Between The Buried And Me: Uncovering the Liminal
BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME are at this point in their career, quintessential experimental prog music. With their latest album, The Blue Nowhere things have gotten even more innovative. “I mean, I know we always say that, but I feel like this one in particular just feels kind of like its own beast within our catalogue,” vocalist Tommy Giles Rogers Jr tells us. “It’s definitely like you said, we go down a lot of new avenues and it just feels like it feels new to us, which I think is very important this far down in our career.”
“You know, our fans have kind of been along for the ride since the beginning. And they expect us to, try new things and they expect us to kind of stick to our guns and go with our guts, so to speak, when we start creating music. We’re very fortunate to have that where we can as artists really express ourselves in different ways and not feel like we have to sound a certain way.”
There’s so much packed into how a BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME record comes out, it’s fair to assume that there’s a decent amount of preplanning done to getting things going. “That never really comes up when we write,” Tommy assures, “We just kind of we let it flow and how we’re feeling in the moment and how we’re writing in the moment is what you get on the record. So I couldn’t imagine being in a band that you have to constantly be kind of checking yourself, making sure it’s if it’s some sort of formula or genre, that would be that would be very tough for us.”
While there wasn’t a set line of thought to making the record, Tommy did have a structure to how he and BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME would curate and condense the ideas. “What I did is of set a schedule for myself- I gave myself a prompt every day, I almost did it like journal entries like today you’re going to write about this. I would go to this certain spot every day and I would write for 20, 30 minutes, kind of without thinking much, just letting the pen do its thing.”
The Blue Nowhere is both a concept album, and very much not a concept album. Being so contradictory, being in two states at once, really encompasses the hotel as the centre theme. “We realised that each song really felt like its own kind of world. And that’s kind of when the concept started coming to me.” This was clearly a subject that Tommy has been fascinated with for a long while, a likely reason that this record has bloomed into something so uncontainable.
“With this one, like it just felt like each song was in its own world. And, you know, I’ve wanted to write about hotels for whatever reason for years and years now. This was the album I was like, ‘this is the perfect opportunity’. These songs can kind of fit in its own world within the space that I’m creating. It’s not a linear story by any means, like Coma or anything. But it just it takes place in this space. And it’s about it’s about the human experience and its chaos and its beauty.”
The idea of hotels has been a fascination for Tommy for a long time, a place he’s been eager to write about, for the commonality of human experience within this liminal place. “This need we all have to search for things that we’re longing for, I think that’s something very universal,” he continues. “And it doesn’t matter where you live or where you come from. I think it’s just it’s just that human need to feel like, you’re comfortable in your own skin, you have some sort of quote unquote happiness. I think we’re just we’re searching for things. And that’s what this album is all of that summed up in this hotel; it’s constantly changing. Like life does horrible things and chaotic things and beautiful things happen. And it talks about shedding, things that are flawed with our personalities and just as a species in general. It’s all these all these things just kind of wrapped up in this in this one space. And that was kind of that was the idea when kind of figuring out how I wanted to approach it lyrically.”
“[In hotels there’s] a lot of history. And, there’s a lot of a lot of loneliness involved in it. And I think it’s a great place of reflection. And obviously the line of work I’m in there’s a lot of moments of that where you’re sitting alone with your own thoughts – I personally enjoy that. I know a lot of people that’s like a very frightening thing. But I love this quiet, introspective moments for sure.”
The Blue Nowhere is out now via InsideOut Music. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS124 here:
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