Page 77 - ION Indie Magazine MayJune 2020 Issue

MW: Yep, you don't always want to hear people singing love songs. You want to
hear people singing about things that real people go through every day.

BD: I guess love songs are cool if you're well-adjusted and that's your real-life
experience! But that sort of thing is relatively new to me.

MW: Love songs are pretty boring unless you're going through that thing yourself
and are in the same frame of mind.

BD: Yeah, I agree.

MW: Would you say that your songs are directly about your experiences, or are
they scenarios loosely based on what you have been through?

BD: A mixture of both, really. In ‘Playing Dead,’ I made it into a story about a tiger
stalking its prey and I had some help from an amazing animator to bring that to life,
turning the tables on the tiger in the end. That's probably the most direct one of the EP,
somehow. The rest are more like threads of my tangled brain as I tried to make sense
of them in therapy…fragments and flashes of memory rather than a concrete example
from the past each time, if that makes sense.

MW: Yeah, sort of.

BD: I can try harder.

MW: I'm no psychologist so I'm not quite with it, take no notice.

BD: Basically, ‘Playing Dead’ is based on a real incident, despite me changing the
characters to animals. The rest are based on conversations in therapy where everything
was tangled, and I was trying to make sense of it. So not based on specific memories, just
a mess of them mushed together.

MW: How do you go about writing your songs?

BD: I write music with Mike. Sometimes I send him fragments I've been working on,
sometimes he sends me them. We tend to do some individual work and then meet up
together to flesh it out, argue, rip it up, and then start again, before bringing it to the rest
of the band to arrange it. I'm a pretty nervous songwriter. By that, I mean that I spend
way too long worrying that what I come up with is going to be rubbish, which sometimes
means I don't come up with much at all. I definitely need to let go!

MW: You're writing about a pretty difficult subject. Do you turn off a bit
emotionally or do you find it therapeutic in some way?

BD: I can't write while I'm in the moment. It's all a bit too much and I struggle to make
anything coherent. I usually write about it afterwards, when I've had time to understand
it a bit more. I find it's easier to access difficult emotions without being overwhelmed by
them if there's a bit of time in between.