“This one was born from one of Sylvia Plath's villanelles, Mad Girl's Love Song, probably her most famous. That poem opened into two tracks on this record: this one, and A Mad Girl's Love Song itself, which comes back near the end to answer it. The record carries Plath's name, and what interests me most is the archetype, what that state does to a person. It reaches far beyond her biography.

Grief runs through the whole trilogy. We tend to lose someone and only then start valuing them. Death becomes a story about how we feel. Very few people stop to ask how that person was seen while they were still here. And there's another kind of grief I keep returning to: mourning a version of yourself that's gone.

The song lives inside the house, the territory of this first part. The lights are on and no one's home. A chair stays warm for a ghost I still groom. I'm watching myself love an empty frame, rewinding it, rehearsing a scene for the air while the lens keeps rolling. I'm asking whether that person was ever really there. A friend? A love? There's no answer, the same way there's no answer for the feeling that drowns you while you grieve. You walk into your own mind trying to work out which parts were true, if any part was. Whoever you lost: a friend, a lover, or yourself.

The bridge holds the line I think about most: I built a whole religion on a doubt. That doubt enters the record early on purpose, at track three, and it never quite leaves. A Mad Girl's Love Song picks it up and turns it into a paradox. Nevermind gives it the weight of someone who is really gone. Somewhere between them, the question stops being about one person and becomes about memory itself, and how much of it we invent to survive.

I think there's a point after a relationship where you stop arguing with the person and start arguing with the archive. A photograph proves a photograph existed. A warm chair proves someone sat there. Neither proves that the version of the relationship you carried was ever stable. So I wanted the song to feel like a projector that keeps restarting: a steady midtempo loop that never really escalates, the world reloading every time. You close your eyes and he's completely real. You open them and the room is empty. The scary part is realizing both versions came from you.”