When The Need Came Back

For a long time, music had been something I carried rather than something I made.

The need to write never really disappeared, but it got buried under everything else that takes over when life becomes full: work, family, responsibilities and routines.

The woman I share my life with has a big interest in music as well, and we've had countless whole nights just exploring new music online.

Which also fed the need to create again.

Every now and then an idea would surface. A line, a melody, or just a thought that felt like it belonged somewhere else.

Toward the end of 2025, those fragments started appearing more often. Eventually, it became difficult to ignore what they were trying to tell me. I wanted (or should I say needed?) to write music again.

What I did know was that I had no interest in going back to the old way of doing it. The traditional version of starting a band, finding rehearsal rooms, matching calendars, moving equipment around and trying to get several people into the same place at the same time.

An impossible task nowadays.

It simply did not fit anymore. Life had changed too much for that to even be an option.

Last time I was a part of a “conventional” band with rehearsal rooms and such was a long time ago.

So instead the question became what a music project could look like if it was built around the life we actually have right now, rather than around how a band was supposed to work.

The idea was simple: keep the group small, remove as many practical obstacles as possible and build the music piece by piece.

No rehearsal room, no weekly schedule depending on everyone being physically present.

Work whenever there was time and we felt like it: evenings, weekends and late hours after everything else was done.

That freedom changed more than just the logistics.

It also meant there were fewer excuses.

If a lyric did not work, it had to be rewritten.

If a melody did not carry the words properly, the melody had to change.

If something felt safe or predictable, it probably was not finished yet.

Very early on, another rule started to take shape. There was no point in writing music simply for the sake of having more songs.

The songs had to mean something.

They had to come from real things we had lived through, things we had watched happen around us, and thoughts that had been sitting quietly for years without ever finding the right form.

At that point there was no Chapter, no catalogue and no clear idea of what the project would eventually become. There was only the need to create again, and the decision to build the whole thing differently this time.

A few ideas were already beginning to take shape. One of them was about silence, not peaceful silence, but the kind that appears when everyone knows something is wrong and nobody wants to be the one who says it out loud.

That idea would become important very soon.