Page 21 - Black Velvet Magazine Issue 108

BV108 pg20-23 Lacey Interview.qxp_BV108 pg21 18/06/2023 16:01 Page 2

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Run With It
Run With It

t's a Saturday evening, a. nice one at that, the sun is shining out-
Iside, but the four members of Lacey are cooped up in a room, in
the midst of a writing session. Graz takes half an hour away to come
and chat with us instead. With the new album, ‘This Is All We Are’,
being quoted as being ‘a soul-baring ride through every conceivable
human emotion’, we begin by asking what emotion he most feels now
when he thinks about the new album.
“Pride is definitely the biggest emotion that comes across,” he
says. “Just because it’s been so long, and there’s been so much hap-
pen from starting to write it until now, not just with us, but in the world,
I think, to finally get it finished and done to a level where we’re pleased
with it and excited about it. Yeah, a big sense of pride. It’s our baby
that we’ve been nurturing for years.”
The new album sees the band working with Deaf Havana’s James
Veck-Gilodi for ‘Dream In A Little Less Colour’, a moment when the
band struck gold. Graz tells us that working with James came about
as Deaf Havana recorded ‘Rituals’ at the same recording studio that
they use – Steel City Studio in Sheffield.
“Absolutely lovely guy,” he says about James. “On the first day, it
was very surreal working with him, because, obviously, I’ve been a
Havana fan for years. But then, to write with him… when he was show-
ing vocal parts, the vocal ideas, it was ‘the Deaf Havana guy’ singing
at me, and I was ‘Yeah’,” he puts his hand on his chin, “trying not to
fanboy. But, yeah, he’s a great friend now and we’ve written a couple
more with him, and we’re scheduled to write with him in the coming
months, so, yeah, he’s just a brilliant friend now, and a brilliant musi-
cian and he got what we were doing. He got what we were about, and
got on board and helped us a bit.”
The song was written in the second of the Covid lockdowns. “You
know, the really bad one,” Graz remembers. “The first one was kind
of novel and it was kind of fun, and it was springtime and it was kind
of nice. But the winter one, that was awful. I think we were all fed up
by that point. So, the phrase ‘If I could dream in a little less colour’ lit-
erally came from… I dream very vividly. Sometimes, when I wake up,
for a split second I don’t know what was real and what wasn’t, until I
think, ‘Ahh, you were dreaming, relax.’ Where it came from, that whole
idea, ‘If I could dream in a little less colour,’ in my dreams, as they’re
so vivid, I try to interact with them, and I always wake myself up. I just
thought that was a really interesting concept to explore and just
wrapped it up with a bit of dreaming, daydreaming, trying to get out
of this dark period that we were in and it all just meshed and melded
together. But, the whole concept of the song, the hook point, was from,
literally, me dreaming vividly.”
On the subject of dreams, Graz says a No. 1 would be a nice dream
for the album. More seriously, he adds, “I think, for us, anyone who’s
stuck by us, or been with us from the beginning, or the early years, it
would mean the world to us if it meant the world to them. If they came
back and said, ‘We love this. We really get on board with what you’re
doing. It speaks to us,’ I think that would resonate with us because
they’ve stuck with us, they’ve been waiting with us. Obviously, anyone
new listening to it, hopefully, we’d like to do the same thing with the
fanbase that we’ve accumulated over all these years, that have been
waiting with us, we really hope they buy into what we’re doing and it
speaks to them. That’s my dream for it.”

his Is All We Are’ is described as ‘Inner turmoil, self-loathing
‘Tand crippling insecurities meets a sense of defiance, inso-
lence, and refusal to lay down’. Focusing in on insecurities, we ask
Graz why he thinks people are critical about themselves and hate
themselves. What makes someone loath themselves?
“Great question,” he replies. “I can’t speak for anybody else, and
I always make this joke on stage that this album is just 14 songs about
me. But I like to think I’m talking about issues, as you say, that every-
body goes through. With me, it’s almost like I’m still a kid. I don’t feel
like an adult. I still feel like that child who is desperate for validation,
desperate for a pat on the back, that kind of thing. I need somebody
to tell me I’m doing alright or I’m OK. And I feel like a lot of people are
LACEY