“Quite often or moreso, I’ll take the start of a song out for a run with me, and there I can get a nice idea of the arrangements, or for the middle-eight, or something like that. But on occasion, like this one, I’ll get an idea for a song from scratch.”
– Stuart Murdoch

I like it when I read interviews and discover musicians’ visions for their art, especially when you find out that their inspirations come from simple daily activities.

For example, Stuart Murdoch loves to run. Seen running through the streets of Glasgow dodging and bumping into pedestrians in the video for Belle and Sebastian’s video, “I’m a Cuckoo”, Murdoch tells one interviewer how he frequently runs with the band’s songs to get a good idea of them.

Belle & Sebastian’s album The Life Pursuit used the running metaphor to represent both the optimism of seeking out the attainable possibilities in life (and the disappointment in the end). And when you listen to the album’s last song “Mornington Crescent” and hear the closing lyric, “we’re a little too free”, it’s like coming to a heavy halt, faced with a dead end.

Listening to “I Didn’t See it Coming”, the opening track of Belle & Sebastian’s recent album Write About Love, the song’s pace brings a lightweight feeling similar to running empty-minded. Sarah Martin and Murdoch sing about how they’re no longer “in the running”, free from life’s pursuits and its disillusionments.

“I actually had a pool growing up in Dundas, [Ontario], but I never had swimming lessons. I could swim. But barely. I was terrible at it. Over the course of that year I learned to swim and became kind of obsessed by it. I was thinking about music that sounded totally liquid. ”
– Daniel Snaith

Unlike Caribou’s Daniel Snaith, my obsession with swimming floats somewhere between fear and nostalgia. I remember crying at the side of a swimming pool after my father tossed me in the deep-end. And yet visions of deep blue oceans and murky waters take me back to my childhood and have become personal symbols of the sublime.

Caribou’s “Lalibela” from the album Swim sounds like the water you get inside your ears, sloshing left and right. It’s the abysmal noise of currents you hear underwater, where acoustic senses overtake the visual.

“Lalibela” is one of the only two songs not featured in the Swim Remixes album, left perfect as it is. The track brings to mind the strange pitch of rain hitting the top of the pool or what sunlight may sound like when you see its reflections submerged at the blue surface of a pool’s bottom.