Negative Space + The New Record

Some back story on the new single and a long overdue update on the project that has consumed the last two years of my life. Grief concept album, anyone?

Hello dear friends! It’s been a while! So much has changed since my last post over a year ago, so much that I’ve been dying to write about, but I have been waiting for the opportune moment to share it. This is going to be a long one, but I promise it will be worth it. Let me catch you all up!

For the last two years, I have been working on a record.

I wasn’t one of those little girls that dreamed about her wedding. When I was young I daydreamed about my debut album. I wrote gibberish song titles on square pieces of paper, gave pretend interviews about my influences, drew album covers in those huge scented markers. As I wrote and gigged more songs professionally, I knew which songs I’d be saving for my first album, which one I planned to use as the title track. I had an idea of how it would sound, how it would feel to perform and promote. I was working towards a long, rolling vision.

And then my dad died. I’ve written a lot about the grieving process on here before, but what I didn’t share was that alongside my lengthy Substack posts, I was also beginning to write a body of work that would totally eclipse any catalogue I had planned to include on any debut album. The experience of losing him changed me so much that my old songs began to feel like they were speaking to and about someone else. Performing them made me feel itchy almost, like wearing a wool jumper that was too tight. It was my brilliant mother, actually, who suggested that I carve out some dedicated space to write just about the grief. She pointed out that I predominantly listen to weird, high concept, narrative records, and that if I was feeling creatively unfulfilled, I should try my hand at the kind of art that I consumed to make me feel whole again. And so, the odyssey began.

As I embarked, two things were immediately clear. Firstly, this had to be an album only about my father, nothing else. I felt strongly from the start that if I was going to explore this, it had to be dedicated and focused. He deserved that, I deserved that, and frankly, I had no interest in talking about anything else at all. Secondly, I wasn’t going to be able to do it alone. Throughout my grieving process, I was lucky enough to find myself surrounded by a community of kind, empathetic musicians, many of whom were bereaved themselves, who took me and my giant mountain of baggage in with open arms. I knew I wanted the record to be predominantly co-written, to showcase not only my sadness, but the people whose common experiences had made me feel less alone at such an isolating time.

That meant, of course, I had to start with the magnificent Toria Wooff.

Toria and I met at a really delicate moment in my grieving process, so freaking early on. I knew she had suffered a similar loss, different in marked ways but equally as devastating and interestingly not that much earlier than mine. She was me a year in the future, wisened and experienced, but still wading through her own recently flooded world, turned upside down by cancer. During our first proper interaction, I said something so heinous and frankly quite mean about how people behave around someone grieving and thought as I said it that if she laughed, we’d be friends for life. She cackled, and told me her own equivalent story. The rest, as they say, is history.

We wrote three songs together for this record, the first two over the course of a 48 hour period. The day she picked me up from the train station to write the second song, we got stuck behind a hearse and saw a murder of crows flying above us. If you know us at all, you’ll know how hilariously fitting that is for the pair of us, little goth, grieving witches. You’ll hear those first two songs in June with the rest of the record (if you’ve seen us live at all in the last two years, you’ll know them already! Lucky you!). The third song we wrote together was Negative Space.

We wrote Negative Space one year ago today, April 1st, 2024. It was one of the last songs actually written for the album. By this time, my collection of sad songs had morphed into a full blown concept album. Alec Brits, the producer of my first EP and co-producer of the record, had helped me sew the collection of songs I had accumulated with various writers across Liverpool into a chronological story. Naturally, it separated itself out into two parts, The Before Time and The After Time. I could see plainly what moments in the story, from diagnosis to death to radical acceptance, were missing, and for about a year, nestled between an angry epic about people who make loss about them, and the sort of aria composed for my darling mother, there was a place held for what we simply labelled, “Toria and Ilana Bummer Tune”. I knew that the empathy she had shown me at the time in the grieving process when the frantic need to stay busy kept me from confronting the true depth of my sadness had to be written with the woman who guided me through that period. I also knew that it had to be a little bit funny, and nobody on earth makes me laugh the way she makes me laugh

So she came over, and... we nearly didn’t write. In fact, we almost put the Princess Bride on instead. She was the one who finally insisted we at least try. I think I whined about it a little too. But I am so so glad we did.

All I had to work from was this iPhone note -

and a poem I wrote when I was 16 titled Negative Space, which had explored depression through the feeling of becoming the impression of where oneself should be, the sad inverse image sleepwalking through life. I knew I wanted to repurpose that metaphor somehow, but never found the right place. Together, we took it and ran.

