That song is really intensely sad for me, it has always been. “I started to make a song inspired by Todd Terry’s club remix of Everything But The Girl’s ‘Missing’.
How To Dress Well “Nonkilling 6 │ Hunger” “There’s not a word on this record that isn’t extremely important. But at the moment when the spark is ignited it seems like true love coming from a pure place of fate and dreams and Shakespeare and like Shakespeare in the end it’s about selfishness and our faulty desires.” The lyrics are about love that snuffs out reality I suppose it’s also referred to as lust. The final version of ‘Agree’ that ended up on Music for the Long Emergency was recorded at April Base, Fall Creek Wisconsin where Poliça and s t a r g a z e huddled up together for a few days recording and walking through the trees. All of this is to say ‘Agree’ has an Agatha Christie feel or a ‘who done it?’ vibe like who broke my heart? Drew (Poliça drummer) often hoped the song would be the theme music for True Detective season 2…but HBO never came knocking. “The original version of ‘Agree’ was supposed to be on Poliça’s United Crushers but once we started hanging with s t a r g a z e it seemed it needed them. All of this is to say ‘Agree’ has an Agatha Christie feel or a ‘who done it?’ vibe like ‘who broke my heart?’…” Writing ‘Nothing’ helped me to find my own beauty in what can be a scary place.” I write to challenge myself and deal with things that are maybe not so easy to bring up in a conversation. This song is one of my favorite songs I’ve written as it speaks to me about some emotions I struggle with at times. As I kept writing I was coming up with more of these images and places we sometimes go to in our minds and realized that the song itself was about that unsettling and yet so familiar feeling of feeling ‘Nothing’. I kept imagining floating in a warm ocean in the middle of nowhere and strange comfort of having nothing on every side. I felt really connected to the soundscape he had created as soon as Jeremy began developing the production. He heard something in that idea as well and developed it sonically even further adding some elaborate dualing tones.
We forgot about it for a little while and then I showed the idea to my longtime producer and co-writer Jeremy Page. I played a scattered melody I was hearing on my guitar and then he elaborated on that. “’Nothing’ was initially conceived in my old keyboard player’s practice space in Brooklyn one afternoon.
I write to challenge myself and deal with things that are maybe not so easy to bring up in a conversation…” “…it speaks to me about some emotions I struggle with at times. Being desperate and frustrated is a huge part of being alive in a capitalist world and i think it fuels a lot of us to create, to party, to freak out but also to get together and build communities.” I’m not dismissing the concept, I just think it can put a lot of pressure on people to know how to care for themselves and when there are so many reasons not to be okay right now that seems a pretty tall order. I know a lot of queers and people of colour who feel like that at the moment – and are turning to this sort of Instagram ‘self care’ solution. The last line, ‘Why’s it so hard to know what I need? Why is it never enough to satisfy me?’, is about recognising your own despair at times when the world is really letting you down. “You got it, and I think you know it” it’s about owning our fierceness and our radical spirit because especially living in a capitalist society, there is always power in knowing our worth. It’s also a song about queer resilience and positivity though. ‘Asking For A Friend’ is about how institutions and governments can tokenize us and use our identity as cultural capital whilst simultaneously destroying queer spaces and pushing out the people that built the community that we come from. We had a day off, so we booked a practice space and the song was written in that 3 hour session, it came out really fast and organically. “We wrote the song whilst we were on tour in Leeds. I know a lot of queers and people of colour who feel like that at the moment…” “…recognising your own despair at times when the world is really letting you down. Playlist on Spotify at the bottom of each page.