"This is an album about hearts, but it's not mushy film endings and twee teddy bears in February. I'm talking about offal here. I'm talking about this organ which you have no conscious control over but if it stops you're gone. Doesn't matter who you are or what you have to offer, that's it. Your heart really runs the show.
"There's so much focus on on these Freudian analyses of why people are so screwed up. Personally, I think fuck the id and the superego and all these terms and psychoses, there's a bigger war going on. I know I'm only running this little corpse because I've been given temporary permission. And it reminds me of our contract all the time. That uncontrollable blood rush around someone you find attractive but don't know why. These diseases that destroy your brain's ability to be the person you "are". You have to accept who's really in control here - and my 21 grams of soul aren't much of a match for a nine stone adult body.
"These are things I've been thinking about for a long time. When you're nine years old and your body is just falling apart and you're curled up a ball on the floor thinking "I'm going to die", you very quickly become aware that this meat suit you're walking around in isn't really you, isn't necessarily on your side and can have a seriously malicious sense of humor some days.
"There's a quote I read recently about the human inability to conceive of themselves as made of these organs and bodily fluids because if they did how could they conceive of themselves of these thinking independent creatures? I think that's true. But there's this inherent fragility to our physical selves which we just don't feel inside our minds and that's what I found myself really terrified by. That's what I needed to confront with this album.
"Not that I knew that when I started writing it. I thought it would be an exorcism of all this bitter rage-sadness I'd had hanging around since I began recovering from the illness I had as a child. It was pretty bad for about 5 years and took another 4 or 5 for me to feel mostly free of it. So I was 15 or 16 and I knew I was living inside this body that had it in for me, or that something inside it was an enemy.
"At 22 I knew I had to get past that. So I started writing an album intending it to be about the whole experience. So I fiddled around with the equipment, getting to know it, wrote a couple of brief sketches, and then over 5 days in December without really sleeping or eating, Can't Be Won't Be came out. It took another two weeks to make it sound and speak the way it needed to, but at the end of that I felt like I'd surfaced from this place where I'd been holding my breath for years. I felt lighter. And then I thought: now what?
"In the year or so following that track I kept on writing and just letting the words come out as I did so. I'd have a few lines, and a sense of what my subconscious was pointing towards, and then I'd have to sit down and puzzle out what it was I was trying to tell me. Sometimes it'd take days til I knew I was being honest. And when I'd written most of the album I took a step back and went "oh my, I've been writing down this battle I've been trying to ignore". And I had to accept that.
"The tracks put themselves in order for me at that point and I could see this journey that I'd been taking in my head for all this time: run, hit an obstacle, run, fall apart. Repeat. This is an album about not running any more. That's why it starts "running with Mary", trying to get away from this female biological imperative to bear great men and bow out gracefully, and ends with "These Are My Catechisms", which is about accepting that the war goes on and deciding not to end it, even though that means you're almost backing down and handing over control. Which can be its own victory. What this album was saying to me was "This is what you've been doing. And it's been hurting you. Isn't it time you moved on?" Maybe that's advice everyone needs."
