The Story Behind The Song
The concept of ‘home’ (mājas in Latvian) is a curious one. It’s easy enough to acknowledge there’s a distinction between a house and a home, but it’s much more challenging to quantify exactly what it is. We say that home is where the heart is, and the feeling of homesickness can indeed resemble heartache. Perhaps it’s simplest, then, to think of home as something, someone, or somewhere that we long to return to in its absence. Though I was born and raised in England, the very first time I stepped foot off the aeroplane one thousand miles away in Latvia I felt like I had come home. I’ve reflected a lot on this over the years, asking myself what was it exactly that I felt I was returning to? Picking fruit from the trees, swimming in the rivers, foraging in the forests and cooking on the fire definitely captured my heart. Though this lifestyle wasn’t part of my childhood, I couldn’t help but feel like I was returning to it somehow. Maybe I’ve been looking at it all wrong- maybe home is actually a place in time. It’s possible that I was longing for a bygone age; one which my ancestral past was able to connect me to, and one which the time-portal experience of post-Soviet Latvia undoubtedly provided. One of my musical heroes, Randy Newman, once wrote that home “feels like I’m all the way back where I come from… all the way back where I belong.” Maybe home was further back than I had first thought. Regardless of what home actually is, where it is, who it is, or even when it is, I hope this piece takes you all the way back to where you belong.
Released 4th November 2022