‘I Didn’t See The Point In Hiding It’: Spacey Jane’s Caleb Harper On The Writing Of ‘Sunlight’

I was never very good at creative writing in school. I always preferred to write analytically.  My mum, like any good English teacher, encouraged me to critique what I saw and experienced to try to understand the effect it was having on me. 

When it comes to songwriting, my approach is fundamentally the same. I don’t know how to invent a story of love and heartbreak or create worlds that people can explore within a song, so I talk about what I’m going through and how I feel about it.

Sunlight was written over a period of 18 months starting in mid-2018. A whole relationship began and ended in that time and the effect of that hugely impacted my life. 

None of us had ever tried to write an album before and, truthfully, there wasn’t much of an idea of how it would come together until we played it through after the tracks were mixed. Being able to sit down over a period of months or years felt like a luxury for artists, with lots of time and a good budget; not something we had for a debut record. 

Between work, study, a demanding touring schedule and a line-up change, we took what time we could to get into the studio and had to hope that something good could come out of it. Songs were written out of necessity because of this. I was working 50+ hour weeks when we weren’t touring or recording, so leading up to studio sessions, I would sit down for three or four days and force myself to write as much as possible. In that sort of environment, spanning over a year, it’s difficult to consolidate themes and intentionally write a cohesive record. Fortunately, with the way life was going, I didn’t have to try.

I’m not an expert, so I could be really wrong, but I think relationships are probably the most important part of how we form identity, how we find a place in the world, how we shape and improve our ourselves, etc. The foundation of life or something? The ebbs and flows, beginnings and ends of relationships of any kind influence people’s emotional health and actions so drastically. One of the most overwhelmingly beautiful feelings in life is falling in love, while losing someone you care about is very, very shit.

"I'm not an expert, so I could be really wrong, but I think relationships are probably the most important part of how we form identity..."

For me, the result of unavoidable candour and being in the throes of relationship breakdowns and restarts, confined me to the themes that are in Sunlight, it wasn’t really a choice. The feelings that overran my head were in the songs before I could stop them and I didn’t see the point in hiding it.

The more I thought back over past partners, my relationship with my mum and dad and how their relationships with their parents affected how they engaged with me, I came to realise that I was the sum of the impact that everyone I loved (or had loved), had had on me. 

I spent the first five years of adulthood trying to reconcile the breakdowns of countless relationships, wondering if I had been surrounded by bad people or just been a bad person. In the end I didn’t really find the answer I was looking for; the safest route was to just say sorry and stop thinking about it.

Spacey Jane's Sunlight is out now, listen to it here.