Immediately after playing the album release for our Consequence Of Love (Side 2) EP at Vancouver’s historic Rickshaw Theatre Covid restrictions came down hard effectively destroying our plans of touring to support the album. As a means to occupy my time during the initial lock down I made a series of six videos about each song on the EP. In these blog posts I’ll go a little deeper into each song to further pass the time as we prepare to release new material in the next couple months.
I’m often asked if this song is autobiographical and in some ways it is but perhaps not in the way people think. Allow me to elaborate. In September of 2001 I was driving across Arizona with my then girlfriend. We took the long way back from Las Vegas to Santa Fe , New Mexico (where we were living at the time) and we stopped for the night in a desert motel off the highway. On the morning of September 11th we woke up to a man screaming in the parking lot outside.
“We’re at war! We’re at war!”.
It took me a few seconds to place where I was. After three or four days of Vegas festivities my mind was still clouded by the residual effects of countless free casino drinks and it was difficult to focus. The screaming man outside our window seemed incongruous with the quiet desert morning and in that waking state I couldn’t determine what was real and what was still the dream I’d been abruptly torn from.
As I sat up in bed and got my bearings my girlfriend turned on CNN in time for us to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center tower. The man stopped yelling and everything was silent except for that image of impact.
For years after that I thought about the surreal nature of that experience. Watching the apocalyptic scene unfold on a shitty TV in a cheap motel surrounded by hundreds of miles of desert in every direction—the sense of isolation and impending doom we felt packing out suitcases into the car. Nothing was ever going to be the same. The world’s trajectory was changed irreversibly.
I wrote the lyrics to The War Came To Us almost entirely at one sitting and they have little to do with that catastrophic event in September of 2001 except for the title and the idea that things can change in an instant. Relationships, concepts, the way we see the world are all just fragile constructs we cling to as a means to maintain order amidst the chaos of life. I talk about other aspects and themes of the song in the video below. Check it out! (It’s the one video in this series that YouTube rejected because I used a clip of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart video—but hell, Vimeo’s just cooler anyway)
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Thanks!
Bruce