Evening Hymns, the project of Jonas Bonetta and a revolving cast of collaborators, have been making music for over a decade. After 2009 debut Spirit Guides came Spectral Dusk, something of a masterpiece in which Bonetta explored the grief experienced after losing his father, and then 2015 saw Quiet Energies, the band’s last release as Bonetta devoted his time to ambient music released under his own name. That is, until several singles emerged this spring, heralding the release of a brand new Evening Hymns record, Heavy Nights.
With support from musicians such as Joseph Shabason (Destroyer), José Contreras (By Divine Right) Caylie Runciman (Boyhood) and Gavin Gardiner (The Wooden Sky), Bonnetta has crafted his most pop-inflected album to date. There is a distinct seventies feel, a certain atmosphere and depth of sound present across the record, despite its varied tones. The lush late-night heartache of ‘I Can Only Be Good’ blurs intimacy and isolation, memories sitting close to loneliness as Shabason’s saxophone snakes in languid turns, while ‘The Days Disintegrating’ sits in a slow slipstream of solitude and patters towards its langorous climax.
Others have a broader sound, vintage synthesizers and drum machines lending tracks such as ‘My Drugs, My Dreams’ a widescreen, technicolor heft. But for all of its richness, the themes of the track work in the opposite direction. “I wrote [‘My Drugs, My Dreams’] in my living room right after my breakup, totally terrified and alone,” Bonnetta explains. “Again, all these huge questions came back to me and I was so confused and drained. I’d just hurt this person that I loved and had loved for so long and who I had had all of these formative experiences with […] I wanted to remember it forever, to be present, to learn from it, and so drew the picture.”
Such a sentiment could describe much of the Evening Hymns oeuvre. Not wallowing in sorrow and confusion but engaging with them in curiosity. Like holding loss in your palm and seeing how it catches the light. “I’d always had this feeling that love should feel good wherever you are, in some idyllic place or in some run-down miserable apartment. I wanted to be happy with nothing. To take away my vices and my dreams and still feel free and hopeful and capable of love.”
Like previous Evening Hymns records, Heavy Nights feels like a space carved out from the normal passage of things. Remoteness repurposed as a form of contemplation, an opportunity to learn. Loneliness not as an end but the means, the stark shadow of the relationships that have been becoming things to be studied and remembered in order to love once again. The result is a record fitting of its name. A descent into the end of something meaningful, and a conscious decision to shoulder whatever heavy truths are found there, all woven from the rich and romantic hues of the early hours, where feelings achieve a new saturation as the lights burn lazy and low.
We took the opportunity to ask Bonnetta a few questions to learn a little more about the record and his creative processes more generally.
Hi Jonas, I hope all is well and things are shaping up for the record. Could you give us a little background on Heavy Nights? What does it mean to you? How did it come into being?
Thank you! Heavy Nights. Written over the last 5 years. Some ideas a little older I suppose. Lyrically these are all more recent. Some of the music had kicked around in my head for awhile though. A lot has changed for me in the last half decade. A new relationship. The birth of my son. Reconnecting with nature and country living. I feel like I’m always working on the next Evening Hymns record and eventually a collection of songs come together.
One of the things that strikes me about the record is the interplay between isolation and connection. There’s a loneliness to the songs, a sense of remove from certain people or places that’s baked into the nocturnal vibes, the heavy snow. But then there’s this tenderness too. A warmth. The sense that each track is a direct communication to the absent thing, no matter how remote or deferred. It’s something that seems to represent the spirit of Evening Hymns in many ways, and I find myself wondering where it comes from exactly. I know you record in a pretty remote location, but there’s a chicken and egg thing with that too. Do records take on the spirit of the places in which they were recorded, or do you seek out those places to realise the spirit of the record?
This is a heavy question because it’s something I think about often enough and is deep rooted in me. I grew up in the country and grew up entertaining myself in a way. The whole wanting to be in isolation in the country makes sense to me. It’s slow and introspective. Thoughtful. I like to be alone. It allows me to make up my world around me however I want to imagine it and that’s helpful for my creativity. I think it would be hard for me to make something aggressive out here. It’s a pastoral place. Quiet and peaceful. Often with my ambient work I’m going right to a specific location to have in infuse all the music. With Evening Hymns the two things are constantly working in sympatico. I’m always out and about with the antennae up trying to make sense of how I feel and what’s happening around me. It’s exhausting. Haha.
Despite this binding spirit, there’s been a significant evolution of the Evening Hymns sound. With the synths and drum machines, Heavy Nights is the richest, most pop-orientated record yet. Does this represent an evolution of your artistic sensibilities too, is it just that this sound was the most fitting for these particular songs?
