The album is still being made. I want to write something personal about what it means to be making it, in the present tense, while I am still inside the process.
Fragile World is about loss and resilience. Not in an explicit or programmatic way: there are no (well, very few) lyrics, no narrative, no road map through the themes. But the emotional territory the album inhabits is territory that comes from specific experience. Years of watching things I loved disappear: venues, communities, ways of life that existed in a particular moment and then didn’t. The Winchester. The early rave scene. Friends and collaborators who went their own ways.
It is also about what survives. The music survives. The love of the music survives. The community around the music, which has taken different forms across thirty-five years but has never fully gone away, survives. The album tries to hold both the fragility and the persistence simultaneously, because that is what the experience of being in this music for this long actually feels like.
I made it for myself first, in the sense that all the music I’ve made that I’m proud of has been made for myself first. But I am also making it for the people who have been listening, who have followed the work across the years, who heard Lost Cause Part Two and found something in it. This record is for you too.
It is not finished yet. But it is becoming what it needs to be.
