Black Sea Dahu — Le temps se fuit

When you’re on tour, it feels like time stops. Each day is a carbon copy of the last: airport, a stretch of highway, a hotel room, the backstage, and then an explosive mass of people. This, of course, is a trick that your mind starts to play on you. In reality, time is running like water through your cupped hands. And what appears to be a seamless experience on the surface is, in fact, thoroughly fragmented on multiple levels. Every day you are being edited and rearranged in the eyes of strangers – their expectations, disappointments, and dreams hung on you carelessly. All the while, you are trying your best to keep it together by negotiating what you are experiencing in the moment with earlier versions of yourself, now trapped inside your repertoire.

Le temps se fuit, the latest single from Black Sea Dahu, is a gorgeous, buoyant meditation on what it means to be in a million places simultaneously. Transparent, on display, and always available! Oscillating between a montage of randomized memories and the day-to-day blur peppered with jump cuts. If you don’t listen to the lyrics, you won’t taste the mild tang of battery acid. The song is twangy, slippery, and full of colour; and it feels like it gets brighter by the bar, leaving you squinting real hard by the end.

Originally, I wrote the song on the piano; it was about the same time that I was working on Glue. Then I spent an evening with Paul, in the studio, trying out totally different versions of the tune, just to have fun with it and to see what else was possible. We cut a mega pop hit version, and then something that sounded like it could be on a Johnny Cash record. It was just a game, but in the end, I didn't really know where I wanted the song to go. We jammed on it with the band for quite a long time, creating all these funny intros, and then discarding them again, until it finally became clear to us where we wanted to go with it.

The title of the song is grammatically incorrect. “Se fuir” means “to flee,” but what I wanted to say was that time flees from itself, which is in a way like the image of the snake biting its own tail. But, in French, the right way to say it would be “le temps s'enfuit,” which would translate to "time flies.” Wrong it might be, but it feels right to me. – Janine Catherine