TESTAMENTS
Q Can you talk about the central role of water imagery in Never Run Dry and what it symbolizes for you personally?
Until I read your analysis, I hadn’t actually drawn a connection between the water imagery in Ae Fond Kiss and Mountain Stream so thank you for pointing that out. It’s not particularly clear from the writing, but the source of the first lines of Ae Fond Kiss was observing someone’s eyes at different degrees of dilation. I likened this to the tide coming in and out on a shoreline, with the pupil being the sea and the iris being the sand. In both cases, as an observer you don’t generally see the dilation as it’s happening but you notice the difference when you return to looking at that thing. “This world the moon” is quite confusing but it compares the relationship between the moon and the tide to the things in reality causing the pupils to dilate. “Your soul the sea so vast” connects to the much more familiar metaphor of the eyes being the gateway to the soul. I think the way I tried to get this across was clumsy, and one would need to do more work to make it clear. This is the kind of lyric you can look back on as a more experienced writer and see the flaws but still be proud of the poetry and intention.
Mountain Stream was the original title of the instrumental composition, but I think it’s notable that I use the imagery of a body of water so differently in this song as compared to Ae Fond Kiss. In this instance the thing being emphasised is a difference in scale rather than any particular qualities which the person or experience has with water. I like this image a lot because contrasting between a waterfall and mountain stream really gets across something grand and extraordinary as opposed to something ordinary and commonplace. Water is so ubiquitous in its metaphorical use, and your question has made me curious about how I might continue my literary relationship with water going forward.
Q What inspired you to weave both elaborate literary imagery and intimate emotional honesty into Ae Fond Kiss (Never Run Dry)?
I think those two things pair naturally and reinforce one another as a writer. The things which personally move you the most will, in my experience, activate the most poetic language. I think all artists bare their soul in their work whether consciously or not, and it helps songwriters in particulars to have what I’d call an exhibitionistic orientation to some extent. This is because we often talk about our own lives in ways that can be uncomfortable, even now I sometimes find Ae Fond Kiss difficult to listen to, and reveal things to the world that most wouldn’t to all but those closest to them. As a writer, I experience a special value in making a public spectate of aspects of my own life in my music. I’ve found that this is alien to most people but I suspect it’s more common among songwriters although they might put it in different language.
Q In Mountain Stream, the lyrics revisit past emotional experiences—how do you approach reflecting on intense personal moments without it feeling forced?
As I said in the previous answer, the things about which a writer feels the strongest, in my experience, are the things which inspire the most extensive and elaborate writing and poetry. So long as one isn’t habitually repressing their own emotions to themselves (see our previous song ‘The Clown’ for an exploration of this), then it should be natural for intense personal moments and reflection to be the source of material.
Q Contemplation seems to turn inward, exploring self-awareness through another person’s presence. How did you decide to shift the focus this way?
I noticed in your review that you thought of the “her” at the beginning as being the same “you” character in Ae Fond Kiss and Mountain Stream. That was not actually intentional, and Contemplation was the first of the songs that I wrote, with the idea coming quite a while before everything else. I now don’t think this is clear in the song, but the original intention was for the “her” to be the part or aspects of the speaker herself that she dislikes or resents, separately personified. The perspective on oneself therefore changes as “her shapes seems more clear” and the final lines, where “eyes I felt such fear of glimmer as mine”, are when the speaker finally sees those things as aspects of herself rather than some kind of separate person. Again I don’t think this is clear to a listener, and I would write this differently now if trying to convey that theme in that way. Writing about introspecting in one’s mind is tremendously difficult.
I think that shift to an inward perspective you identified does provide a significant contrast within the EP, but it wasn’t something that was conscious before the music was recorded. Thank you for pointing it out in your analysis.
Q Across the EP, there’s a tension between articulation and letting feelings speak on their own. How did you balance lyrical structure with improvisation?
