Arcane Vessels - Foreword lyrics

Arcane Vessels - ForewordArcane is a word meaning "understood by few; mysterious or secret." Vessels is a word that typically refers to a ship or other large craft that carries something inside. Sometimes I feel like everyone is a ship, floating around carrying something secret and mysterious that no one quite understands.

Arcane Vessels is an mini-album I intended to bridge the gap between my first album "Colossus" and my upcoming album "Pantheon". Writtеn over the winter of 2017/2018, I wantеd to explore a more forlorn sound before I moved into the grandiose and chaotic sound of Pantheon. This three month period of writing was a strange transition from a very black and hopeless pit of despair that I wallowed in for the entire second half of 2017 to a much brighter state of mind that I suddenly found myself in in 2018. I came to find my depression nearly non-existent, my energy levels completely rejuvenated, my motivation to create in overdrive, and my overall outlook on life completely turned around. I'm not sure if it was the change in environment, or me just growing into a new year, or the imminent graduation from my teen years to my 20s looming in late March.

Writing the album was very much a change from the musings of my emotionally void heart on Colossus as the dam was starting to crack and I felt feelings start to trickle out for the first time in almost half a decade. From my heartbreak as a transgender woman who can never bear children on Womb, the strange 3 day-long depressive episode I found myself in after the death of one of my favorite book characters that spawned Infirmary, and the continuation of the ongoing loss I felt after the death of someone dear to me on Hospital Beds II, I started to chronicle my return to the realm of feeling that I'd barred myself from for the majority of my adolescence. It was painful and beautiful and I reveled in every moment of the bittersweet emotions.

Pantheon will be happier. It will be an album of growth and self-discovery, of newfound joy and beauty. I could not be more excited to share it with the world as proof that I truly did make it out alive of the black hole I flung myself into while writing Colossus.

As always, eternal thanks for listening to my creations. Much love, Hayden - xxx