3 : what the heart wants
the heart wants plastic burning, a bedroom at 3am, a dream, a shadow, choice and repetition, questions for god or for the machine & a world where only one of them talks back
what does a brain need to survive? once i was asking questions over and over to myself & other people & any entity that would accept language i was asking what i wanted, living in a parallel universe, walking my head around it while my legs stamped through reality
the song came later than this feeling, they always do it was april and everything was exploding slowly, that's what spring's like in this country, and there's this wild manic energy that comes with the light. suddenly there's sun, suddenly everything's blinding
i took the song to practice, just E & A and the words, and max started a drumbeat that sounded like the army & in 15 minutes it was finished. a month later we played it in the same studio with the microphones on
i wanted the song to capture the desperation, the attacking sensation of a brain when it's trying to work down through itself & get to some kind of truth. sometimes it feels impossible to avoid the feeling that pulls from the torso , the urge to destroy, the drive towards what makes you worse . that's what's exorcised when i play what the heart wants. it's the question and the answer, it's a space in my head that can't be touched
maybe you know that feeling, maybe you don't, but the song is for you now too
i hope it makes you feel untouchable
2 : change is
change is a narrow blade slides in before you realise
i've been dreaming about stained teeth, i look into mouths and lose my thread. lately the world feels even more incomprehensible than normal. up close and far away, i don't understand the war or the songs i'm writing. i don't understand this country. what do the flags mean? what should a song do? i hear people speak and i wonder what they're saying. nothing sounds exactly like truth
energy's rising fast and chaotic everywhere. furious action, hammering scaffolding and bees hitting the window, birds all wide open and screaming, blinding sea. one day it was dark, then it was night and the sun was still very high & everyone went outside and started fights in the street. mirages in april, the hottest on record. i tried watching blue films to cool down, but eternal sunshine & mulholland drive made it worse & i couldn't turn my brain off, my brain was all spotlights and strobes & people running through nothing into nothing
a year ago this month i wrote a song & it felt like all of these things, repeating the energy i didn't realise repeated
& everything is changing but it feels like running in a dream,
or a thin edge moving under skin
1 : blue and strange
in my dream you were looking at me like a star, the orbiting centre
we walked through hallways of a huge house & every careless person didn't notice us
i didn't realise that the songs are like dreams. they make dream sense, they're full of dream images. they're inbetween what's real and what's imaginary
i've been growing my song seeing eyes and they're focussing better & better. they hear the long grey sea on a still day and an empty car park and a hard white line of doors in a hall they hear masks and faces and shapes on an old red blanket
i wanted to make the music sound like dreams feel and look like itself. it's layers & layers of thinking and sound and time. producing felt like diving through those layers and now my face is wet and i can breathe again, and there are a few minutes of clarity
i hope the songs feel real and imaginary to you. i hope we might see the same world for a few minutes clearly
