BELIEVE IT ALL FOR YOU
30.05.2025
Over zoom giving online songwriting a go for the first time, Boo Hewerdine told me about a cult called ‘John Frum’ who live on the Melanesian island of Tanna. Multiple theories exist about how the cult came to be, but one is that a man called John (from America) landed a plane on the island and the Indigenous people believed he was a god. The locals made symbolic planes of straw and built runways to welcome and worship their deity.
At the same time, I was reading a book by Jonathan Haidt called ‘The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics’. He writes… “Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”
It was also around this time, that a beautiful friend of mine told me he had “not got much time left living on this earth”. He grew up in the church and was just now coming back to it as he reckoned with death.
So, I was thinking about religion, spirituality, beliefs – and as with many songs on ‘Fragile as Humans’, I was thinking about compassion.
At The Wool Hall studio, just as we were about to record the song, it started to rain; a heavy summer rain. We threw open the studio doors and put up a mic. The bass line from Tim Harries and the electric guitar through a Lesley amp from Luke brought a playfulness to the recording, a bit of light which was just right.
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