“These last two songs hurt the most, Nevermind especially. It's about Hannah, one of my oldest friends. We met at university when we were 16, 17. We were different in so many ways, above all in personality, and it was so complementary. I remember tiny things from the very first day: the black dress she wore, with heels she couldn't walk in. In every group project I did 90% of the work, and she'd show up laughing with the one part I had told her not to do that way, done exactly that way, with a thousand justifications. Today I miss all of it.

She was a sweetheart. An incredible human being, so light. In most of our photos together she's stroking my hair. At university I had a habit of sleeping through the classes I picked up easily. Somehow I was still taking it all in, even asleep. The teachers who didn't like me would try to catch me out, wake me up with a question about what they'd just explained, and I'd answer it, and they'd get frustrated. I never meant it as a show. Hannah would sometimes buy press-on nails just to stroke my hair, because I told her I liked it better that way. Those are the five cheap plastic nails in the bridge. We traveled together, we spent so much time together, and I never realized how much we had shared until she was gone.

She died in her early thirties, without any warning, and we weren't speaking. It was over something silly. Truly silly. The song calls it some dumb old distance, too stupid to explain. We had survived disagreements that should have done far worse, and we had even made peace with the person who caused this one. It stayed anyway. She was gone and I never got the chance to tell her any of this. She had been in my city for a concert the week before, and she was coming back the following week. The last traces I have of her are on her Twitter, making plans for it. That's the second verse: scrolling at two in the morning, her making plans for Thursday like Thursday still belonged to her, cheering for some band, and me swearing that this time I would have gone. Old social media is vicious that way: the sentences have no idea what happened.

Why is she on this record? First, because of grief, the thread running through all of it. Second, because the end of a relationship has decisive moments, and they aren't always the most aggressive ones. After she died I put off calling her mother for weeks. Calling meant admitting her death, admitting so much. When I finally did it, I cried for an hour, and I had asked the person I lived with at the time for one thing: to be there for the beginning of that call. He said he didn't want to take part in that. Those were his words. Later he claimed it was about sensitivity. It doesn't matter. I had only asked for something to lean on before I fell. After that I started to notice that every anxiety attack got me called crazy, while he was causing so much of it. Everything kept getting worse, and now I can see it. Somehow, even after she was gone, Hannah was the one who gave me that clarity.

So I keep her in these small memories. I didn't want to write a grand grief song, because Hannah was never grand to me. She was available. She was a stupid joke, coffee, gossip, some ordinary hour that didn't look historic while it was happening. The sound stays at that scale: muted electric piano, room tone, a soft downtempo breakbeat, warm bass, acoustic guitar, low strings, voices doubled the way people sing together.

Nevermind is a very literal song. Every image in it existed. It opens on a Tuesday morning nobody thinks to save, and on the belief that hours grow back like hair, like nails. It's about the certainty of time. Plenty of people already say we only value someone after we lose them. I'd rather ask for something simpler: if you're going to end a relationship with someone, tell them, while they're alive, what they mean to you. Even if you also say I don't want any contact anymore, it doesn't make sense, I'm too hurt. Fine. Tell them anyway what they represent, and don't wait to realize it after they're gone. Be selfish about it, if that's the only way you can. Just don't let it pass. The outro says her name, and what I believed at seventeen, mostly because of her.

Why Nevermind? A lot of people have asked. I have a tattoo on my neck that I got after a dream about her. We had talked about tattoos once. I said I wanted one on my neck and was scared because of work. She said: do it, make it small, I think it's beautiful. I said no way. Then I dreamed of her talking about the neck tattoo, and in the dream I was already getting it done, without knowing what it was. When I woke up I went looking, and found that she had a tattoo of her favorite song, Nevermind by Foster the People. I got it on my neck right away.

I had never heard that song before, and it felt like a message from her. It's about resilience, about finding strength when everything is hard and something breaks. One line talks about being there, smiling, when they see your face again, and it sounds like someone looking down at me. Another talks about life blooming when something breaks, and this whole record is built on the bell jar cracking open. Everything made sense. Afterwards.”