This is a great question. I actually think, and this might be counter intuitive, that the highly edited, polished, articulate lyrical style clarifies the theme and emotional world of the composition such that improvisational choices will still be in that emotional world. No matter what the band decides to do in the moment, the fundamental meaning of “you must let my sweet heart break” doesn’t change and I as a bandleader and artist have no worries about that meaning being lost.
Q Mountain Stream (Take 2) moves into Swedish and more abstract expression. What made you decide to switch languages and use improvisation there?
As a bandleader, I gave very little direction to Dom and Rebecka when they were recording this track. The choice to switch to Swedish was Rebecka’s in that moment and it’s the kind of thing that happens more often when we play live. Rebecka will often improvise new lyrics in transitions between songs or in newly improvised sections within a song. This is part of why I’d like to record a live album next year because these are some of my favourite moments on stage and it can be hard to achieve them in a studio context where there’s more pressure to perform everything as intended.
Q The lyrics often explore love without ownership or expectation. How does that perspective influence the emotional arc of the EP?
This is an interesting question. I think one of the most powerful sources of tension and emotional stakes in the context of love is our response to the things we can’t control, particularly how those we love respond to us and what they choose to do. It’s important that the language of ownership in love is fundamentally a metaphor, even if its use in English is to the point that we forget that.
We can have expectations of other people while still being conscious of the fact that their responses and actions are out of our control. No matter what we may feel, that feeling cannot change reality or make another person think or act a certain way. This is important in the sequence in Ae Fond Kiss which includes “you must let my sweet heart break”. To allow yourself to respond so strongly to another person, you must be open to the kind of emotional pain that losing that person, or them not reciprocating your response, will entail. Having this perspective is important to your identifying “not even [love’s] heartbreak could be rendered in bitter or accusatory terms”. I don’t think my writing could really stay in a depressed or cynical place for long because I don’t think one should ever treat the consequences of things outside of our control as fundamental to how how we evaluate ourselves and the world.
Q Contemplation wrestles with self-doubt and fear. How do you see vulnerability functioning in your lyrics and its connection to the music?
I think, if you choose to write based on your own experience, vulnerability is necessary in making the stakes of the situation clear to an audience. I actually think that my primary goal is to convey stakes and create a strong work rather than portray my own life in a particular way. The songs are works of art first and personal reflections second, so being vulnerable could be viewed, from a certain perspective, as a means to that end. I think that even exaggerating certain aspects of your own life can be justified if they make the song stronger. However, it’s much more rare to find context where holding something back emotionally contributes positively to the strength of a work. If those emotions are that powerful, the situation that activated them will likely have incredible stakes and therefore translate into a consequently powerful song.
Q How does writing lyrics that pair so closely with improvisation challenge or inspire your creative process?
One big challenge as a songwriter is setting words to music in such a way that everything is clearly audible and the meaning comes through. The more complex and poetic your lyrics, the more challenge there is in making them singable and finding a melody which allows them to speak. Rebecka’s improvisational ability allows me, at times, to write more complex words and give her the responsibility of choosing exactly how to say them in the moment. In Contemplation, the chorus (“thoughts within my mind…”) has no specific written rhythm and in Ae Fond Kiss there is no actual written melody. Rebecka has the musical and acting ability to find different solutions to these problems, and therefore lead the band in new directions, every time we play the songs.
Q Across the EP, there’s a recurring sense of awe at the emotional impact of relationships. How do you cultivate that feeling while writing?
I think an artist should write about things and people that are important to them personally. Those are the things that will activate the most ideas and inspire an artist to innovate. There’s always a problem solving element of dealing with a new theme, that of: “how can I portray this with all the power it has to me personally”. In my experience that’s the fundamental source of innovative ideas in my writing
This doesn’t necessarily mean writing about one’s own life, novelists don’t do that, but it does mean having a sense of what kind of things are important enough to you and worthy of being portrayed in art. That feeling of awe comes if the thing you’re writing about is important enough to you, and that is reflected how you write about that thing. Not all relationships in one’s life will activate that kind of feeling, and those that do are incredibly precious. When someone like that arises in your life as an artist, it’s primarily an honesty with oneself that allows those feelings to propel writing and creativity.
