Joy Division Closer

You know, I can’t remember how I came across Joy Division but shortly after that record came out I had a cassette copy of it and it was stuck in my car stereo and I couldn’t play anything else. At the time it was wintertime and I was working about 45 – 50 miles from where I lived and the place was covered with snow and the skies were overcast and grey for months. I was working in an orchard cutting trees that grow off the roots of apple trees and you have to cut them off beneath ground level which is frozen. You have to dig the shears in and cut these things off.

So I was driving all this way and listening to nothing but Closer and all day long those songs would be in my head and it became the soundtrack for all my waking hours. It just somehow made sense. It also wasn’t the greatest period of time in my life but that record made me feel better. Sometimes when you hear something that’s mirroring something that’s happening in your life – so much so that it hurts – it makes you feel better.

How did this affect me as lyricist and songwriter? All these records are, for the most part, personal and they may come from an individual or a wide range of people and emotions but they’re all coming from young people and that’s naturally what I was drawn to as a listener and I guess I did my own version of that. I don’t know if I’m trying to articulate some universal truth. I haven’t thought about it in that much depth. I’m just trying to articulate something that suits a particular piece of music.