5 Q&A With SWiiMS
How does 'Into The Blue Night' reflect your musical journey and growth as a band?
We have described ‘Into The Blue Night’ as that feeling of coming out of a long tunnel into the light. It's familiar, but also new, like seeing the sun for the first time. There is a feeling of nostalgia throughout the record, but hopefully in a fresh new way.
How do you feel 'Into The Blue Night' represents your artistic identity?
The record explores the balancing act of falling in love and the feelings of lonely isolation that we all endured during the pandemic. Trying to capture what so many of us felt, trying to find and hold on to an identity.
What was your favorite moment in making the music video?
Our thought was to have the story of a rebuffed lover told through the destruction of her shirt. We loved the idea of starting with the end, with all of her gifts littered on her shirt and working backward with each present being removed one by one. As we shot the video, Mai had to pour red wine all over herself, that was my favourite part!
Where do you find inspiration for your songs or musical ideas?
A lot of the music is simply finding a part that we like and then building that idea out. Mai finds inspiration for her lyrics all around. As we wrote this record, she was in the first stages of falling in love and you can clearly hear that on the record. But there is also a sense of isolation and loneliness that the pandemic brought on.
Can you walk us through your creative process when writing and composing music?
The pandemic forced us to find a way to work on music alone, but together. We started working exclusively online for the writing of 'Into The Blue Night". Colin would often write an outline of the song and send it to Mai to start working on lyrics and melody. Once she had something she liked, it was sent back to rework the music to better compliment what she had come up with. We have become very efficient and still use this method to generate new song ideas.