All of the Final Fantasy Has A Good Home album was written while I was touring British Columbia with the CBC radio show “The Vinyl Café." We'd take the bus at night, so I had a lot of time during the day to explore my new surroundings. I spent a lot of time walking along highways. The north of British Columbia is fiercely cold for a Torontonian, but the walk was always worth it. I would bring my Polaroid camera along and snap photos of the Skeena River and the mountains that stretched up forever on each side.

The turning point came in Prince Rupert. Until then, most people we had met were happy, proud northerners who had nothing but a good-natured scorn for the softies from the south. Prince Rupert was another story. There was an air of desperation. I was told that since the shutdown of Skeena Cellulose the population had dropped to half of what it was. Those who could afford a house in Kelowna or Prince George had moved and everybody else was left with what is rapidly becoming a ghost town.

The concert was a huge success. You'd think that Stuart McLean was royalty. Afterwards, I took photos of the coastline, where pelicans were making their nests below environmental warning signs and I wrote song after song. Final Fantasy had played a concert in New York City two weeks prior. As a musician, however, it's far more interesting to be in places like Prince Rupert … where live music is not a commodity, where the tools of irony and post-modernism are unavailable, but where one has to fight for every note of every song, like drawing blood from stones.

— Owen Pallett