For singer-guitarist Murray Lightburn, that means his family, his continued opportunities to play music with musicians he holds in utmost regard, including the Dears’ keyboardist Natalia Yanchak, who also happens to be his wife. It’s also the fact that music he wrote in his 20s still resonates with audiences. The Dears are evergreen.

Outside of Lightburn’s family and the Dears’ enduring connection with audiences, he also finds levity in the random chaos, mess, and happenstance of life.

“One of the things I like to do on the weekend is go for my epic walk which includes walking down to my photo store where I’ll drop off film and maybe buy some new film and chit chat with the people who work there,” Lightburn tells RANGE. “Maybe I’ll go get something to eat, and then I’ll go to the market and do some grocery shopping. It’s like a 10-kilometre walk.”

“I’m still kind of learning the camera,” Lightburn says, dubbing himself a hobby photographer. His main goal is to experiment with focus, distance, and exposure, though he’s further compelled to capture instances of parallax, when an object’s position appears to shift depending on the observer’s perspective.

RANGE spoke with Lightburn about a selection of Polaroids he snapped on his walks while in search of visual inspiration behind Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful!. Whether intentionally or not, the seven photos he’s shared capture a consistent theme of the Dears’ music: the indomitable human spirit; beauty exists in the quotidian, but often, you have to look for it.

“It’s like a scavenger hunt to look for the beauty in life, for the things that take you away for a moment and not let yourself stew in your own shit,” Lightburn says. The mind can lead a person to dark places, he notes, but “a lot of them don’t actually exist, whereas everything in these pictures exists, and there are stories behind everything.” As his photographs demonstrate, it’s all how one frames a situation.

“In my neighbourhood, there are a lot of alleyways, and in these alleyways, kids play. This is one. This has been going on as long as I’ve lived here. It’s such a cool vibe in a neighbourhood that is historically an immigrant neighbourhood, even when my parents first came here in the ’60s; they had an apartment right around the corner from where I live now. So a lot of these kids are little brown kids. There’s something about the place where these kids play that’s interesting to me – the flags, the background. Nobody is gonna steal anything there. There’s something so innocent about this. Somebody set that up, that stage, for kids.”

“This is near the store where I drop off film. It’s somewhere in the Plateau. I think this is the back of a restaurant. Another theme of my pictures is what I consider just fucking classic Montreal, which is just an enormous pile of trash outside this restaurant. Nothing’s being done about it. It’s one of those things where it’s like, eventually somebody’s gonna do something about it, but in that moment, nobody’s doing anything about it. I think I was trying to get the distance right, but the subject is just trash, Montreal trash. [Laughs]” Theme: proof of life.

“Broken mirror. The challenge was to not reflect myself, but then the light got blown out in the big piece in the middle, which is kinda cool. That space is all of 12 inches in a square, and the mirror was not very big. But I saw that and I thought it was odd that a broken mirror was just on the side of the street nestled in this little area. You’re walking along the side of a building, and there’s this pile of broken mirror there. It’s an absolute choice by someone, and it made me laugh.”

“Again, it made me laugh. What possessed that person to write that? We’re in a predominantly French city, on the Plateau – I think that was on Rachel Street – and here’s this English graffiti, and for some reason, they’re telling us all dogs go to Heaven. At the core of my street photography mind is [the image] has to be entertaining for me.”

“This person has a lot of pants. They’re hanging all their pants on the line. I found that funny. It’s not the greatest photo. The shadows are pretty crushed, but I kind of like it. The sky is doing some lifting by backlighting. All the poles around here slanted. These old wooden poles [are] terrifying to look at. Dude, this city, man. The infrastructure. I don’t know what it’s like out where you are, but my god.”

“This is such a mise en place. They’re using every possible thing – the two railings with the kids clothes on them, and then the shoes on the chair, all drying in the sun. And of course, nobody’s gonna steal that. It was like it was on display, like they were selling it, but it’s actually their laundry. That’s an apartment building in my neighbourhood. Also, I’m happy with the composition of it because it’s got the thirds, it’s got the bricks on the top and then the foundation, and then you’ve got the fence in the foreground, and the red and green contrast. Then you’ve got the white bricks, the white shoes, and then the white posts on the fence that’s sort of like, why are the tops of these white and the rest of it is black? It’s like unfinished painting, or maybe that was by design. I dont know, but it’s interesting to me. I would say this is my favourite picture of the bunch. It’s my neighbourhood in a nutshell. It really gives you an idea of the type of people that live in my neighbourhood and how they live.”

“It’s the other side of the same space. The other one explains more what I was looking at. I took this one first, and then when I walked closer to the little house, I turned around and said, ‘Oh, this is a better view.’ This one’s me discovering a space, and then the other one’s like, ‘Here’s the space. Here’s where I am.”