To Carry a Whale

• Portuguese Translation

It’s an observation on what it’s like to be a sober alcoholic addict a couple of years in. A whale is heavy to carry. It’s gonna hurt you to carry it. But it’s also beautiful, and it’s a miracle to be able to carry all that at all.

— via The Line of Best Fit (March 2021)

It was the first time in my life where it’s really been quite a concise and focused writing process. My friend (Sam Duckworth aka Get Cape.Wear Cape.Fly) produced the album and it was the first time where I had a theme that we stuck militantly to, the theme of living with something heavy, which is where the title comes from. We got rid of a lot of songs that on paper were big songs but just thematically didn’t fit with this idea that I had for a ten-track album called To Carry a Whale.

It was very much ‘this is what I want it to be about’ and it enabled us to be bold and push aside certain songs that I think some people thought I was crazy to not put on there, but they didn’t fit.

—via Yorkshire Post

I definitely felt I had done for ten years the kind of feel-based songwriting, and as I was going into rehab and a few months before and after as well, I was spending a lot of time in America and I started listening to a lot of country music. I fell in love with it, even the cheesy stuff, “Don’t Take the Girl” by Tim McGraw would be a good example, straight to the point.

One of the ways I stayed sober was following suggestions that deflate my ego and fear. Sometimes the scariest thing that someone could do – and a lot of young artists have this – is to tell a story directly as it happened and mention all the specific places, the colours, the cities, the smells, the names even, and on To Carry a Whale, which is the first album written in that space, I know what every song is about, this my story, I want to tell it so maybe it will help someone else. It’s helped my songwriting in a way I’m less fearful, I’m not as scared of singing ‘I love you’ if I need to.

—via Yorkshire Post