About Vague Souvenir…
Associated with the “Ceremony And Jubilation” special project that celebrates Your Favorite Enemies’ first 5 years, the “Vague Souvenir” album is a unique and intimate journey consisting of 14 transits, which includes 3 personal songs written over the course of the band’s first years, that have all been revisited and reappropriated by the band members, 4 french poetry songs, excerpts of Alex’s upcoming poetry book , 2 soulful interpretations of cover songs performed by the band in the “Upper Room” studio and 5 homages to artists that have been truly significant and deeply defining for the band members over the years… All of them giving the album its distinctive emotional honesty and poignant, authentic sincerity.
“Vague Souvenir” is the story of an emotion I experienced when I first saw an old polaroid picture taken by a Japanese friend, modestly exposed in a hidden, humble, treasure-type of environment. It was back in 2007, and I was mesmerized by the peaceful invitation to let go from that picture, that would, many years later, become the “Vague Souvenir” album cover…
I remember trying to convince myself that I was feeling some well-assumed melancholia or some stoic acceptance of the nature of memories, but somehow I knew there was something way more profound, an emotion that was so unexpectedly vivid and meaningful that it seeded a true spark of life in my troubled soul. The type of defining light that would emerge in the deepest time of need, a sudden awaited answer to an everlasting state of heart left unfolded in the darkness of self-denial for so long that it became impossible to distinguish its nature, from illusionary shadows to the brightest of all truths. A light from which would arise a journey leading to the very end of a night that always felt endlessly implacable, a night from which absolution, redemption, rebirth and peace seemed so far away, unreachable, reminiscent of moments that might have never been or might have never vanished.
As comforting as nostalgia may look like before the eyes of illusionary remembrance, it is nonetheless revealing to its witness how the emotional tides of the past have the ability to recollect pieces of a life which history we are desperately trying to rewrite, instead of reinventing its present… Abdicating through the make-believes of a delusional type of reality, in order for pain to disappear in a wishful type of abnegating… Imitation of life and freedom trickster… When covering regretful longing is a permanent state of self-preservation, wistfulness is the deceiving essence by which we define our daily misery and feed our lifelong remorse… And your hearts keep wandering in the midst of hopeless grief and mournful desolation, resulting in the cruelest of all self-deprivation.
Therefore, after years of shadowing the nature of that fulfilling spark of light and denying its blooming redemptive fire, this album is an acknowledged surrender to the love that heals and to the compassion that revives… surrendering without capitulating… a ceremony to the merciful and a jubilation for the amnesties… freedom.
-Alex