hey jupiter
the secret to dreams is to dream up a door
25 Oct, 2024
This was originally published as zine, for the 2024 Hallozeen Zine Swap. I will probably make some more copies at some point, if you’d like one email me and we can work something out. All profits from my zines are currently being used to purchase e-sims for Gaza.
Widow's Peak is a song from Bat For Lashes fourth studio album, The Bride (2016). It tells the story of the titular bride, whose fiance dies in a car crash on the way to their wedding. The album acts as a kind of journey through her grief, and when we get to Widow's Peak, she is at perhaps her darkest and most untethered point. Vocalist and co-writer Natasha Khan delivers Widow's Peak not as a song, but as a spoken word poem; whispered in places and howled in others, against a backdrop of sparkling chimes, rolling guitar and rumbling thunder. It’s the kind of song that you can see as soon as you close your eyes, your head pressed to the cool glass of the bus window to keep yourself from slipping into its depths completely.
what does it mean, the bad things that I've seen?
When I first heard The Bride, I’ll admit I wasn’t all that into it. I discovered Bat for Lashes through her second album, Two Suns, which is also sort of a concept album, but those concepts are strung together by a number of solid bangers, including Daniel, Pearl’s Dream and, my favourite, Glass.
The Bride, however, is much more of a slow burn, with the songs themselves seeming to take a backseat to the story Natasha Khan is trying to tell. There were a few tracks I was initially drawn to, and would return to occasionally over the years since its release; Joe’s Dream, which feels very Twin Peaks in both its imagery and sound, Sunday Love for its driving drum beat and electric cracks of lightning, and Close Encounters because … ghosts. Still, I never spent much time with The Bride as a whole, and let it fall towards the bottom of my favourite BfL albums list. Now, it sits somewhere near the top, second only perhaps to Fur and Gold.
So what changed?