Hey thanks a bunch.
In between my last big album and now (over 4 years) I have done some proper soul searching and personal development. I saw myself being taken by a touring / album lifestyle and how easy it could be to loose yourself in that process. So that's where the different inspirations have come from over the past 2 years. Exploring my life and, without getting too far up my own "wazoo", writing metaphor music from that place in the process.
Then last year I first I set out to write a song that would sound like the Sun as a life giver. Then this turned into the idea of making a whole album like the sun.
From Dazed
"The sun is a drum - I specifically was inspired by this idea, that our whole entire existence on the planet seems like a huge thing, but imagine zooming out and seeing our sun is just a singular drum hit. For us it seems like it’s going on forever, but imagine, if you were to zoom way out, the sun just seems like a ittle blip of energy, and it happens that our whole lives are based around that one blip of energy. I tried to convey that through big, saturated tones."
So I made SOL, The Sun is a Drum and The Light of One Thousand Furnaces. Each having a story in themselves about what the Sun does and how it might sound if it was a character. Just having fun with that.
Then Blue and Grey came out. Which is literally this gentle little song about a Blue Heron. I thought "how the hell does this fit?", but I loved it so kept it around.
Then I had big career stuff change, and then a relationship end very suddenly. Then my biological father passed.
This brought out a whole other side of the creative process for me.
What started to happen was an album first inspired by the Sun, that turned into a very personal collection of stuff. So for me, the Sun is the starting central point (archetype), the Moon is in relation to Woman (archetype) and the Earth to being a human experiencing this. Mind of War and a song about the crazy human brain came out of this and during my 10 day silent meditation retreat. This all just sort of happened after the fact as I sat back and really looked at the material.
Hopefully this makes some sense! Ha!