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Our recurring feature series Track by Track lets artists guide readers through each song on their latest album. In this edition, Sir Chloe breaks down her sophomore full-length, Swallow the Knife.
Sir Chloe’s blend of grunge and shoegaze is a fitting outlet for her rage on her second album, Swallow the Knife. It’s cutting and forceful, but also cathartic, not so much steeped in its own anger as it is looking for a way out — for relief.
“I imagined the anguish I experienced while making this record as a passenger who travelled with me. It sat on my chest like a rabid chimp, swiping at my face,” explains Sir Chloe, aka the artist Dana Foote. “I sing a lot about longing for relief on this record, because for a long time, I couldn’t get any. You just have to wait it out and be sane and perfect and calm and smiling with your nose ripped off.”
The record clearly comes from a place of great emotional upheaval for Foote. While Swallow the Knife might not find her completely coming out the other end, it cuts through it all with a sharpened blade of alternative rock that proves Sir Chloe is not going to simply smile at the swiping chimp.
Read Sir Chloe’s complete track by track breakdown of Swallow the Knife and stream the LP below. Then, catch her on her upcoming 36-date headlining North American fall tour by getting tickets here.
“Forgiving”:
Sometimes a ghoulish, frightening experience is thrust upon you. It may remind you there is evil in this world, lurking in the bodies of strangers and friends. It also may not. You may ask, “why me?” only to find there is no reason. You also may not. After one particularly ghoulish experience, I confided in a small group of trusted friends. Some of my loved ones, speaking to an unrecognizable fractured version of myself, suggested forgiving may set me free.
The thing about forgiving is everyone suggests it but few know how to carry it out. The act of forgiving was proposed to me as a kind of “letting go.” Letting go of negative emotion and bestowing said emotion upon the one who behaves ghoulishly, like a shameful invisible crown only the bestower can see. At that time, I was of the opinion that the concept felt a little like saying “choose happiness” to someone standing on a chair with a noose around their neck. I didn’t get it, it wasn’t helpful, the exercise had a low value outcome. There’s no money in it. So I sat on the floor of my apartment and over the course of two hours wrote and recorded the song on an acoustic guitar. It was the second song I wrote for the record. When I recorded the chorus, I wanted it to have a real playground “nanny nanny boo boo” sound. I stuck my tongue out of my mouth in what I hoped to be a childish, taunting manner to get a sound I was happy with.
“The Hole”:
I had hit a real dry spell with writing. It was July, I had just been on the road for a few months, and I had been living out of a suitcase since January. I had a few hours to spare wherever I was the day I wrote “The Hole.” I yanked that one out of myself. It felt like people were thumping my back with their palms while I choked. This was me thumping on my own back to dislodge the song from wherever it lived inside me. At the time I wrote it I was in a deep, dark, ugly place with no escape in sight. I was running 5 miles a day in 100 degree weather, hoping I could sweat it out of myself.
Sometimes I go dark, and in recent years it’s become more frequent. I don’t use my phone, I’m sitting on thousands of unanswered emails, and my social media sits dormant. When I do this my friends will typically check in on me to make sure I’m okay. I typically just tell them I’m in “The Hole” and they get it. Same goes for the other way around. If my friends seemingly go missing, I’ll shoot them a text checking in and, if they’re having a hard time, I ask them if they’re in “The Hole”. It’s an easy umbrella term for a psychological winter.
I used to call it “The Pit,” but a few years ago I went to Mass Moca, one of my favorite museums of all time, in North Adams. They had an exhibit called “The Cold Hole.” It was a snow covered room with a deep black circular ice plunge in the middle. Museumgoers could volunteer to plunge while viewers watched as though it were a zoo exhibit. I watched two people plunge, and I kick myself to this day for not trying it myself. After I saw “The Cold Hole,” I called the deep dark winters of our lives “The Hole.” I didn’t like the song when I first wrote it, I wasn’t planning on including it on the record. But it grew on me and now I have a real soft spot for that one.
English (US) · 