In the UK alone the rate for depression based suicide last year was at a staggering high. Often swept under the rug, depression can be one of the most serious mental illnesses out there. Not receiving the support needed people they are beginning to turn to other sources. Music has long since been a coping mechanism for many, emotions become more vivid, lyrics take on different meaning. Loosely based on the life and times of Silvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, Russian born Iamthemorning have created their latest masterpiece in the shape of Lighthouse. Acting as a beacon of hope for lost ships, the album is an emotional tour de force moving throughout the various planes of depression. We were very lucky to be able to be walked through Lighthouse by the band’s very own Marjana Semkina. Speaking about the imagery, metaphorical or otherwise, the singer illuminated the various different themes tackled on the conceptual story. Coupled with the album’s creative process and the band’s plans for the coming year. Join us as we take a stark and honest look into the world of Iamthemornings’s Lighthouse.

Listen to the full unedited interview on Soundcloud below or read the transcript underneath.

 

So today I have Marjana from Iamthemorning with me, hello!

Hello Tristan,

How are you?

Very good thank you, very very good.

Excellent. You released your brand new album Lighthouse last week, what have fans reactions been like to that so far?

Well it was much better than I had feared. I was very nervous about the release of this album because its kind of very different from the previous ones but the response was amazing so far. We are very happy with how people take it and how they respond and all the reviews and comments. Its been very positive.

You mentioned that its different from your previous material, in what way?

Well our previous album, the first one we released with Kscope, Belighted it was kind of I guess more heavier. It was also maybe kind of more conventional in terms of being a Prog Rock album. It featured heavy guitars and heavy drums a lot more and this Prog Rock-ish parts whereas this album has a much more chamber feel about it. We used instruments that we have never used before like winds and also there are some ethnic instruments, which is not very typical for Prog bands and bands like us.

I didn’t realise that you had never used those instruments, there’s clarinet on “Clearer, Clearer” is that correct?

Yeah several of them actually three or four, also flutes but we have never used wind instruments before! We also have this traditional Breton instrument called bombard which is kind of tricky too because its a very specific sound. It has this particular feel about it and we have it featured and playing solo in a very heavy part of the song. The very beginning of the album its the first proper song “Too Many Years” and there’s a bombard all of sudden playing solo. We went in for some risky creative choices I guess! It was very exciting to see what people have to say about it.

Was that just off the cuff or did you really think about that you wanted to be experimental this time?

Well we kind of don’t put limits to the creative tools that we use. Thats the reason we also featured a children’s choir in one of the songs. We have a lot of ethnic percussion this time, the aforementioned bombard, numerous wind instruments. We just don’t want to limit ourselves to anything. If the songs calls for very unusual instruments then we use it, why not?

Could you tell me what inspired you to base the concept around Virginia Woolf?

Well its not just Virginia Woolf, its also about Silvia Plath to be honest. I’m kind of a bookworm really, I read a lot and there was this specific period in my time when I was travelling around the UK last spring and I had been reading a lot of those writers and I also visited Beachy Head in Seven Sisters near Brighton.

Very, very high cliffs above the sea, the spot that I found out later on is quite popular among suicides in Europe. Its like the most famous suicide location and it has this special sort of melancholy about it. It was a very good match with the literature that I was reading. I was coming through some very weird times in my life too, everything put together inspired me to speak up about the subject of mental illness.

I don’t think that people are free to talk about it. They normally don’t and I don’t believe that people take it seriously when it comes to facing mental illness or talking to someone who is coming through some tough times. Its normal for people to discuss all sorts of diseases, like I don’t know, injuries and broken legs or even cancer but not ever do they talk freely about being depressed or having social and mental anxiety so I thought that I would like to speak some more about that.

I think your point is absolutely right. There is far too little, not only information about depression but places on where you can get help. Do you think that this will act as a kind of outlet for some people?

I don’t know really, I kind of hope but one of the reasons was also people that are coming through depression or suffering from all sorts of mental illnesses. They are the ones who need support the most and ironically they are the ones who get the least of it. They can’t talk freely to anyone because they know that noone will take it seriously.

Its very often that people think that well he is miserable because he just doesn’t want to get out of bed and get out of the house. He’s not really depressed he’s just lazy to do things or do something with his life. That puts those people into a very bad position even worse than what they have been in before and the reason for this album partly is that I want them to know that they are not alone in this. Its very important to know that there is someone else who knows what this is. This is a reminder for them.

I was going to say I have also been to Beachy Head so I know exactly that feeling. Did you see the telephone?