I think I wanted to make something that sounded romantic. I wanted it to be rich and hazy. During the writing process I was falling out of and then into love. Many changes going on. A lot of late nights wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. Drinking wine and feeling poetic. I think all of my music is pop music. I’m trying to make even sad songs feel catchy. This one I tried to frame in more of a classic song world as I was listening to a lot of older music. I wanted to make a 70s pop record. It’s what I was connecting with at the time.
You’ve spoken about how you worked on some of the songs for years, putting them aside when you felt they weren’t quite where you wanted them. I’m interested in how you decide when something is ready, the moment when the final song emerges from the idea. Is the whole process down to intuition and feeling? Do you have the equivalent of editors, first listeners to help you through?
It’s intuition for sure but it’s funny because I do a lot of producing now and I’ll listen to demos from artists and then new versions and then they get to the studio and it’s constantly changing and I often get to witness the artist just circle around in the weeds. We all do it I think. I’m aware of that with some of my songwriting process. A song like ‘My Drugs, My Dreams’ I kicked around for a really long time. I had a pretty thorough sketch of it during the recording of Quiet Energies but it just wasn’t ready. I really liked the chorus and I felt like I owed it to that chorus to bring words and verses that were as strong. I’d pick up a guitar and work away on it when I felt like it. There isn’t really any editors. Just different versions of me at different stages I guess. Haha. I’m not really sure if this album version is even superior to the first version but it made me happiest and that is the end goal.
I wanted to ask about intimate songs. An intensely personal and difficult thread started on Spirit Guides and ran right through Spectral Dusk, and while subsequent records have taken on different issues there still a sense of that rawness, of private emotion. Heavy Nights is no different in that regard, and it got me thinking about the process of delving into the places that we might otherwise try to bury. Is it cathartic? Exhausting? Do you think the compulsion to capture such moments is an act of escaping them, or remembering?
I wouldn’t say it’s cathartic. It’s certainly exhausting. For me it’s a version of therapy. It doesn’t really feel great but it seems to help me. It forced me to really try and understand what my Dad’s death was to me and what our relationship was like. I think the aspect of playing the songs over and over again is the exhausting part. Touring them and having to conjure up those spirits each night was a challenge. I think if I didn’t have any problems I wouldn’t be writing. The song has always been a vehicle for me to understand myself more clearly. It’s never an escape. It’s maybe remembering. But it’s really just searching for meaning and understanding in the challenging moments.
How about in terms of giving the songs away to the listener? As an example, I saw you play in Cardiff with The Wooden Sky in late summer 2012, and there was something right around the corner that meant I lent heavily on Spectral Dusk in the months/years after. For me, that record is still about grief and loss, but one that is entirely my own. It struck me that the artist has to give up something. To let the songs be adapted to a series of adjacent tragedies and traumas, and I wondered how that exchange feels in practice?
I don’t feel like I’m responsible for the songs once they’re out there. The songwriting process is a pretty selfish practice for me. I’m writing to free myself from some weight and once my work there is done the songs are free to roam and be whatever they want to be for people. I was a really sad guy making that record, understandably, and there is an energy in everything that I did with that record that is saturated in that sadness. I feel like something magical happened with that album, or that I reached some level of clarity in understanding my Dad and his passing when we were recording, that certain people are able to use the record to also reach that same place. Maybe that’s getting a little mystical or something but that album felt honest to me. A transmission from a son to his father that other people are allowed to intercept. I think that losing someone is a gift in the sense that it creates these profound moments of real immediacy and honest and rawness. It’s a gift to be that present. If you are. If you’re in it, in all of it’s intensity.
Since the writing process was my way of understanding stuff I don’t feel like I’m giving anything away with it once the songs come out. I’ve got what I need from them at that point. The idea that others can use them to explore their own emotions is amazing. And if it gives anybody something to lean on in a hard time while that’s just an amazing byproduct.
I’m so grateful that Spectral Dusk has been that for a lot of people. Writing Heavy Nights felt similar albeit with the heartbreak of an old relationship. Whereas the last record Quiet Energies really felt like I was writing to pick myself back up again. Heavy Nights felt like sliding back into that old world of writing about my sadness to understand it more. What went wrong. What changed. Who am I now? I hope the heartbroken find this record in the wee hours.
Heavy Nights is out now via Shuffling Feet Records and you can get it from the Evening Hymns Bandcamp page.
Photographs by Caylie Runciman