I wanted to bring that feeling of humility and smallness. In the face of that scale of tragedy, when you're hearing the tides and tides of sirens, it's a real reckoning how dependent we are on each other, how small we are in the world, how interconnected we are. It was a really scary time, and all of us collectively felt powerless… witnesses to tragedy… so against the way in which America and pop culture paint the individual as having so much power and control, the freedom to make your dreams real, all this stuff we're taught. When I got back… I was in deep, dark lockdown, and there were sirens going nonstop in London as people were being shuttled to the emergency room, dying of COVID. The next time I heard it… Danny and Harley it away and maxed it out. We’d just made that one snippet… very simple, chords and a lyricless vocal. something he and I talk about when we write… the end of a phrase, what pressure it sets up. A lot of songs hinge on that way of making it addictive… getting it stuck in your head.

It leaves you feeling inconclusive at the end of the phrase, so you need to hear it start again. This is actually a very signature Danny L Harle thing to do - to write a… sequence that doesn't resolve, that requires going back to the beginning. Sometimes when you… do collaborations, it ends up sounding like one or the other, but this track feels like a perfect combination.ĭo you have any more context to how an ambulance inspired the song?Ĭaroline: The beginning of the track was just a chord sequence with a cyclical melody. Harley: That's a good way to describe it. So it's almost an interplay between a spirit and environment. But then Harley brings to it this massive, tectonic wall of sound that is so environmental and so forceful. It's really - for me, at least - a song about hopelessness. There's a lot of tragedy, at least from what I'm bringing to the… vocal performance and the lyrics. And we didn't even know until a couple days ago that Harley was gonna play the part of the biker.

It was this weird, accidental, inward spiral that we ended up in. But when Daniel Askill went to make the video, he was thinking in terms of the mythological creatures, so he wrote it around this winged creature that I'd play and sent it to me. In the lyric, I'm referencing the cries of ambulance sirens. It's interesting because the figure of the motocross rider is gonna feature throughout the entire narrative of the campaign. And I love the interaction between our two characters because I'm so ethereal and air bound and soft and emotional, and Harley's this petrified, mechanical, potentially corpse… until he's excavated from the earth and revived by music. There's the motocross biker that Harley plays, and then there's this archangel siren creature that I play. What did you guys get into? I saw there were harnesses and a rain machine.Ĭaroline: There are two figures in the video.

Flume friends lyrics