Biography
On a hungover morning in February I was walking through London Fields on the way back to my flat. It was typically overcast and my eyes were on my feet. I was thinking about a similar park near my secondary school in Newbury. Somehow, the opening lines of a song appeared unbidden.
“I was lying on the floor of the playground. You were chasing off a kid with a greyhound. I remember thinking you’re the coolest girl I know.”
At the time Dry the River were in something of a wilderness, creatively and temporally. There were a lot of uncertainties surrounding the record – when it would be finished and how we would get there, who we wanted to work with in terms of our wider team.
In the practice room later that day I mumbled the words over some chords for the rest of the boys to hear, and by the evening the song existed, dreamt up out of our collective subconscious, as though it had just been waiting for us to find it.
The rest of the record kind of reconstituted itself around that new knot of music, and now we find ourselves a month from the release of our second album, renewed and excited.
For me, Everlasting Light represents the path out of the wilderness – a kind of unlikely moment of clarity where we remembered what its like to be a band in a room. Listening to it now, it feels like we were trying to exonerate ourselves, trying to articulate the feeling that all the detours we’d taken were part of the process, and that we were beginning to find our feet in our own way.
Who knows – still, it feels cathartic to shout “I had my reasons at the time”.
The combative video came from these themes – of getting back up after a setback, dusting ourselves off. The black belts are real, and so is the pain.
See you in the dojo.
DtR x