Arctic Mistress is an invitation. As well as a celebration. It tells the story of why I went there to do my filming. I wanted to know her; this Arctic Mistress. “A place so pure and so full of emptiness”. I wanted to see if it truly existed. I wanted to do this; before it was gone. Before the “icebergs melt into tears”. A turn of phrase I personally feel is possibly one of the best lines I have ever written. My co-writer Bryan Potvin wanted to convey a sound-scape of cold and distant imagery with the shimmery guitar and I wanted the melody to match this. So the words and melody needed to be spacious - like the arctic itself. They needed to lay hauntingly on the chord structure as words do on the wind itself. I wanted the lyrics to convey a longing to actually know this white, wind swept and distant land. I found out that it was not so distant after all. I got to know it personally. To breathe in the arctic air is to breathe in pristine nature itself. The winds blow across thousands of miles of cold white snow and into our nostrils giving us a high stronger than any drug. A cliche has long existed and it is this; that the Arctic takes a little piece of your soul causing you to always desire to return. I have experienced this enough to know that it rises above cliché and becomes a beautiful truism instead. I felt that this meant that the arctic is a lover. She is my lover and she “calls me back home and lays like a beauty upon her bed of ice”. Longing for my return. Waiting for me. Confident in her own beauty. If a man or a women has in their memory the greatest lover they have ever known, I believe the Arctic landscape embodies this memory in the form of a hypnotizing white and frozen beauty. And that is why and how she steals a piece of your soul. To breathe in the arctic air is to change your life.
7 мар 2024