(Rather strangely, on the way home from that session, Toria was in a small car crash that ended up writing off her little silver car, and the day after we filmed the music video for this very song, the same exact thing happened to me and my little silver car. Someday on the other side, I’ll learn that something strange did indeed happen in the space-time continuum to cause such a weird coincidence, but for now, I just have to settle for saying “how odd!”. Drive safe while listening to it, friends.)

The album itself was recorded at Tesla Studios in Sheffield, owned and operated by the amazing David Glover, whose steady hand and wicked mind for production is perhaps best demonstrated in the sonic progression of this very song. The original demo of Negative Space, played on an acoustic guitar by us two women singing in close harmony, was extremely country. I didn’t want it to be a country song, and it was Glover who had the brilliant idea to turn it into a Springsteen song instead — a much more authentic representation of my roots as well, considering I am absolutely not from the American South, but very much from a fellow suburb of New York, spitting distance away from New Jersey.

Everything you hear, bar the harmonies, percussion and synths, was tracked live, without a click, in the room together. That vocal is the live vocal. The insane uptick in speed was natural and communal. We arranged the chords to the middle eight together before the final take (largely the work of guitar player and dear friend Joe Smithson) and tracked it immediately.

The view of the band from my little corner of the room where we made the record. From left to right - Alec, Danny, Dave and Joe. Glover and Chris are somewhere behind that back window, pushing all the right buttons.

It dawned on me in this process that many artists spend hours in the studio trying to capture the magic of the demo version of a song, not realising that what they’re attempting to capture is the audible sound of excitement at getting it right for the first time in a room together. The beauty of tracking the album this way was that we had that moment on the final version. It was communal, it was alive, and it perfectly captures the spirit of the entire project. The entire record was recorded this way in the end, as live and together as possible. It is a cross-section of my support network, an encapsulation of everything I love about writing and making music. Sorrow shared is sorrow halved, and joy shared is doubled, as the old saying goes.

The next few months will bring a procession of some more singles and eventually the whole album, and while it feels amazing to finally be able to talk openly about this behemoth project that has consumed me for the last few years, I know it will feel even better when you all have heard it. It feels so strange to say that making a concept album about the death of my father has been one of the most enriching and truly joyous experiences of my life, but it absolutely has. This record has been my lifeline through the dark, at times the only thing I have felt motivated to get out of bed for. Before it, I was beginning to lose my mind, frankly. And I cannot wait for it to finally belong not just to me, but to whomever needs it in their own struggle with loss.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to this newsletter to get updates on the record, info about shows, and more of my self-indulgent essays about writing. And keep listening to Negative Space. There is so much more to come.

Love to you all!

Ilana xx

—

Negative Space

I’m getting really hard to get ahold of
Got really into knitting for a while
My collarbone’s protruding from my shoulders
And I weep when I’m alone like I’m a child

All the boxes of his things still need unpacking
I haven’t had a meal in 5 straight days
And Dave has always been so understanding
But I know he hates to see me hurt this way

I know that I should probably leave this house
But the woman in the mirror doesn't look like me right now
I can see it plain across her face, we’re wasting away

I’m terrified that grief will make me boring
Cause no one really likes it when you cry
It happens much more often when I’m drinking
And wailing at the party kills the vibe

I wonder if my father knew this feeling
When his mother died I never saw him cry
Did he lay awake and argue with the ceiling?
Did he look for her in every flickering light?

I know that I should probably leave this house
But the woman in the mirror doesn't look too good right now
I see her slip into negative space, we’re wasting away

I know that I should probably leave this house
But the woman in the mirror doesn't have the strength right now
To brush her hair and teeth and wash her face, we’re wasting away

One day the waves won’t crash down without warning
The whiskey will get smoother over time
Maybe I’ll feel better in the morning
Maybe this will haunt me my whole life

—

Negative Space was written by Ilana Zsigmond and Toria Wooff

Lead Vocals, acoustic guitar, keyboards, and backing vocals - Ilana Zsigmond
Backing vocals - Toria Wooff
Electric guitars - Joe Smithson
Bass guitar - Danny Miller
Drums and percussion - Dave Ormsby
Percussion - Alec Brits

Produced by David Glover, Alec Brits and Ilana Zsigmond
Engineered by David Glover and Chris Wilkinson
Mastered by Alex Wharton at Abbey Road Studios