Wereju - Forty-Seven Years of Decay (2020)

"We are young
Wandering the face of the earth
Wondering what our dreams might be worth
Learning that we're only immortal
For a limited time".

Work on this album began in early January, shortly after the news of the death of Neil Peart. At that stage the working title was 'Learning Immortality' (for those who pay attention to such things you will no that this was not the first time one of my titles was influenced by the lyrics of Rush).

As the months went by this album slowly became what you hear now; a mediation and a meditation on what it is that makes us who and what we are (does it feel like Groundhog Day?). If I could explain it all in words I wouldn't need the music...

“Archibald MacLeish affirmed that ‘A poem should be equal to / not true’. As a defiant statement of poetry’s gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a retuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive, like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin’s regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it.” - Seamus Heaney