“The Close/ Le Réveil was written in the last week of August in my lounge and produced across the first two weeks of September.
The urgency of it was in part a response to the stagnancy of 2020, and in part a response to it being the first time I’ve written music to directly process emotion, rather than reflect upon it after the fact. I essentially wrote my own breakup playlist.
The title alludes to the well-worn cliche of endings being beginnings. The songs are loosely structured around the various phases of grief after an ending and aim to ‘close the book’. The project as a whole, and its creation, represents the release from that and the awakening that comes after, ‘le réveil’.
The lead track from this EP, ‘First Time’ looks at the enormous and overwhelming experience of first love and first loss. ‘Swimming Upstream’ is about two people trying but failing, as the past haunts the present and distorts reality after the fantasy of newness fades. It’s a song of regret and sadness, wrapped in a sense of injustice and resentment.
The EP gets gradually lighter. ‘One More Night’ is about missing the sex, ‘Peaches’ about realising mistakes and understanding that you have to grow yourself, ‘Carry On’ is half nostalgia /half acceptance, an understanding that time passes and all you can do is wait, and finally ‘I Miss You’ is about memorialising something that, even if it wasn’t right, was beautiful and deserves a longer life than it got, which essentially is the purpose of the whole project.”
‘First Time’ & ‘Swimming Upstream’
Josef Salvat
Singles out now through Liberation Records
Available to buy/stream here
The Close / Le Réveil
Josef Salvat
EP out 26 March 2021
Available to pre-order here
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