"i wrote this song in june of 2018 just after i'd moved across the country from vancouver to montreal, shortly before i settled in toronto. i had almost no money and i'd had to get rid of most of my belongings and mail the rest of them to montreal after getting scammed by a moving company, and i was living in the kitchen of the only friend i had in montreal at the time, with a couple cardboard boxes as my desk set up next to the fridge. i finished "shed blood" living there and wrote this song and "bloom" by black dresses about some of the things i was feeling at the time.
right before moving, all my vancouver roommates had moved out at the same time, so i'd decided to just move to the east coast on a whim to make it easier to work on new black dresses material, since WASTEISOLATION had been doing well online since its release that april. i was feeling kind of unstoppable from pulling off such a big move on such short notice, though a lot of scary things also happened around this time, so it was kind of a whirlwind of really chaotic emotions. some of the strongest positive and negative feelings i'd ever felt all kind of hit me at once around this time and i think these lyrics kind of reflect that - i wanted to run with the chaos and use it as best i could, leverage it, become this weird cringey feminine night creature lol. i feel p distanced from that vibe now but at the time it was really important to me and i'm glad to have artifacts that represent it. kind of macy rodman by way of HEALTH "DEATH MAGIC" or something. tangentially, i think i sketched out the instrumental for black dresses "in my mouth" around this time too, which was directly inspired by macy rodman's "she will be a relic one day".
i still kind of prefer some of the lyrics to this version and wish i hadn't toned them down for the final one, even though i think they ended up more polished in the end. this song was kind of the start of me trying to be more confrontational in my solo work so it felt appropriate to rework it as the closer for UGLY DEATH, kind of summing up and reflecting on a lot of the growth i'd experienced in the 4 years between the demo and the final version coming out, as well as a lot of the themes on the rest of the album.
the original song didnt really have a name and was just titled "wants.mp3". early on i pitched it as a black dresses song but it didn't end up working out, i think partly because it was already pretty complete and there wasn't much room for additional collaboration. the vibe also just wasn't quite in line with the band's 2019/late 2018 era in hindsight."
