Every week I met with my career coach, Mary Grey Jacobson, and talked about strategies for my career search. I sent out my resume, contacted alumni, and tried everything to get my name out there. Months of silence started to gnaw at me and I was getting discouraged. The one positive I could see was the relationships I was creating in my Fuqua journey.
During my recovery, our class got the green light that a graduation celebration in Durham was happening for my GEMBA 2020 class. I was thrilled that not only was I able to go and reunite with my classmates, but I was able to share this experience with my son.
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Looking back, 2020 was a tough year. It felt like everything was exploding and nothing seemed to be steady. Fast forward to the end of 2021, everything fit into place like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle. With the help of Fuqua, I was able to find my dream job, pivot into a role I never would have applied to in the first place, and work at a company I am passionate about. I love being a Fuqua graduate and a Duke alum.
Everything Everything's fourth album A Fever Dream stands in stark contrast to its predecessor Get To Heaven - out are the macro-zoomed views of society and in are the salient examinations of humanity's ceaseless fuckuppery. Out are rainbow-glazed pop hooks (mostly) and in are serpentine explorations of structure, dynamics, and texture. It's still very much Everything Everything, but it's a different side to a band we thought we knew.
Now's the time for real emotions. There's so much bullshit flying around and so many lies. So much falseness. I felt like it wasn't the right time to be secretive or cryptic; there's stuff that needs to be said in a straightforward way. We need to look seriously about a lot of things. The type of world we wanted to create was one that was easily approachable and true. We all wanted to make a really honest record, or at least one that felt like the music we wanted to hear ourselves.
It's kind of about the rise of the far-right. Obviously there's the reference in the title to when Hitler was put to power, but the song is also me being a bit... sarky: "...and they say it's a wave but it feels like a dribbling mouth." It's kind of... a bit crap, isn't it? Like it's not very scary, it's just idiots fearmongering but also completely flattening that fear at the same time. I'm also saying how everything is going off the rails, but it's also fun as well - it's taking something which should be (and is) in everyone's faces and pushing it into the background and going 'yeah, don't get too wrapped up in it, these are basement-dwelling idiots... it's not a thing and don't be afraid of it'. That's the idea but it's wrapped up in a very scary coat. We're playing both sides of it really, like bigging it up and tearing it down at the same time. It's undermining fear itself.
Not being able to cope is probably the best way of putting it; not being able to be what people expect you to be, or need you to be... not fitting in. It's much more personal than anything 'big' - it's much more on that personal level, where you realise you can't please everyone and that that's painful.
Aside from the obvious, it's about the modern, shallow way of not caring about consequences - you just want the thing you want. I felt that was one of the reasons we've been surprised by recent events in the world; people don't necessarily care about the fallout, they just want X to happen or they just want Y happen... and fuck the consequences. It's a recurring theme on the album and it feels like something that's being going around, certainly in this country (and a few others), but we're not necessarily damning that way of thinking, nor exulting it, but just saying 'this is a thing that happened, this is how people felt in 2016 and these are the results'.
All of the lyrics are purposely all-consuming. Lines like "I want disaster" and "I want it now" are part of this sense of surreal desires coming to the surface and not thinking about the end, or being held accountable for what happens.
Some of the lines were even more childish when I first wrote them. I feel like this is the appropriate way to respond to some of the things we're seeing coming out of America, and it's at the level they - he - might actually understand... if you're going to be ridiculous, I can be ridiculous back. It's pretty basic in its conceit... it's very much a nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah-type thing. One of these days someone will tell you no, and you're going to go fucking mental and I wish could see it. It takes the piss out of this supposedly scary rise of the Nazis and all this shit. I'm tired of it, I'm going to bed, fuck off - you don't scare me.
This is a bit more serious. It's about decision making and who gets to wield power in the world. We're asking questions about who gets to decide that, and why that should even be the case... "I'm a policeman and you're a criminal / we decided, we decided that's that." These things were laid down centuries before we were around, and we're asking why we should have power because of it. There's also an element of divine right in there, and towards the end we look at the idea of salvation. The idea that if I get destroyed will my soul still be able to get sucked out...? It gets quite surreal towards the end. Really it's about those big decisions and who gets to make them.
