Run Like Rivers by Asléane

I wrote this song years after it happened. It’s not that I didn’t want to write about it before, it’s that I couldn’t. Just couldn’t. To me, there’s at least two kinds of survival I experienced, or continue to experience. The first one is more immediate. I survived that night and I learned to put the pieces back together best I could. Most pieces. The second survival came with the music, is the music. In fact, my music was the piece that took all these years to repair – a painfully slow process of surviving and healing and evolving. Changing, really. 

See, my work as a songwriter is largely rooted in the autobiographical, the personal. And consequently, I had to write about what happened to me. More so, I felt that I needed to express this in my music before I could move on to any other song – it demanded to be dealt with. And my body and mind demanded time. So I gave it time, as the need for time was ultimately stronger than my need to move through the music. This hurt in ways I can’t describe. Enrages me in ways I can’t describe. We often experience absence as loss, and this was a particularly heavy loss for me. My songwriting practice was absent for years; it felt inaccessible to me from the moment it happened. I would reach out repeatedly, but I just couldn’t quite touch it. Eventually, it was a loss I had to mourn for a very long time until, finally, my music returned to me. I didn’t lose it after all. 

When I say I couldn’t quite touch it all these years, I mean that I tried to write about the trauma and felt like I failed over and over again. Held back by its sheer magnitude and this idea that I had to somehow capture the experience in its entirety when its weight on me changed day by day. Nothing I put to paper could hold its immensity and fluctuations. And I was still stumbling for words. No surprises here, but it took a while to begin to articulate what happened… to myself and to others. I had to find the words, my words. 

Writing this even feels strangely charged with notions of finite representation. Like I am making an effort to capture my whole story, like this is the only chance to speak on my experience – I want to do it right. But right doesn’t have to be whole, perhaps can’t be whole. I believe the truth is a very vast thing, and I carry it with me wherever I go, yet there are parts of it that move in manners I don’t understand. I am okay with that. Clearly, this isn’t the whole story, but these are my words, holding the parts that I can and choose to share today. I lay no claim on absolutes. 

No words can capture what happened entirely. Run Like Rivers taught me that. It set me free. The song doesn’t express that night as a whole; rather it bears witness to my (ongoing) experience. It’s just one iteration as I continue to find my words and melodies. After all those years and mourning and healing, writing this finally removed that stubborn barrier I fought with for so long. Truthfully, the song isn’t everything, doesn’t even say everything, but writing it meant everything. Just like sharing it does. I get to reclaim my music now, and our relationship isn’t what it once was. It’s better.

I found so much strength and joy in this collaboration. I remember being in the studio in Brockley and watching my stupidly talented friends take my delicate piano ballad and turn it into something that now feels unbelievably expansive to me. A space that can hold me and a space that I can step into and fully occupy. After all this time, I don’t feel small in it at all, quite the opposite, I feel good.  

-

Run Like Rivers by Asléane.

Produced and engineered by Merrick Winter.

Mixed and mastered by Adam Lee.