I started to daub the words to what would later become the lyrics for “Summertime Departures” as I was living in the dazzling city of Tangier, where I sort of drifted in a moment of great confusion. My father’s passing being at the center of the echoing emptiness that I was no longer able to ignore after years trying to avoid any type of introspective honesty on what felt like a senseless existence at this point in my life.
The way I dealt with it all was silence and isolation, even though his presence, souvenir and memory, as much as all the questions and the resentment coming with it, were haunting me. I would so often dream about conversations we never had that I thought I was going crazy, if not obsessed. I wondered if it was sorrow, guilt, anger, but it was something intangible. My father dedicated most of his life to his strong spiritual beliefs and he believed until the very end that he would be healed. Even if he knew his cancer was incurable, he sang and praised to his last breath. He was so convinced of his miraculous healing that he never thought it would be necessary to write a few words of his own, to share untold stories or what he was making of his situation… That deep conviction was incredibly troubling for me, especially after his passing, but I refused to address any of it… Until I got to Tangier… and knew I had to.
Witnessing how the people who make Tangier such a unique place connected with the notion of the “now” offered me a perspective I couldn’t escape from no more, something that was way beyond grief, life, death and myself. Therefore, I started writing. It all sort of made sense with the image of setting stone on a sanctum shrine… That was the starting point. That was the strange but meaningful ignition for me and ultimately the song. The idea was about a “marker” testifying of the foundation a person could have been in our lives… a “common” stone transcending any sort of precious ornaments.
That image led me to wonder what’s ultimately left of us, when time passes by, when loved ones disappear, when promises vanish with the memories of those we cared for, when names are no longer mentioned, when our fondest souvenirs of someone we used to cherish slowly make place for somebody else’s heart, when the vivid colors of flowers are long gone, when time keeps its vows and catches up with us, when dreams and their hopeful shines wither, when we’re one faceless soul to somebody else’s view… When we are lost in the winds… When there’s no right or wrong in death…
And therefore, now looking at it with an honest perspective of my own paradoxes and vulnerability, I understand that “Summertime Departures” is my way to say that regardless of what we may have spent our entire lives believing in or what we may have forgotten with time, there is a permanence amidst the most painful of all sorrows and our decision to let go in the acceptance that love, just like stone, will forever endure.
