From A Spark To A Song – Old Noisy Friend

“I always believed that “Old Noisy Friend” was embodying that fragile state of vulnerability from which true compassion and love can turn a desperate confession into a redemptive rebirth… I knew by heart its faithless cry-out for an uplifting awakening and its deepest need for forgiveness and redemption, but it’s only after playing the song for the first time after so many years that I realized that many more colors had yet to be unfolded and much more light had yet to be revealed, thus turning a song about being a resigned despair and a faded whisper into being a living testimony of merciful absolution and contemplative avowal of forgiveness. That gave an unfiltered honesty to the words and a heartening perspective to what had been a profoundly dark and heavy song…”
 

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As I was thinking and meditating about the soul of the “Vague Souvenir” album, it was essential for me to freely live the invisible nature of desperation and hope I experienced over the years, to express honest feelings without feeding infatuated sounds. I wrote many songs over the years, some of them sketches of confessions and fragile prayers desperately daubed through hopeless mornings, personal recollections of emotional breakdowns and breakthroughs. Others remained shiny words covering dark pains, profound fears dressed up into some poetic pretensions, impersonating lights feeding my own shadows with fake neon brightness. The nature of words can reveal many degrees of truths and illusions… The essence of art can give birth to wonders and make-believes…  Just as a condemned heart can confess deceiving and winding promises and a redeemed soul can feed a craving spirit for justice with compassion and love…
 
Of all those songs I wrote about my troubled and distressed past, “Old Noisy Friend” has been the heaviest of them all, not because of its deep sacramental nature of fatalistic abandonment, but mainly because it was defined by a profound acknowledgement of being a self-consumed sacrifice of unforgivable desperation. A heavy song because it’s been written out of the ashes of prayers I never expected to be anything but echoing murmurs of what I thought would be a fair self-inflicted repudiation. Heavy because I didn’t expect any merciful home to welcome the broken soul I have been wandering with for so long… Heavy because I never conceived that love could heal the shame of all the hate I fed my soul with over the years… Heavy because I truly thought it was better to be a faded moan than to offer my last breath for any possible rebirth cry-out. When you fail yourself so many times, when you betray your vows in such a way that you don’t know who you are anymore and when you surrendered every possible redemptive faith at the feet of misery, what’s left to believe in and what’s left to expect for but a last confessing whisper. And from that last avowing breath, a compassionate wind of life can slowly arise in an affectionate drift of unexpected absolution, a season of forgiveness can bear the fruits of peace and freedom in your heart and soul, blooming from the seed of a last honest sough of resignation…
 
And today, many years after such a dark season in my life, my understanding of what freedom truly is about might be partial. But even if the scars remain apparent, if the pain of old wounds can be felt in time of deepest doubts, love is the graceful gift to which I owe my life. Even if those days are gone, forgiveness will always be the greatest of all offering, as I may fall on my knees again and again, but never will I be outnumbered… or left unworthy.

– Alex