Living Room Sessions: Interlude

16 SEP 2019

PHOTO: NATASHA VERMEULEN

This is the second from a back-catalogue series I’m making at the moment while I’m working on a new EP / album (in the name of going backwards to go forwards, or some such thing!). This consists of me making a lo-fi video (see below) of some of my key songs in my living room at home, and popping them up here with their back story.

LIVING ROOM SESSION #2.

Track: Interlude

Year of release: 2017

‘Interlude’ is a track that came to life while I was configuring songs for a show a couple of years back - I was playing around with setting an infinity delay on my vocal pedal, which is where the main looped vocal comes from, and this dark, eerie song was born when I sung a melody over the loop. The lyrics are from Percy Shelley’s poem ‘A Dirge’, which was published posthumously by his wife, Mary Shelley, in 1824.

I am always interested in the kind of dissonance that exists between despair and hope and trying to reconcile the two, and this song is a little snippet of that. I never released it as anything more than a demo (link below if you’d like to listen to the demo version!), but it’s one I enjoy performing live because of its free-form structure and the atmosphere it creates.

So - let me transport you to a dark, stormy night out in the wilderness for a few minutes: the wind is howling around your ears, you are tugging your coat closer about you but the bitter chill still knifes its way in - there’s a plaintive song sighing in the wind-buffeted trees, and the inky blackness is closing in all around…

Lyrics and demo version link below video

Listen to the original demo version here

Lyrics:

Rough wind, that moanest loud
Grief too sad for song;
Wild wind, when sullen cloud
Knells all the night long;
Sad storm, whose tears are vain,
Bare woods, whose branches strain,
Deep caves and dreary main--
Wail, for the world's wrong!

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

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