Don't forget it, don't forget
Had a good thing but we let it quit
Throwing out hearts over one bad night
Regret it, we will, for the rest of our lives
The latest release from Minneapolis-based band Poliça was written in the shadow of a traumatic accident. As KEXP's Sound & Vision reported earlier this month, frontwoman Channy Leaneagh fell off her roof while scraping snow, ending up in a back brace for several months. She had already been considering leaving music, reading career-help books like What Color Is Your Parachute?, and the accident just compounded the difficulties the band was already enduring. But then a doctor helped her through the trauma and shame by asking her to reframe her experience, influencing the new LP When We Stay Alive.
On today's Song of the Day, Leaneagh described it in a press release as "a love song to my love who remains my love," adding, "If love is a sea sometimes it's a sea full of plastic, bleached coral and without any blue; just grey and full of rotting fish." It's easy to imagine that love for Leaneagh is her music. "I still love music. I still love writing music," she told Sound & Vision. "But also the music industry is changing and it's OK for me to keep exploring some other work for myself. And without the feeling like I failed in anything. It's just music isn't always going to be my career. But it's always been there for me and it always will be."