took a lot of effort to pull together, but I have been getting a lot of great feedback about it. Everything I’m saying at work all the time – that your visual identity is an important part of releasing music in 2025 – has proven to be true. I’m interested in video-making as an artistic practice of its own, and I’m looking forward to improving my solo production style with each new song drop.
For listeners who are struggling—physically or emotionally—what do you hope this song helps them feel?
After I got sick, I would sometimes say I wish I could hold people by the arm and impart all the silver linings I learned about back then via osmosis, or some kind of telekinetic transfer. Obviously you can’t do that, but what I can do is speak honestly about my experience and explore those feelings within my songwriting.
Music offers a chance for a listener to sit with their own emotions for a few minutes at a time. I’d love if listening to Man Down could inspire people to consider how impossible and miraculous their own existence is, but that’s a lofty goal. After my own struggle was relieved a little, in the first years of remission, I came to realize that the things I thought were severe or stressful were really not that important. I learned to value relationships with the people I loved, I was able to refocus on what I wanted to do with my time on earth, and I learned not to sweat the small stuff too much. Maybe the song doesn’t say those things overtly, but if you’ve read this far, I’ve got to talk to you about it directly 🙂
The song is walking the line, contemplating what separates us from being here and not being here. I feel lucky to exist. Realizing that you mean nothing and everything, all at once, is a liberating feeling. I wouldn’t expect a song to make someone go deep and consider their own existence, but wouldn’t it be cool if it could?