The telephone?

Yeah, there is a telephone I’m not sure which part of it. It was kept there for people to make the last call and a direct line to the Samaritans. In case people were suicidal.

Oh I haven’t seen it! I have mixed feelings about that, is it for making last calls or contacting Samaritans to get help?

Its kind of one or the other really! You’ve also had a number of guest musicians on the record. What inspired their inclusion?

Well we had Gavin Harrison on our previous album as well which was brilliant I enjoy working with him. He is just such a brilliant musician so this time when we started looking for a bass player. As you might know we do not have a constant side of musicians, there is just me and the piano player and a lot of guests. It was kind of natural for us to come to the conclusion that Colin would be the perfect fit. With his style of playing we thought that it might be a very good match. I approached him and it wasn’t a lot of time before he said yes. It was kind of an easy decision for us.

Mariusz is a special story, he has always been a very special musician for me. I love what he does in Riverside and Lunatic Soul and I love his voice. At a certain point we decided that we have to invite a male vocalist for singing the lower part of the title track “Lighthouse”.

It needed some help in terms of lower register, my voice is kind of pretty high and I wrote a part that was very low so I could sing it but with not enough power in my voice. It was very natural as well to call for Mariusz because we are friends and I couldn’t think of anyone else. It was his voice that I heard there from the very beginning. Everything came naturally for us, we never push for anything. We just do what the music asks for.

Like you said it compliments the higher register absolutely brilliantly and I think its a standout track of the album easily.

I really like it too, thank you!

What was the process of writing and recording the album like?

It was quite a lot of fun actually, it was almost and international thing to do. We recorded the gran piano in Moscow then we recorded strings and wind instruments in St Petersburg, vocals,drums and bass in the UK. Then Mariusz recorded his part in Warsaw and we had guitars from Toronto so that was kind of across countries. It was easier than Belighted though we had a very full picture of what we wanted.

Before we started recording we had demos with all the parts written down already, the result wasn’t quite surprising. With Belighted we put everything together as a jigsaw. This time we followed the plan very strictly, we knew for sure, we knew exactly what we wanted to get in the end and we ended up getting that particular thing.

I was going to say structurally and the way that Lighthouse flows is very organic.

I think this is partly because of the song writing process and the process of writing the whole thing was different. We initially had a kind of skeleton, a concept and the tonal plan of the whole album and then we took our draft and put them into this kind of plan so that the whole picture was in front of our very eyes from the beginning. Its very thought through, Gleb worked a lot on putting it together. It wasn’t just a set of songs from the beginning, it was a full album and we have been filling it with musical pieces.

Primarily the album does focus on mental illness, is the story of Lighthouse about suffering manic / depressive episodes?

Yeah actually its about a girl that gets treatment. The track “Chalk and Coal” its about Lecture Compulsive Therapy. I’m kind of studying the subject a lot songs from the album are dedicated to different parts of the story of this girl that comes through her struggles with depression. Thats the reason why there is such a diversity of moods throughout the album. There are different phases of disease, manic and then depressive, I’m not sure about the English terms though.

Some tracks put us into a kind of low place, they are very dark and bleak. Others are not very like “Matches” for example. Thats the thing about the album, it has a very clear plot. I was writing it having the story in front of my eyes and therefore there are specific scenes described in songs. Therapy or “Sleeping Pills” is about trying to fight insomnia and actually taking sleeping pills but then “Libretto Horror” takes us to the place where she overdoes the amount of pills that she takes in trying to get out of this very bad situation she got into. Its kind of very concrete, if I can say that. Its not about abstract things, its about a very specific situation in life of a diseased person.

I think its very specific but its also quite ambiguous because it could be attributed to anyone who is suffering from depression.

Yeah that was kind of what I was aiming for. I have received a lot of messages so far already from people that are coming through some things like that who told me that “wow this is so precise and so accurate” “thank you so much for putting this into music and into words because thats very important for us”. These messages actually warms my heart because that was why I did it. I wanted to give some help to the ones who need it.

Did you decide on the title Lighthouse, I read up a bit on Virginia Woolf and she was fascinated with Godrevy Lighthouse.

Actually it has nothing to do with her to be honest. Well partly it does, there is also a lighthouse on Beachy Head as well but its actually a symbol. Its actually a very hopeful thing! Lighthouse is a symbol of giving guidance, its a guiding light for lost ships in the sea. Its also a symbol of hope, even though, if you’ve seen the cover art there is a lighthouse but it covered underwater and its still giving light.

