The first picture that comes to mind when I think of the new single’s title „Fade, Light“ is me on my bike after work in late summer 2017, cycling home to Charlottenburg, where I lived at the time. It’s still warm in Berlin, I’m wearing shorts and shirt, and the low sun paints the world in peaceful pastel colours. A year that contained some heavy incidents lies behind me and in a flash, contrasting the peacefulness, the knowledge of this heaviness is in me. It triggers a sudden desire for solace, and I interrupt my ride near S-Bahnhof Tiergarten, push my bicycle away from the bike track, direct my face to the sunshine and close my eyes. Years later I cannot be sure (memory often adds or steals details) but in hindsight it seems like this happened in a more or less automatic process. The song’s opening line „Sun in my face / I lose track of time“ very much belongs to this moment – the image of me standing on the pavement with closed eyes is still the perfect summary of what this song is about.
Over the years, this picture and the predominant emotion of that song have never left me. Songs alter and grow differently over time, for some of them I have to dig a bit deeper to „feel back“ to the emotional origin (I’ve often done that before shows in order not to play songs with too much muscle memory). Especially when a song comes into being over a long time and I add more recent thoughts to the lyrics during the writing process, it’s sometimes difficult to tell where the first roots of it can be found. Others reveal their initial source at any given moment—“Fade, Light“ is one of them. Eno and me played it at almost every concert since eight years ago as one of the last songs on the set list, I played it in most of my solo shows, and it was not under discussion to not record this important and formative piece and musical friend for the upcoming record. However, over the years we’d been digging a bit deeper into the possibilities of how to create: more courageous and spontaneous, more out-of-the-moment, everything is allowed. And then, after working on several other songs with a totally different approach, „Fade, Light“ no longer seemed to fit into the collection of songs we plan to put out in 2026. We decided we would not include it in the record.
But this year, when a series of events in my personal life confronted me with my old need (which is probably a lot of peoples‘ need) to find a home and haven within myself, I realized that the song just belongs to the record. It might „sound“ a bit differently but it just perfectly sits in this circle of song-shaped memories and ruminations about love and its whereabouts, and fears or what we can learn from them. So, here it is, as part of a collection that will come out next year – a friend of our’s that might become yours, too. We hope you’re safe out there, take care. (seb)
November Me 