We made the decision very last minute to remove the band completely at the end and just have a cappella vocals, and then slowly bring the band back up. It's a completely studio thing to do... you can't really play that organically. It gives this amazing sense of being thrown of the edge of cliff... a bit like when Wile E. Coyote is still running in the air for a second and then he falls (he? She? I don't know what sex the coyote is). It's an intense way of building the narrative... it's probably the highest I've ever sung as well, and it's really difficult. I'm pleased with how we produced it in the end; it feels bold. A cappella is going to be tough live... but I haven't got to do anything else, so I should be able to pull it off. We'll see...
This is our pro-Brexit song. It might sound like an odd choice but it's me trying to describe why I think it all happened. It's that thing Michael Gove said - 'people are sick of the experts'. When I first heard that I just stopped and sat down, and I thought 'what the fuck is going on?' It felt like one of the most insane things I've ever heard, but the more I thought about it the more I knew we needed to talk about it. We can't ignore that, but we can't ignore it - it's been laughed at but I think it's one of the most important things anyone said during the whole Brexit process. When I sing "I don't need to run the numbers" that's me saying "I don't care what the experts say" - it's a bit like "Desire" in the sense that I'm just wanting something to happen. I don't believe in this idea myself but enough people did believe it that I want to talk about it and keep reminding people that it is a reality. It will happen again if we don't get our fingers out of our ears. So that's what the song's about, even though it comes from a side of the debate that I'm not on. The verses are showing the flaws in that mindset... how ridiculous the mindset of telling an expert what you want to hear is. I'm not going to say it's a bad thing, but I'm going to say it is a thing.
I wouldn't mind if it was co-opted... Team America is the best example of that. I'm not completely condemning it, and there's a romance to the idea of saying 'yes, let's just fuck everything up'. Part of me enjoys that. I think a lot of people do. I do, in a lot of ways, enjoy watching everything unravel and I enjoy watching people that were so secure become insecure.
This song is not about good vs. bad... it's about the country breathing in and out (something I touch on in "Long Knives"). We're watching history unfold and it's fascinating. It's certainly worth singing about. I don't feel a need to say 'oh, isn't this terrible... what a bad decision...'. How fucking boring. I'd rather say 'guess what happened in 2016!' because I'm a bard, not a politician. Who gives a crap what I actually think? It's the most boring thing in the world.
It's about a neighbourhood, distrust in society, distrust in your neighbours, division... it's based in the '70s in a 'peering over the garden hedge' kind of way, with people looking at neighbours and thinking 'ooh, they're nothing like me'. But I try to ram home that idea that yes, people are exactly the same.
There's this sense of the familiar has been turned into the unknown. The divisions that have erupted in our society between young and old, different classes, races, personal beliefs... every possible type of division has suddenly been split apart. I wanted to make a song that was about the fleeting sense of an enemy that's not and never was really there. That's behind a lot of it.
Alex worked on this one for a long time (it was called "Car Wash" for ages 'cause of the line about washing a car... we struggled a lot with the title). He put hours and hours and hours into refining it. He was listening to a lot of electronic stuff at the time, and he had all these synths he was putting in and every week I heard it it had changed completely even though I thought each one was really good... he was continuously refining it until it was unrecognisable from what we started with. Then we got the studio and started it all again anyway... but there was a great day when we said to Mike [Spearman, drums] 'just be free, just play jazz' - he was originally a jazz drummer, and he's never really played anything like that while he's been in the band, and he tends not to set himself free very often... we kind of forced him. [Our producer] James Ford was like 'the guys really want you to play jazz so I'm not stopping until you do'. Mike just improvised all over the middle eight and it was just very, very cool. It's one of my favourite moments, hearing him go 'off the grid'. 152ee80cbc