Memories of the Sky

“We were in the early stages of the writing and demoing this new album, our 12th, when we read about a special exhibit at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay featuring Louis Janmot’s epic series of paintings, drawings and verse – indeed, his life’s work – “Le Poème de l’âme”. Instantly felled by his breathtaking images and its story we began the album in earnest, deeply influenced and inspired.

Janmot’s premise and our own is the tale of our vague yet potent memories of the life and lives before and our transit to the one we currently inhabit. In everyday life and especially in dreams, these memories come to us. The beginning of the story – Janmot’s depiction of the guardian angel flying from heaven to earth with the soul of a child – is where we got the title and inspiration. The memory of a sky full of traffic, angels protectively carrying souls to and from earth, to and from mortality, both at life’s inception and at its end.

With his breathtaking imagery in mind, and as inspiration, we set out to depict a similar journey with this collection of music, words and sounds: the longing, the faith, the visions, the darkness, the hope, the desire to be good. The faint but insistent remembrance of things unseen but known.

The album is a continuum across two discs that we’ve titled individually – Disc One: The Clouds Darken; Disc Two: A Winter Light – as a kind of celestial navigation of the journey. It can all unfold over two hours in one go or with a rest stop intermission built in, as the trip sojourns gradually from shadows into luminescence.”

Releases on December, 1st, 2024.