Work Text:
It's a strange thing, writing music for this album. It's so completely different from last time. Well, last time Olly hadn't exactly been writing for an album, he'd just been… writing. At least in the beginning. And even when he'd started writing for an album, it was still not what it is now. Thinking back to that time, that person, feels as though he's looking at someone else through a milky film on glass. Like he's spying on some stranger whose fogged up window he happened to pass. And yet, there are instances of it that he remembers vividly. Sobbing over his keyboard like the biggest cliché, feeling so intensely sorry for himself, the cuts that didn't get any less shallow following the first, no matter what Sheryl Crow said.
Writing for this album feels different than that. That Olly, the one who cried, and ached, and kept looking for solutions somewhere in the space between his own body and someone else's, he's… gone. Changed. Transformed. The little butterfly has spread his wings, Olly likes to think. He didn't think it possible, then, that he could change so profoundly so quickly, but he also couldn't really imagine what Years & Years would become. The life it would give him.
There's really no way an experience like this wouldn't have changed him massively.
It's not a bad thing. Olly generally isn't someone who is apprehensive of change, but in the last two years he's come to fully embrace it. Change to his personal style, change to the way he writes music, change to the way he thinks about himself – Olly relishes it all now. He's starting to get antsy when nothing changes in too long. He has to go change his hair, or try new clothes, or something.
Emre calls it his existential wanderlust, but what does Emre know, really. (A lot, actually. Emre is one of the wonderful things that Olly couldn't have fully predicted. Mikey as well, of course, but Olly's relationship with Emre is just a tad different. Easier, on an empathetic level. There's something about Emre that he feels like he just gets, and something that makes it feels like he's gotten in return.)
Olly has met so many great people, because of their music.
This time around, writing music doesn't feel like screaming about his own pain into a void that seems to echo forever without any sort of response. This time it feels like whispering gently into a space he knows he will be heard. There will be people who will listen, and respond. Who will weep, or laugh, or dance with him. It's honestly one of the most humbling things, to know you'll reach thousands of people with your words. It feels daunting but also… it makes Olly feel like he's airborne.
Olly was worried about it, at first, when their album took off and they kept going up and up and up in the music world. That he would never be able to deliver another album as good without going through the same kind of pain. That even if he did, he'd not be able to write about it as well.
But that's yet another wonderful thing Olly has learned – pain is in fact not a requirement of art. There's beauty and value to be found in a whole plethora of experiences, and Olly is actually quite looking forward to writing about different things. About the people who've touched him gently and kindly. About all the ways a person can learn, and heal, and grow.
So even though writing this album is different, it's a difference that Olly enjoys. It is sometimes nerve-wracking, to know that some of these tracks will make it onto an album, but it's also nice – to have a goal to work towards, and to want to work towards. Writing the first album felt like dragging all of his hurt into the open. This one he writes with a spring in his step.
It makes for a nice change, honestly.