I‘m lying on the grass. Like in the XTC song, but Eno and Hyde have their air play now. It is warm. There‘s no one around. Happily barking dog in the distance. The album streams from a simple UE Boom Box. Daydreaming. The evening before I could have walk-danced like the young woman in the M. Ward video of „Unreal City“. That was real Paris, months ago, it now looks… unreal. Horrible. Try to find a Thalys in autumn. Try to find old me in old Paris. Le Chat Noir, long closed. Now, not all those darknesses – not to know where to bury the dead in NYC, all that suffocating, that loneliness, those last looks. „High on a hillside, the trucks are loading, / Everything’s ready to roll / I sleep in the daytime, / I work in the nighttime, / I might not ever get home“. Breathe deeply. Ready to lose, ready to celebrate. April, my tender cruel stargazing month. We all have to find enough answers for ourselves these days. Polaroid pictures fading, dreams collapsing. Anyway, the someday world may show itself in glimpses. Now, as the melodies float on.
Michael: There‘s so much joy and hope in this album. But the last song of the album, „To Us All“, is so dark when you hear the lyrics: it could be written by a soul mate of Samuel Beckett, there are lines like „From the blood that we just we couldn’t spill / From the ones that we just couldn’t kill / We spin a world in a dizzying fall / To see the things that will happen to us all.“ But the sounds and the melody have an incredibly warm, embracing quality. it sounds like a lullaby for the end of the world, or, to our endlessly numbered days.
Brian: That was actually a much longer song earlier, there were four other verses, and I took them all out. Just left that bit. And the four other verses for me painted the picture too fully. They filled in all the details, and it wasn’t so good then. So I emptied it and was just left with what had actually been the climax. So the song had built up to those two verses that exist. As a sort of climax, but then I thought: get rid of the build-up, just have the climax! I’ve never really done a song in quite that form except it’s slightly like a song of my very first album, called „On Some Faraway Beach“, where there’s a long lead-up, and there are three short verses that sort of just sit there like a little island in the song.