Q How do you approach capturing fleeting emotional moments in lyrics without them becoming overly abstract or inaccessible?
The most important thing is to give the listener enough context that they can empathise with the character being portrayed. It’s very easy to write deeply personal music which, as a writer, you have an intense connection to but which an audience can’t connect with. This is because they don’t have all the context of the writer’s life that he’s listening to those same words with. This is why I think it’s useful to think of the song as being sung by a character who exists in the song rather than by oneself, because it orients you more to giving the audience the information they need to empathise with that character and be moved by the song. I think comes more naturally to me because I’m writing these songs for someone else to sing, and so these same things have to be clear to them first before the audience is even involved. In ‘Ae Fond Kiss’, the lyrics before “every tear with reify the good and every ache a testament to life” were necessary in establishing to a listener what those very abstract statements actually mean in a way that wouldn’t be necessary to the writer.
Q Ae Fond Kiss (Never Run Dry) references classical literary influences. How do you balance those inspirations with creating something distinctly contemporary?
Because of the instrumentation of the band and the musical influences we all bring to the table, our sound world is going to be contemporary no matter what we do. It’s not something we’ve ever discussed or set as a conscious intention. I think that as an artist, drawing on influences should be something that happens naturally and isn’t forced. It’s the result of, in this case, engaging with literature, painting and other great works of art, allowing oneself to respond to those things emotionally and then asking what the source of those responses might be.
Q There’s a subtle progression in the EP from admiration to introspection to surrender. Was that progression intentional from the start?
I can’t say that this was intentional from the beginning, as we recorded these songs alongside three others that were previously released. I think this might have been subtly in the background when deciding on the order of tracks, but now that you’ve pointed it out, it’s given even myself a great appreciation for the EP’s arc.
Q If you could summarize the emotional through-line of Never Run Dry in a single idea, what would it be and why?
This is a great question. The music on Never Run Dry was paired together because of its drawing on other sources and doing new things with that material but there wasn’t a conscious emotional through line at any stage.
Reflecting now, I think the through-line of Never Run Dry is finding the beauty and value at the root of emotions which have a negative affect. In Ae Fond Kiss, “every tear will reify the good” is a very radical take on mourning, and what it means is that pain in this context is the consequence fundamentally of virtuous aspects in both people involved: the speaker’s capacity to love deeply and those aspects of the “you” that were deserving of that love. That idea isn’t explicit in the other two songs, but I think it can inform how we listen to them. The struggle to introspect and work out the root of your negative emotions can be painful, but that pain can be thought of as the consequence of a bravery in engaging with those things. Mountain Stream is a mourning song, and we mourn things that were of value to us. The more profound the value, the more emotionally painful the mourning but one’s capacity to feel is earned and developed, whether that consequent feeling is positive or negative.
You could describe all the songs on Never Run Dry as exploring negative experiences to some extent: unrequited or unachieved love, mourning and self doubt. But I don’t think the speaker comes across at any stage as cynical, depressed or as giving up on any of the things they were pursuing. Even the final section of Mountain Stream asks “might I find?”, which leaves open-ended the idea of an equal or greater value in the future.
Q How do you hope listeners engage with the lyrical complexity of the EP, especially those encountering your music for the first time?
I think people respond to music initially for all kinds of different reasons, and our music has many elements that can be the catalyst to stop and listen for the first time. It could be Rebecka’s voice, the sound of Cameron’s Euphonium or one of my melodies. I don’t think any new listener or fan needs to necessarily engage with the lyrics as a starting point. I think our music rewards repeated listening and reflection on how it makes you feel as a listener, and I think that connecting to the lyrics is a natural part of that process.
