The Dark Place

Check-in:

Hello Earthlings! It’s summer here, Crimson Veil are back from our epic tour with Combichrist, and I can’t believe it’s only just July. My check-in on the podcast this week is a pretty juicy one: I can finally share that my partner Dara and I are moving to Spain next month.

It’s scary, exciting, and really crazy! We and our cat Sam are temporarily residing in a shepherd’s hut, with most of our worldly possessions packed away in a storage container.

I’m busy with various recording sessions, including putting down parts for the next Crimson Veil album, which is keeping me sharp, and we are currently back in Germany for a few days to play a festival. My passport is heavy with stamps.

Life is good right now, so of course, Mish and I decided it was a perfect time to bring some darkness into things with our new podcast episode The Dark Place.

You can listen to the podcast here

A bit about our podcast

Mishkin and I started our podcast Wingspan: The Highs and Lows of Being a Musician last year to share an unfiltered conversation about what it’s really like to survive in the music industry. I feel like I would have liked to listen to a podcast like this when I was younger and I hope it connects with other musicians as well as entertaining music fans.

However I realise that podcasts aren’t for everyone which is why I’ve decided to start condensing this content into a blog. These blogs will be a bit different from the podcast itself, especially as the blog is just my voice, not Mish’s.

This means you can read the blog and separately enjoy listening to our candid and often silly conversations, but if you prefer reading to listening then this is essentially the same content presented in a different way.

TRIGGER WARNING: This blog comes with a trigger warning of addiction, mental health, suicide and abusive relationships.

What is the Dark Place?

The Dark Place, or as Mish calls it, the poison well, is the place you reach into to pull out your most painful feelings and experiences and put them into song.

For both Mish and me, music has been a very important form of therapy - we would go so far as to say that we probably wouldn’t be here now without songwriting as an outlet. For me, it was like a lifeline that pulled me up, song by song.

Every time I wanted to leave I would think, "I’ll wait until I’ve written this song, I need to leave this song as my legacy". I didn’t see it like this at the time, but it was my big source of hope and it gave me something to live for.

Mishkin and I initially bonded over the fact that we used music as a tool for therapy, expression, survival, and a way to be heard when we never felt heard.

A song that came from the Dark Place

My first album, Cold Comfort, is an album buried deep within the dark place. As well as being horribly bleak, I feel like I was still very immature in many ways when I wrote it. Looking back, I feel like it was the album that saved my life but I don’t listen to it or sing songs from it anymore.

The Devil Always Pulls Through is probably my most recent (released) song that came from the darkness. It’s about addiction, a time when keeping my life on an upward trajectory felt overwhelmingly difficult, and this looming feeling that the moment I let go and stopped trying, I would be pulled down towards hell like gravity.

I dug a little deeper into my poison well for this song and drew out a story from my first boyfriend who was a heroin addict for many years. Each day he and the others on the street didn’t know how they would get their fix, but every evening, like some dark miracle, something would arrive - “every time I’m getting dry, like clockwork, a hero comes riding by”. 

I feel like often the darkest songs are the most effortless to write and come so naturally because you just have to expel them - this darkness has to come out of you somehow, and this is the way your brain knows to deal with it.

Mish’s role as a creator is almost shamanistic in her ability to connect with fans through songwriting, as reflected in her close-knit community and cult fanbase. As well as songs that dealt with traumatic events and the deep grief of a loss of faith, Mish’s darkest songs come from a place of depression and despair.

Eulogy, from Birdeatsbaby’s fourth album Tanta Furia, is a suicide letter in a song and is extremely bleak. These songs were a kind of rebellion against feeling shut down and repressed and they felt like secret messages.

I think one thing we’ve both learned over time is that it’s ok to draw from this dark place as often as you feel compelled to. Something I’ve learned through years of therapy is that it’s ok to have to process things again and again. However…

Creating boundaries around the darkness

There are quite a few things we’re taught as musicians and one of them is this toxic and pervasive myth that you have to be fucked up to be a songwriter. You have to be poor and miserable and self-destructive. This was something I bought into for a long time, maybe because my songs felt so inspired during my darkest times.

However, something both Mish and I have learned as we’ve come out the other side of these periods of our lives is that you can live a happy and empowered life and still write songs of substance. One of the big things that inspires me as a songwriter is literature and I often take books and characters as the basis for songs and then add depth from my own experiences.

I feel like for better or for worse, most of us will always have that dark place inside us and it isn’t always necessary to go seeking out experiences to add to this. Both Mish and I also draw inspiration from the state of the world, which is its own endless supply of bleakness - but with this as well, there’s often a limit to how much you can consume if you’re a highly sensitive person.

The more your music becomes your job, the more important it is to be boundaried with it - for example, for me this means doing my work within firm time limits. If I don’t stick to boundaries then my mental health takes a noticeable hit!

Artists we love that draw from the darkness

Queens of the Stone Age (album: Like Clockwork) 

The Devil Makes Three (album: Spirits), 

PJ Harvey (album: Rid of Me/Is This Desire)

Nine Inch Nails (album: The Downward Spiral/The Fragile)

Question of the week: What is the darkest lyric you’ve ever written?

Mish: I was reading a lot about what was happening in the world, particularly in South America with the Catholic church. Women were waking up in handcuffs after medically needed abortions because it was a sin to live over your unborn child. I felt so moved by it that I wrote a song called Mary that was about mysogyny, war and men controlling women. 

The lyric I would choose is:

“If you lead so many to believe their death is not a mystery

They’ll bring their arms and bring their guns, for the Lord he speak, but not in tongues”

Hana: I was in a physically abusive relationship in my early twenties that I never really processed at the time or felt able to speak about. My song Lorelei is about that and has a lot of literal lines but the darkest one for sure that I feel paints a picture in very few words is:

“Your little ragdoll acrobat”

Weekly Whinge

Mish and I like to do a weekly whinge at the end of each podcast.

Hana: I’m going to keep it dark for this one and talk about how fucked up fairytales are in terms of the messages they give to girls about boundaries and consent. In The Frog Prince, he stalks her back to the castle and erodes all her boundaries until finally sleeping on her pillow and kissing her. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White are both kissed by strangers while asleep. Everyone has to get married to live happily ever after.

Mish: My whinge is designer clothing. It’s one of those things that’s consumerism at its most bloated. People pay loads of money for fast fashion that’s been made in a sweatshop just so they can have someone’s name on it. It’s ugly and boring and everyone looks the same. Buy a painting instead and then you can be a wanker with a painting.

That concludes The Dark Place. Please leave a comment if you enjoyed this - we want to know what your darkest lyric is, and of course, your weekly whinge. Thanks for reading and I’ll be back here again in two weeks with our next podcast subject.