Its also kind of a controversial thing, it can be interpreted in several ways, even when everything is very bad, everything is covered in water, the sea has swallowed England or something. There is still light in this or it could be interpreted as underwater is the way to go. It starts and ends at the sea shore, where the protagonist is standing with her feet in the sea trying to decide if she is going to drown herself or not but there is never a particular ending to the story because there is an open ending.

We have an instrumental piece at the very end of the album called “Post Scriptum” which we put there not to end the album on a very bleak note to end the album with “I Came Before The Water II”. We didn’t want everything to be hopeless, we wanted people to make their own ending, to not give them any particular end of the story. No because there is still the notion of her keeping fighting it. It sounds weird, kind of geeky!

Its not weird or geeky at all. I think its fantastic and there aren’t many people who are doing this and thats why I think that you have received such great response already.

I think that people should talk more about that!

You mentioned the artwork could you tell us how you came up with that concept?

If I say it was very natural that will be the fifth time in this interview haha! I don’t know it was actually the first idea about what the artwork should be like and I kind of had a very clear picture. I drew a pencil sketch and sent it over to our artist and sent him some pictures of Beachy Head so that he could kind of have the impression of the landscape I want to see. It ended up not looking exactly like Beachy Head but that wasn’t the purpose at all. I wanted to give him a general feel of the place. We didn’t have a lot of options to choose from, the first suggestion I came up with Gleb was very happy about it. Lighthouse was actually one of the working titles for one of his drafts for the title track. I suggested taking this for the title of the album for several reasons and then came up with the idea for the cover art.

Its a peculiar name, I was wondering how you came up with Iamthemorning?

Oh haha! Its not a very interesting story! Its a title of a track from a band called Oceansize, I had been listening a lot to them circa 2010 – 2009 so we were never very ambitious about our project in the first place. I suggested taking this name and writing it in one word and using it. I really liked the feel of it, its a very pretty one and I think it represents the mood of the musi rather well. Its gentle and nice and quite girlish I guess! I just suggested using it and Gleb was fine. We never really knew that we would grow to this scale because otherwise we would probably come up with something more original but no regrets, no regrets haha!

No I think its perfect. Its almost like someones name, you kind of grow into what it is and it becomes part of you!

Thats actually what happened and I can’t see it any other way now. Its also a nice homage to Oceansize, they broke up long ago which broke my heart and I never even got to see any of their concerts because they never came to Russia and I couldn’t travel back then.

You mentioned that you have instrumentalists from all over the world, has it been tough being based in Russia?

Well yeah, its the toughest thing ever! Obstacles all over the place. We even had a lot of troubles when we got our CD’s, Kscope sent them to Russia like last year or the year before when we released Belighted. They sent us a box of CD’s and they spent two months and a lot of money to get them out of customs.

Even tiny things like that, I go to Holland every month now specifically to ship Bandcamp orders because Russian post just does not work properly. In every single thing that we do, we always have troubles because of our country of origin. Its very complicated, wherever we go we need a visa. If we go to play in other countries we need a very special type of visa that takes extra paper work and extra budget to arrange.

Oh god…

Its very complicated. If we need to go on European tour and take a cello with us thats an extra seat on the plane and extra papers to take an expensie instrument out of the country. Classical instruments should have a specific passport. Now I’m here in Europe and spending a lot of time here and I’m just so jealous for everyone who was born here! Bands that are based in the Netherlands lets say, they can just get on a bus and go touring Europe without any troubles. They take this for granted and keep whining about how difficult everything is haha!

Will you be coming over to the UK or Europe at any point?

Well Europe is more likely than the UK, the UK takes a very special type of Visa and its very expensive but we are working on lining a tour up for autumn but nothing is clear yet. Its very hard for a band like ours to find touring companions. We tour as a chamber quartet with string players so therefore our sound is very specific and its very quiet. There are not a lot of Progressive acts out there that might be a good fit for such a quiet band.

Do you have to be quite careful with venues as well, you want to try and get quite a nice wholesome sound?

This is the ideal situation. Russia we only play in classical halls, we can arrange that. Its a bit more difficult here in Europe, if you’re just starting to tour we have only been on one European tour so far so we can’t be very picky. You have to take what you are offered. I really hope that venues like theatre’s and chamber halls are waiting for us in the future but so far we are just going with the flow.

Thank you ever so much for speaking to The Metalist and congratulations on an absolutely incredible brand new album.

Oh well thank you very much!