Still Come The Night

Album: Still Come The Night (2022)
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Songfacts®:

  • The lead track of Alison Sudol's debut album finds the former A Fine Frenzy artist dealing with her grief following a miscarriage. Writing the track was cathartic, but so is singing it. She told Songfacts the story behind the song and its impact as a performer:
     
    "I wrote that song a few days after [the miscarriage]. I started to write it in the wreckage of it. I considered not putting it on the album because it was so intense. I found reasons that were wrong with it. I think ultimately it was just highly emotional. It's pretty tough to sing live. It seems to resonate with other people. That's why I'm doing this. Especially this album, it's around grief. We don't know how to process grief in the Western world. Whether that grief is the loss of someone that you love. There's so much grief around the environment or the life you could've lived. We calcify those emotions in order to not be bombarded by them all the time. Music is really effective at stirring that. Just the vibrations going through your body are very powerful at dealing with grief. When I sing that, I sing it with the hope that it's going to dislodge something. It certainly does it for me every time. Just vocally, it's quite hard to sing at the end, and the feeling I have afterwards."
  • Sudol released three albums as A Fine Frenzy: One Cell In The Sea (2007), Bomb In A Birdcage (2009), and Pines (2012). Still Come The Night is the first album under her own name.
  • Sudol also weathered the COVID-19 pandemic while she was working on the album, which initially explored different themes and emotions. When the miscarriage happened, the turned to writing to help her process her feelings, and a different kind of album emerged. When she connected with producer Chris Hyson, the magic really started to happen.

    "He and I knew each other a bit but not very well," she told Songfacts. "I just had a feeling there would be something there collaboratively that would be really special. He was up for making something. We tried one day where I played 'Mary Of The Willows' into a microphone and he came back with an exquisitely produced version of it, which I was not expecting, and then said, 'Do you want to go rent a studio for a few days and see what happens and not put too much pressure on it.' He brought Lloyd and Alex Haines (drums and guitar), and Alex Killpatrick (engineer), and we went to Wales. I didn't know what was going to come of it, to be honest. It wasn't like we were longstanding collaborators. Everything poured out and it was magical."
  • 2022 also saw Sudol's return to the Fantastic Beasts franchise when she reprised her role as Queenie Goldstein in The Secrets Of Dumbledore.

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