Souvenir Track-By-Track Breakdown

An Invitation

Viggy: These lyrics were inspired by Drought’s beginnings. Some of us had spent over a decade away from playing music, and like Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart, you can only ignore a part of yourself for so long before it eats you away from inside.

RJ: As soon as this song was complete I think we all felt this was the logical beginning to the album. Eric’s intro, titled ‘Introduction’ on the record, begins the song and has this really foreboding quality. As we were writing the instrumentation I felt the verses had this really lyrical quality to them, like they were telling a story. I love the arch of this song and how that story unfolds.

Abattoir

Viggy: A lot of the songs on this record have these kinda bigger ideas in there, but “Abattoir” is so straightforward. I think every one of us has experienced disappointment over artists or mentors whose work we adored. They turn out to be bad people or not what you made them out to be in your head. So I had a bit of a revenge fantasy with this one. Kill your idols and be the kind of person you wish they were.

We’re the Flora

Viggy: Last summer, I visited a bouquet art exhibit. All of these flowers and plants had been clipped and fashioned into these beautiful structures — giving them a second life as something new. And I think we can all think of the things in our past we wish we could remove ourselves from, even though they’re the reason we’re here today. It was especially fitting to have Pat from Fiddlehead and Have Heart graciously guest, since he’s often written about similar experiences of generational trauma and how we come to reconcile ourselves with who we used to be.

Proof of Life

Viggy: 2019 was a really difficult year for me, and I tried to take my life at the end of it. This song’s a reminder that it’s okay to wear those scars and to talk about it. I have a tattoo on my arm of Langston Hughes’s Suicide’s Note, where he imagines death as a calm, cool river. And it fits into an ongoing theme on the record that we all come from a river and will one day return to it. Eric was at one point telling us the lyrics all seemed to speak to this idea that you can never swim in the same river twice. It’s always changing, and so are you. I lived and experienced these things—a literal proof of life.

Compass/Needle

Viggy: This song was almost written inside-out. I wrote “one day you will believe in believing” in my notebook as a reminder that things can get better. The world isn’t a static thing and every experience we have passes, but we have to be willing to work if we want to find community or a sense of home and purpose. Many of the lyrics touch on other aspects of the songs on Souvenir. The metaphor of a river or a homeland that’s just one point on that river. A better world is possible, but we have to believe in it.

Souvenir

RJ: When Eric first showed me this I was almost annoyed with him. You ever have that happen - where you take in something so perfect you’re like, kind of bothered by how good it is? I was like, “This is perfect. What could I possibly contribute?” I thought he should work on developing the idea on his own and see where it took him. I’m glad he pushed back and that the song ended up how it did, as these weaving guitar melodies. I still get lost listening to this song.

Saint

RJ: This song took shape while I was away visiting family. I sent the initial idea to Eric and we bounced ideas back and forth. In a day or two the instrumentation was mostly complete. At some point the song seemed to pivot from what I was originally imagining and became something else. At times I really wrestled with whether I liked this new form it had taken. I think the lesson here, for me, was one of control, letting go of what you want something to be and instead, trying to embrace it for what it is. I can’t say if that’s always the right move but I think at times you need to let go and see what happens.

Viggy: The first time I heard the guys play it, it sounded like such a typical emo song. Something Basement or Modern Baseball would’ve written. So I immediately started jokingly writing these lyrics about a car crash. But eventually that evolved into a metaphor for this content-driven influencer culture we live in. We put such a premium on being remembered, but I don’t want to be an artifact in AI images years from now. If I die in a car crash, let me be forgotten. Eric from Mom Jeans was kind of the perfect companion for this. We’ve seen each other play a bunch of times and I knew he’d nail the cheekiness this song calls for.

In the Glass Room

Viggy: Our guitarist RJ called me one day and told me about a dream he had where he was helpless to save someone he loved as they were burning in a room. It struck a chord with me, thinking of friends we’ve lost and the survivor’s guilt you feel in the aftermath. Oftentimes, you can’t find any reason for losing someone. It feels nonsensical. Irrational. “Who lit the spark that refuses to go out?” is a question with no answer.

One of Me

Viggy: This song was really hard for me. The rhythms are really angular and I kept trying to find my way in. One night I was at RJ’s place and we were trying it acoustically, and I got inspired by an amplifier he’d taken apart on his desk, literally the same one he uses on our record. Here were all these tiny component parts strewn about but still wired together. It looked so naked and bare. So those rhythms inspired the song to become the darker companion to “Two of Me”. Where the lyrics on the next song are about reconciling disparate identities, this one’s about the conflict between them.

Two of Me

Viggy: These words were originally supposed to be for a different song, but when the rest of the band played a riff and melody that sounded so hopeful, it seemed like such a better fit. There’s a lot here for folks to interpret, from references to Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses to a Tori Amos song and the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182. W.E.B. DuBois wrote about ‘double consciousness’ and this song imagines an igniting event that then turns one identity into two; like twins with different experiences in a single physical body. For me, it represents what it’s like to be part of a diaspora.

Old Seed/New Grain

RJ: This is one of the first songs we wrote after recording our EP. It felt like it took an eternity. Some songs seem to just pour out in a fluid way. This one was a labour. At this point in our journey we were really still figuring out who we were and what we’re doing, and how we go about writing together.

Viggy: As a child, I used to lose myself in songs that felt like they could situate me in the world. The band Cornershop did that with “Brimful of Asha,” almost remixing these ideas from South Asian culture into the nineties context. In some ways, the song is an ode to my mom. She loved Asha Bhosle and old Bollywood songs, so I wanted to pay homage in my own way.

Wayfinding

Viggy: There’s a lot of discourse around masculinity these days. All people feel the confines of gender, but men are often punished by other men for expressing it. Like living in a tiger’s den when you’re not actually a tiger yourself. Can we name, challenge, and redefine masculinity to be tender and caring, or do we just need to find our way out? The lyrics reference the Raein song “Tigersuit” which I’d heard is about feeling trapped, and the monologue is about some of the most painful moments of my adolescence. I hope this connects with other people who want to be better, kinder humans.