Owen Pallett and the World He Built to Destroy

Owen Pallett’s Heartland arrived in 2010 as the kind of record that demands you accept its premises before it gives you anything back. The album is a concept piece built around a fictional agrarian world and its protagonist Lewis—governed, in a darkly self-implicating way, by a fictionalized version of Owen himself. Pallett had spent years recording as Final Fantasy, making violin-based orchestral pop that didn’t belong to any obvious shelf, and Heartland was where all that restlessness finally assembled into something coherent and strange. "Lewis Takes Off His Shirt" is exactly the kind of gesture the album traffics in: a small, intimate scene that Pallett’s string arrangements inflate to something close to myth. Lewis the character is both subject and vehicle, observed and operator—which is the only interesting way to write about anyone, fictional or otherwise.