❤️‍🔥Alex Shares about The Love That Moves’ Design

Hey,

I hope you’re doing well and are celebrating Halloween to the fullest! This is Alex’s and my favorite day of the year! I mean… C’mon! Getting dressed up, eating candies, and tricking people you love, this is what everyday should be like!!! Love this time of the year! Always reminds us how much of a kid at heart we are – especially Alex and his two lovely boys Leonard and MacKaye! Feel free to share any pictures!!!

I’m now back to our Montreal HQ. It’s this time of the year where the trees are exposing their most beautiful colors and perfumes, my favorite time of the year to be in this part of the world. All those red and yellow leaves, under a usually low and dark sky always brings some kind of nostalgia… A great time to be back in the studio with The Long Shadows!

It’s Saturday, 12pm, I’m in my office where 7 windows offer me this great yearly spectacle! I’m listening to Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division! I went into the post punk alley these past few days, as we’ve been watching a documentary about a music festival which occurred in France in the late 70s until the mid 80s called Elixir! Such an inspiring documentary about the power of music, and how everything is possible to the very few that are crazy enough to believe in it! 

A few friends decided to start a festival in the middle of nowhere in Brittany, and they ended up welcoming The Clash, Depeche Mode, The Cure, Leonard Cohen, Simple Minds, Talk Talk and so much more…! Incredible story which brought me back to such an important musical era in Europe which shaped pretty much every musical genre we’re listening to now! 

I had the huge blessing to share with Alex about the upcoming The Love That Moves vinyl and collection design! He’s been really generous in his response, so, I’ll leave you to it for this week! Such an exciting season but the best part of it all, is of course, to share it with you! 

Enjoy! 

THE LOVE THAT MOVES' VISUAL MEANING

The idea for the visual of “The Love That Moves” happened, like it usually does for me, in several different phases. When all taken into account, they seem to have little, if any at all, logical connection between every single one of them, but, somehow, looking back at it all now, it makes perfect sense as a whole for me. So here are a few fragments of the organic and creative journey beneath “The Love That Moves”.

I’ve been often asked if it was getting more and more challenging to find inspiration for new projects, which is a very good question considering the fact that before embarking on that new “solo” adventure, I had developed and redefined every aspect of my previous band, Your Favorite Enemies, for the 12 years it kept on growing. I guess the answer resides in the way I perceive art and creation, which is not in a branding, commercial, or pecuniary perspective, but with a soulful and genuine purpose. Otherwise, as beautiful and well-made as it might be, it’s nothing more but an object designed to be sold. It’s absolutely not judgmental towards anyone monetizing their dreams in order to keep them alive, and I am not looking with disdain at those having for sole ambition to amass riches. No. For me, it’s about discerning deeper layers of “meaning” for each and every one of those projects. The reward is not how many units of this and that I may have “moved” or not — that has nothing to do with my world. It always reverberates around the same unique question: “Have I truly dug deep enough to discover what I didn’t know I was looking for in the first place?” Finding is easy, at least it is for me. It’s what I call the large and easy path of self-gratification. Discovering is something else. It’s a scary and unraveled path to engage yourself on and it involves a world of frustration, anger, resentment, doubt, and much more of the same antagonizing sentiments along the way. My friends and collaborators don’t particularly like my digging moments. They say that I become an obsessed and consumed character, which is probably the nicest way they have found to refer to my unbearable and insufferable attitude…! They are most probably right… I supposed I can drive people insane on a regular basis when I chase the invisible. I can barely stand myself either…!    

Therefore, if the visual identity of “The Pain That Bonds” came to me more naturally while I was walking on the mountain with MacKaye one morning, “The Love That Moves” was entirely something else, to such an extent that I had to reevaluate the essence by which I look at “love” itself. I’ve been raped as a kid, and since then, I have despised being touched and I set clear emotional boundaries between me and anyone able to move me inside. I tend to distance myself whenever I feel like getting too attached to someone who may have pure and genuine affection for me, even though I’m an extremely loyal person. A friend recently told me that I have an avoidance anxiety or intimacy avoidance. Yes, I have that type of therapist friend as well…! It wasn’t too surprising of a comment, to be honest, but it nonetheless led me to explore what was the notion of “love” for me. I remembered an old picture of me and my father when I was a child, who he was as a person… I thought about my mother, who always had my back and offered me her indefectible support over the years — I could write a book filled with anecdotes involving school authorities, cops, love interests, pastor’s ass kicked, and so on. She’s the toughest individual I’ve met in my life. My mom, of all people! I also thought about friendship and what it means to me, the connection I have with my two dogs, and the profound affection for what others may consider fans but whom I consider family. I mused about my vision of art, my fear of failure, of being a disappointment or a letdown through my insecurities… It seems a world away from having to design the visual identity for a musical project… But for me, it’s not. 

As you may know, ever since I moved to Virginia with MacKaye and Leonard, I developed a real passion for the whole ecosystem in which my home is located. If I always had a sensitive heart towards animals and an active involvement regarding the respect of the environment, living here opened my eyes to the incredibly inspiring notion of what I call the overlooked wonders surrounding me. My growing passion for the birds living on the mountain is the epitome of this new curiosity and inquisitiveness I’ve developed over the years. I’m a big city boy, no doubt about it, which makes it even funnier for my friends when I’m in awe by the view of bright cardinals, a group of bambis, or a family of foxes. I find it comforting to admire other living forms interacting with each other. I’m somehow learning a lot about life and about myself as well. It’s therapeutic for me to be part of something so much more grandiose than the usual music business mundanities I have always hated in the first place anyway. The peace, the harmony, the balance. If I’ve been called “The Holy Psych Priest” or “The Crazy Noise Preacher” by reporters reviewing my live shows, I’m referred to as the “Mountain Monk” by some of my loved ones! Let’s just say it changes from the other passionate nicknames I had in the past…! So much for cultivating zenitude… It suits me well, though, and keeps my spirit away from the inner bleakness I’ve been battling with for most of my existence. It’s an unfaltering source of personal reflections and musing perspectives. 

The initial spark for the visual identity of “The Love That Moves” is the product of such introspection following the observation of an opened bird cage I have in my home studio, a simple structure hanging over our heads, without any particular features standing out for others to even notice it’s actually there, even it’s clearly out of place. It’s a meaningful symbol for me since I purposely put it there to remind me just how self-imprisoned I’ve been in the past, both personally and creatively, no matter if the cage door had been opened the whole time for me to embrace any form of freedom… It’s simple, almost childlike, but that was the very first element that kind of unlocked the symbolism that would eventually reveal the deepest signification of what the song may have evolved into. It was something indeed pretty simple of an object, but still, it bears a universe of metaphors and allegories for everyone to find their own realm of intimate sensations through the evocative imagery of that ordinary yet profoundly emblematic object. From bondage, enslavement, servitude, subjection, surrendering, up to liberty, emancipation, a leap of faith, enfranchisement, unfettering, or unyoking, there are more interpretations than I can dare and try to enumerate here. Again, it’s all about discovering wonders through the essence of what is seen as ordinary.

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Thank you so much for your incredible love and support! 

Let’s be great to one another! 

Your Host and Friend, 
Jeff  

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