Pylon Moon is a song that is both viscerally in and of the moment and yet generates a sense of deep time and space, particularly towards the future.
Dc / OFFICER explains that it started with the view he saw out of his late night winter Bakerloo line train ride home from work of the full super moon looking as though it were resting atop a nearby pylon, almost like the pylon had been built to hold it. So came the name which captures at once that this is an embattled love song, one he wrote to and for his whole family during a prolonged recent period of time where he felt he was losing grasp of the light himself and the only light and joy he could access was being held, hopefully yet fragilely by his family members, distant from him as they felt. Dc tells me “the song opens with the kernel lyric from which the whole album then grew after texting it to myself in order to not forget it in that moment ‘You make all the colours of my heart crane their necks back to the skies for your light’. It’s one of the lyrics I feel most desire to sing each time I gig at the moment - I can still taste both the ripping of grief and struggling for hope turning in that line, rather than growing old or stale it’s still waking something in my soul each time we play it.”
At times OFFICER relishes in the absurd - like a ‘snowdrop of all snowdrops’, at others it’s more like a daringly cheerful resolve to the imminent sense of warfare (internal and external) ‘hold on for her world war, I love a little loon’.
Hope and turbulence co-exist and almost abide within each other in a single refrain ‘glitter in the white beam, building bodies under storms’. It’s a hopeful, torturously vulnerable and therefore beautiful confession but with the foreboding sense that his heart is being searched by a hostile authority. How this song manages to be so thrilling and joyful and yet so searching and dreading all at once is best left a question to be experienced and enjoyed in the hearing rather than analytically resolved in thinking... which feels like a good place to finish.
