Family forms the heart of UBC alumni Carla and Lynette Gillis' music

This article is republished from The Ubyssey with permission. Read the original article. 

Carla Gillis (MFA’07) and her sister Lynette (MFA’04) 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. In 1997, Plumtree released an infectiously catchy, if lyrically minimalist, song called “Scott Pilgrim” on their second album, Predicts the Future. You might have heard what happened next: Plumtree split up after their third album in 2000. Four years later, that song became the title of friend and fan Bryan Lee O’Malley’s hugely popular graphic novel series, later adapted into the film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, starring Michael Cera. And through it all, Carla and Lynette never stopped being in bands.

The Gillis sisters had moved from Halifax to Vancouver around the time O’Malley began working on Scott Pilgrim. Having been a musician since middle school, Carla enrolled in UBC’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing to further develop her skills; her sister graduated from UBC with a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art in 2004.

“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 began asking herself questions, exploring what it was she really loved to write about, and what through lines 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…twenty-some years, and the band Plumtree always practised there.”

The loss of that space brought Carla into writing more intentionally about family. “It was always in my dreams.” The support of her parents and her collaboration with her sister always anchored her music in Halifax and in that family home. Once it was gone, she noticed just how much family came up in her writing. She started to write about Nova Scotia’s 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 and Lynette grew up in a busy, vibrant home. The four Gillis children lived there, along with the 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. Then 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. Under the name Overnight, the Gillis sisters released Carry Me Home in 2015. It’s a much heavier album than anything they had ever 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. After completing her master’s degree at UBC in 2007, Carla moved to Toronto and became the music editor for the Toronto alt-weekly newspaper NOW. Unfortunately, the print media industry was declining quickly at the time, and what started as a promising 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 again. “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.”

Carla’s creative background lent a lot to her new clinical work. “A lot of my clients are musicians and artists,” she 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 shaped by the loss of another family member: their 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 this turbulence, the tone of this new album is exceptionally optimistic and bright. Although it dives into darker moments on tracks like “The World to See” and “Wind & Trees,” it’s also full of lively songs that braid together joy and sorrow, as in “Pothos” and “Strong & Good.” Carla found that the education and experience that she and Lynette gained in the world of clinical therapy have been foundational to this more optimistic approach.

Carla and Lynette have always been in a band. Like many young musicians, they once felt a drive to “make it” as artists. Plumtree has seen a good deal of posthumous popularity thanks to the Scott Pilgrim books, the 2010 Hollywood movie, and the 2023 anime TV 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.” Even so, 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 and Canadian cities, 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.”