I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what happens to the difficult things we live through.
We’re very good at wanting to package experiences neatly once they’re over. This happened. It was hard. I learned something. The end.
But I don’t think life really works like that.
Some things leave pieces behind. They change us in ways we don’t understand until years later. Sometimes we carry things for so long that we forget we’re carrying them at all.
And then, occasionally, something unexpected grows out of them.
For me, quite often, that something is a song.
Shadowrealm came from a very dark period of my life. I don’t particularly want to tell you exactly what happened, because I think there’s value in leaving space for you to bring your own story to it.
But I will tell you that the song isn’t really about darkness.
It’s about what I found there.
There’s a line:
“I never saw them before
Diamonds in the black of my soul.”
I think that might be one of the truest things I’ve ever written.
We spend so much energy trying to get back to the light that perhaps we don’t always notice that something can be forming in the dark too.
Shadowrealm is released today.
Oddly, for a song about emerging from darkness, I made the whole thing out of one thing: my own voice. There isn’t a single instrument anywhere on the recording. Just me, layered over and over and over again until those voices became the world of the song.
There’s something rather fitting about that, which I only really noticed afterwards.
I went into the shadowrealm with my own voice.
And I came out with more of it.
Laura x
The Chantress