“The House interpolates a piece of "A Casa", the old Brazilian children's song by Vinicius de Moraes, about a very funny house with no roof, no floor, nothing at all. If you really analyze it, that house is a misfit. Some houses actually are misfits that look polished from the outside. Most of them, honestly. So I turned it inside out.

The chords from "A Casa" slowly turn into "Tubular Bells" by Mike Oldfield, the main theme from The Exorcist. Sometimes the devil is inside, and trapped. This whole record ended up being my exorcism, so it made sense for the house to be where it begins. The rhyme already describes a home with nobody really in it, so I built on top of it instead of starting from scratch. Every missing piece became a way to talk about how a house is built and paved on real people. No roof meant nothing stayed private. No floor meant every step just sank further. No window meant every shadow had nowhere to go.

Musically it's built out of plunderphonics, actual domestic sounds in place of a drum kit. Cabinet clicks, a spoon against a mug, a fridge hum, a floorboard creak, a latch closing. I wanted the house itself to be the instrument, so every percussive element is something you'd actually hear inside a home falling apart. Around those sounds there's a warped music box, metallic drones, digital bleeps and sudden holes of silence, and the two sources are allowed to contaminate each other instead of handing over cleanly. It's a twisted lullaby made of familiar objects that stopped being reassuring. It's unconventional and off-chord on purpose. I left the seams showing. Sounding broken is the meaning.

In a way, this is the domestic version of the bell jar. You don't need a glass dome somewhere outside your life when the place that should mean privacy and safety is the thing holding you in. A half-built love can enclose someone for years without ever holding them.

The backing vocals are my daughter's, Amora. I wanted a voice that had already lived inside that space, and hers was the only one that made sense there. She's present on the track the same way she was present in the actual house while everything around it was changing. Her voice works almost like a children's choir, intimate and a little uncanny, and it closes the distance between the song and the memory.

From here on, the house never leaves the record. The candle lit for the people we might have been, the table set for two, the chair still warm in Did I Make You Up?, the good shoes and the couch in Almost. Here the house is still a frame around a failing situation. By A Mad Girl's Love Song it has become the narrator's only reality.

The address at the end, Fool's Gold Avenue, Number Zero, is the joke I let myself make once the grief settled a little. It's an invitation to a house that was never really a home, and the punchline is that I know I won't be the last person who ends up living there. A shelter and a place where you can stay are two very different things.”