Page 20 - Black Velvet Magazine Issue 107

BV107 pg 18-21 Jordan Red Interview.qxp_BV107 pg 20 30/11/2022 00:11 Page 3

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one’s sleeping, but I can play guitar for three or four
hours. That was OK. I was alright with that. It was
weird. It was almost like, you know that idea that
there’s meant to be less mental health problems in
times of crisis, like in the war, there’s less reported
suicides or people actually struggling because
there’s this massive crisis that people are actually
in. So, I think, in that regard, that was ok. 2021 was
just, ugh. It’s burn out, isn’t it? That’s how I felt.
Being burned out… you’re on Zoom every day. You
can’t go out and do all the normal things. They even
closed the gyms, which is ridiculous. I almost think
that if they kept those open, I probably wouldn’t have
minded so much with the rest, because you could
still have a bit of normality, rather than just stay in-
side forever.”

hile Dan said that ‘Spilling My Blood’ bore
Wthe brunt of their frustration, it is also said
to be ‘an anthem for everyone that refuses to give
up on life.’ Daniel Leigh sings, ‘I’m not giving up and
I feel the fight rise up in me’. Dan says he thinks
songs such as this have the ability to motivate oth-
ers.
“I put them on and I feel like, ‘Yeah, get on with it,’”
he says. “I feel, all of a sudden, a burst of energy.
The gym I go to, I think they’ve playlisted most of the
songs. ‘Spilling My Blood’s always on a lot, ‘Beauti-
ful Monsters’ comes on way down. ‘Freak Show’,
they’re all in there somewhere. They seem to be
good for people working out, having some motiva-
tion.
“On the whole, we always try to…every song’s
got its own little story. Some of it’s written from a
personal perspective. Some of it’s maybe bigger,
wider, zooming out and looking at issues, I guess. I
think anyone that’s going through something in
those songs, they’re probably going to relate to it. I
would hope so.”
When talking about the title track, ‘Hands That
Built The World’, they’ve said, ‘We want everyone lis-
tening to this to know – your life matters, you have
value’. Does Dan think a lot of people don’t realise
how much value they have?
“Yeah,” he replies. “I think there’s that saying,
‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation’ and it’s al-
most like people are paralysed by fear a lot of the
time. Maybe they’re not looking after themselves as
much as they should, or they’re doing too much for
someone else when they could be building them-
selves up, and actually going out and doing the thing
they want to do. I think people should probably take
stock a little bit more of their skills and what they
want to do. If you can’t do something, then learn.”
‘Awake’ is related to the lockdown, but is written
from the perspective of an abusive relationship, and
a person escaping the relationship. Dan tells us,
“‘Awake’ is kind of a metaphor for the last however
long… two years, two and a half years… and it’s writ-
ten from that perspective of an abusive relationship.
It’s really felt like you’re in an abusive relationship
with your own government. They just keep coming
at you. There’s always some other new thing you’ve
got to do and I think the frustration at that point,
‘cause we wrote that in the lockdown of 2021, it was
really like everyone was tired, sick of it. We just
thought that was a good angle on it, because that’s
kind of how it felt at that point. Everything that they
were doing to try and make this go away, it wasn’t
working, or it felt like it wasn’t working, it just felt like
theatre the whole time. That affected us. Recording,
writing. All of the music we wrote through this way,
through Skype, so that wasn’t bad, it was always a
case that we had to demo stuff, can’t get together,
and we kind of wanted to on those ones. In a way, it
made us really try to nail our songs before we went
in the studio so there wasn’t any wasted time. It af-
fected that as well. Wales had… I think, when we

JORDAN RED