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“stands out for us as the darkest and one of the most impactful tracks on the album. It was inspired by the narratives shared in the Box of Secrets, where individuals wrestled with deciphering the thoughts of others and sought to shed light on complex situations.”
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“‘KEEP IT SIMPLE!’ is about wanting to be with someone so much even if they don’t want anything real with you, and clinging on to them while thinking you have tough enough skin to endure that. It hurt writing and definitely brought up a lot of things emotionally for me… It’s one of my most honest songs.”
The creative process is mostly unexplainable and unique in that it’s not repeatable. Anyone who’s dabbled into art making will identify with the feeling of not knowing how you got to something and not being sure you’ll ever be able to make anything like it again. That is perhaps what makes this process so magical.
In music, songwriting specifically, phonetics or stream of consciousness words that come out might lead to an idea that becomes transcendental. Sometimes, I find my subconscious knowing what I really think and feel before I do. Just like in Jonathan Haidt’s theory of the elephant and the rider where the elephant is our subconscious and the rider our consciousness, (the logic with which we retroactively justify the elephant’s behavior) I too find ways to justify my brain’s phonetics or random word choices as ideas that may have existed in my subconscious.
Finding what fits my gibberish is a process of imagination. That’s how I came up with ‘Terminal Woes’. If a melody comes into existence with a certain sequence of vowels, I have a sense that it must live there. When I came onto the phrase ‘Terminal Woes,’ it spoke to me and sparked all these ideas around what it entailed. It spoke to my fears of the future in this planet, to my rage against corporate greed, to my love for nature and to my fear for an entire future generation/the thought of having children.
“who’ll dance at the break of dawn, when the heat’s begun, when our mother’s gone?
last chance! every living thing, every breathing being, everything that’s green
it’s not just a human’s world, just a human’s world just a human’s world
we’ve got to reverse this flight for our future child, for continued life”
Nico had produced the marching like beat and once we had the verse and “terminal woes” phrase we knew there was an idea worth developing. In a thrift store, I’d picked up a record of Ravi Shankar playing his Concerto for Sitar and Orchestra alongside the London Symphony Orchestra. It played on repeat and I think some of it’s spirit seeped into the vocal melodies on this song (and some guitars in other songs on the record.)
Check out "Terminal Woes"
“In ‘Rent Free,’ hope flirts with despair, and the rain makes way for the rave. It’s a euphoric lament on the fragility of love, and the solace of dancing with total abandon.”
“A head-rush of deeply subversive guitar-lead pop, this upbeat and vital sounding joyride, “Addictions” features the extraordinary opening lyric “I have died many times before / a different type of death”. An unexpected trip awaits….”
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