Being a little more aligned with my inner self now – thanks to my connection with the water and for having slowed things down considerably – I started to listen to some of the songs I was contemplating digging into for the upcoming album, with a completely different perspective. I’m realizing just how far off I was, how I had lost my way. If it could be a frustrating admission at this point of the process, it’s quite the contrary to me actually, as it means that I have a much clearer vision of what I want to explore, express, and share with that particularly significant post-surgery record. Only for that, I don’t perceive what we have previously accomplished as a total waste of effort. I’m more enthusiastic about the long creative emotional sufferings to come than I’ve been comfortable with the affective numbness I was inhabited with during the recording sprint I’ve been through. Again, it means something special is bourgeoning within me. For me, if conception has always been utterly painful, its delivery has a meaning that I can’t explain with words, especially knowing that once it’s born, alive, honest, and heartfelt, art will keep on blooming way beyond the very source of its inspiration.


Clarity is a strange sensation. I guess it’s because it requires a substantial measure of self-abnegation to be able to see details that your fears, your ego, your denial or pretension have prevented you from seeing, or from discerning before. For me, it started when the members of my management family came to visit and we played a few songs we had crafted for them to hear. I wasn’t comfortable and kept on explaining what was wrong with the tracks. I realized that it wasn’t about the fact that I wasn’t happy with the songs; I was ashamed in many ways. It’s not that the songs were bad or anything, far from it. It wasn’t me. It was somebody else’s bastardization of my music – and I’m not talking about Mikko’s work, but mine. It was a parody, absurdity, a travestization of sorts. And I don’t know why but I decided to play them my version of the song “Architect of Time”. It’s probably some of the most honest lyrics I’ve ever written. It’s about losing faith, a kind of conscious and assumed state of personal desperation. The second the song ended Bill, who had remained silent up to that point, said: “That is you Alex and that song is your mission statement for the record.” Not only was he right, but what he mentioned was “it”. Jennie and Michael went in the same direction, insisting on the importance of making it my record and reminding me that I was a consequential artist, not a product. And Jackson took me apart after to encourage me to keep on following my guts and instinct.


Therefore, listening back to some of our initial writing sessions, I could perceive the nature of the mission statement Bill was referring to. I found a sense of purposeful nostalgia in those songs, a type of non-fatalistic acceptance of the profound damage defining the heart. There’s also a high level of self-consciousness regarding the sorrows that live behind the eyes of a mourning soul, an awareness of the passage between an everlasting night made of total bleakness and the very first sign of a new morning luminosity we almost lose hope into. It’s all there, all over the lyrical content. I cannot only see it, but I can also feel it as if my ability to hear, see, smell and touch has been heightened a tenfold, waiting for me to have the courage to speak it up, as I do now. I always found it puzzling that the sole fright I ever had creatively has been related to letting myself be heard. It’s not about the voice, nor about singing in itself. It’s about exposing my heart for what I am. Listening back to the lifeless versions of the songs we had crafted in the 3 weeks of production, we could hear it was only about that…hiding. That’s why it reminded me of my tenure with Your Favorite Enemies. It was all about that; standing in the shadow of the band, too afraid of the light. It took me years to understand that and the reason why “Windows in the Sky” radiates with so much freedom… It’s the sound of emancipation from structures, forms, conventions, and formats, but mainly my need for security. Just like I mentioned in one of my previous studio diary entries, it’s hard to stay away from what has been a lifestyle for so long. You need to be extremely violent with yourself to remain on your path. Reconnecting with those songs is as brutal as it is limpidly evocative of those inner struggles.


It’s even more obvious as I’m listening to a never-released song on repeat called “My Revolution” while writing to you this morning. Some of the lyrics are: