Memento Mori

In an interview with NewReleaseTuesday frontwoman Lacey Sturm explained:

Sure! In ancient Rome, when a Roman general or King would come back victorious from battle, the whole kingdom would celebrate and throw him a parade. As they sang praises to welcome him home, a slave travelling behind him shouted, “Memento mori!” which is a Latin phrase meaning “Remember that you’re mortal; remember you will die.” In other words, the slave was saying to him that we ultimately share the same fate. At this moment, you are on top, but tomorrow is another day and our positions can be reversed. So “Memento mori” really was an amazing phrase to find, and it just sums up what we’ve learned over the past 7 years of being together.

We were looking for artwork for the album and we were thinking about doing a triptych for the packaging. We had seen one CD by [metal band] Demon Hunter that had a triptych and we thought that was so cool. So, we kind of wanted to do something like that. And so we were looking up different triptychs and we came across a piece of artwork that was a triptych by Hans Memling and it was called “Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation” and we actually put part of that image on the backdrop that we use when we do radio shows or places where we have the room to hang it. It’s huge. And underneath that was the phrase, when we found [the image] online: “memento mori.” And we just researched where the phrase comes from and what it meant and we just thought it was interesting, the phrase. I remember just writing in on my arm and just thinking about it for a few days. And at the time we were meeting together and rehearsing the [new] songs and we put them all down, the ones we wanted to use for the record — we had about 25 songs to pick from. And when we picked out the songs we wanted to use for the record, when we looked over the group of songs we kind of saw that message jump out and it kind of hit everybody [in the band] the same way. Because we have all been through a lot of stuff. With a lot of [us], close family members have passed away over the past five years that we have been touring. And the thing that we learned the most was that our lives are short and precious. …It makes life make more sense when you remember that.

– Via Atlantic City Weekly