SONG 1: Trains

This is the first song I wrote for this EP before knowing this would be an EP I would put on Spotify or other streaming services. This was about a month after the breakup and just after I’d decided I’d moved on with someone that I’d started “dating” (not sure what word to use) immediately after to try and fill a void. After a particularly rough night this fell apart with a mental breakdown and moving home early the next day.

When I got home I was in an awful state, my sister picked me up and took me to my nans house. All I brought with me was my clothes, laptop, the £10 microphone I recorded the entire EP on, and my acoustic guitar (With a broken G tuning peg). I took my guitar and started playing covers of Flatsound on my own in her sitting room. It was the only way I could get this eternal lump in my throat up and breathe properly again. The feeling of this was probably the worst I’ve ever felt. It was everything I was avoiding for months escaping from me. And it came from every pore in my skin. It felt like molasses covering me when I moved. Every part of me was tired and I couldn’t rest. Especially my eyes. It’s the most disorienting thing I’ve ever experienced. Time was distorted in the strangest way. Every action felt like it was drawn out and stretched to take place over hours. But, immediately after that action, it would fall away from me faster than thought and I would lose it. I don’t remember much of what I did that day but I can remember the feeling.

In the next few days of this I wrote 4am Trains and immediately performed, recorded, and filmed it. (image from the live video above).

It's 4am, you're not here, and the trains outside are making it hard to sleep. Lyrics:

I should’ve stayed

Stuck out the day

Instead of leaving

In the morning

Should’ve sat there and listened

Should’ve sat there and listened

But the shame of being

In that house with you sleeping

On the couch with your reasons

While I sit in the feeling

Just go back

To when I was breathing

In the same

Way as I needed

When your hands

Found a reason

For being next

To my person

In the felt in your clothes

In the open window

With the trains rattling bones

Moving on into the coast

In the lines left undisclosed

For the fear of letting you know

That I’m scared where this will go

Because to me you feel like home

(The following segment negates all structure and simply tries in another way to express the depths of the anxiety, dread, and depression I felt from that time).

It was like time oozed slowly out of me. Like every piece of my skin could be felt at a resolution I’d never experienced. I was vibrating with pain. Pain in my throat and chest. It seemed to spread from there in the same way warmth spreads through cold hands. But it replaced everything with dread and the feeling of a patch of pure, empty cosmos, endlessly expansive and dead. It was a feeling of everything coming to an end, a true end, not death. Something like a disappearance or banishing that would remove me entirely from the world. Like my atoms wouldn’t return to the soil, or to the stars they came from. And I was completely apathetic to the idea, even wanting it.