Elements

My mind opened wider than I knew it could. Anything everywhere. Everything glowing. Everything changing. Visions of a new reality.

I don’t know exactly what was happening to me when I wrote this. I think it was a kind of awakening, or a kind of breaking — sometimes those feel like the same thing.

I started hearing people inside each other. Past versions of myself inside strangers. Everything looping back around.

I think this is the song where I first reached for the idea that connection is what we’re made of, even when it doesn’t feel that way.

The deeper I looked, the more everything repeated. Shapes within shapes. Feelings within feelings. A life folding in on itself.

Panic, expansion, dissolution. Falling inwards until I found the edge of myself.

I don’t think I knew where the song would end when I started recording it. By the time I finished, I’d accepted that no one could see me. That’s where the song ended too.

Been asked a few times if the whistles were my own — and the answer is yes.

After the spirals came the heartbeat. Breath, sunlight, rain, movement. A reminder that I was, against all odds, still here.

This was the album’s return-to-body song.

I can feel my pulse again.

Overload. Everything was too bright, too fast, too much. Colours running everywhere. Emotions fracturing into light.

I deliberately obscured the lyrics to make them hard to make out. Maybe I didn’t want to be seen for some reason.

The first time something felt real again after years of distortion.

This song’s melody is the same one I hummed into the void on August Song, two years earlier. By 2016 I finally had words for it.

This track was recorded in a single take using a shitty wired EarPods microphone when I was very sad.

You can hear crackles, sniffles, and the sound of the keyboard keys being slammed down. I didn’t feel I wanted to remove or fix it after the fact. I tried re-recording it ‘properly’, but nothing ever captured the original essence of this raw first attempt.

The stop/start nature of the track represents the cycles of thought the mind can go through as it goes round and round and round when you’re in a weird and dark place. It’s a stream of consciousness, which I feel by its end, gets to something resembling a little like peace.