Track by Track: GhostStory. - 'The Re-Dream Trilogy'
Multi-faceted, Manchester-based artist GhostStory. has just released ‘The Re-Dream Trilogy’ EP. He took a moment to talk us through it.
“I wrote the re-dream trilogy as a half therapeutic process and half exploration. I knew I wanted to do a short concept EP around mental health and it’s impacts on various aspects of our lives. but at the start of the process, I realised that I’d been exploring these issues creatively before with no safeguarding for myself and my own mental health, I was often writing from trauma in a not-really-actually-cathartic way, more just exposing myself and then regretting it. So the EP became an attempt (excuse the pun) to explore those same issues, but trying to find a healthier way.”
Re-Dream
The verses of the opening track and quite dark, as some of my mates have pointed out. It’s meant to represent the two sides I have with my own head, low or manic. And manic always seems like ‘I love life, I’ll keep giving until I bleed out!’, and you never see the pit coming, that you’ve fallen in fifty times before. It’s also a call to arms for myself in a way. The verses might show some sort of suicidal ideation, but the chorus is ultimately that call to keep going. I had to say to myself “if you’re going to do this whole life thing, you’ve got to take some responsibility for that future.”
The Attempt
This song is more concerned with the outer. In a lot of my work I try and talk about mental health as an extension of the self and it quite often impacts loved ones around those circumstances a lot more than you realise. But The Attempt takes it the wrong way, and as this point of view of being a ticking timebomb, and shutting yourself away from help instead. Which is the opposite of a healthy decision and leads to detachment, loneliness, probably narcissism at times for myself. Other people remind you who are you are.
Section II
Closing, this one is about the relations between society and mental health. Whether that’s medications being over-prescribed, lack of therapies, phone screens designed to make addicts of us, or growing sleeplessness’s problem in adults in Western societies. Or the ‘Blood Water, Neck Chain Shark Tooth, face my demons in a vocal booth’ is pointing at the creative industries that tend to exploit or demand artists pain for careers in the industry.
Subtlety was not the aim with these works.