Chartreuse on ‘Bless You & Be Well’: Grief, loss and starting over
Editor’s note: Ahead of the release of their latest album, Bless You & Be Well, Perry Lovering of the West Midlands indie outfit Chartreuse shares a story of love and its inexorable ties to loss.
Their touching album charts this theme in tender detail. It is due for release on August 29th via Communion Records.
Every seven years, every cell in your body will have been replaced. Starting over is inevitable, but it’s not the end.
Approximately 480 loved ones die of cancer each day in the UK. In May 2024, after a tumultuous three-year journey of extreme peaks and troughs, my father became another number and finally met his end. A few months prior to that, I was consoling my best friend at his dad’s funeral, mourning in all black, knowing that my family would be the next to suffer the same fate. I barely had time to wake up before sitting on a plane to far northern and remote Iceland, bass guitar sleeping soundly in the cargo hold, sudoku book in my hand, wondering to myself, “how the fuck did I get here?”
For years, I had been struggling to juggle being there for the band and being there for my family. And often at most times, failing to take care of myself in the meantime. It’s almost ironic; I’d been surviving on pure adrenaline for so long. A consequence of trying to balance between what I felt was duty and what I felt I wanted from the world, that finally these two sides of my life had reached their culmination in the span of months: Death and creation.
Losing a father, someone you had looked up to your whole life, it’s like losing your future. Like losing a part of yourself that you might one day become. You can’t help but fall into the trap of asking yourself these big questions: “What am I doing with my life? Am I happy? Do I feel proud of the person I am?” Although it didn’t seem like it at the time, going to Iceland so soon after my dad’s passing ended up a blessing. It was this dumbfounding reminder that I was actually following my passions, I was striving to create something, and I was doing things that genuinely made me happy. What more could I ask for?
“Loss doesn’t have to be the end. You don’t have to be swallowed by it.”
Chartreuse
I was at the lowest point of my life. But those two weeks at the ends of the earth with three of my closest friends, working tirelessly to build something from the ground up, became the panacea to my problems. On paper, it would seem odd for one of the worst moments in your life to be marked by one of the best moments in the space of two short months.
I feel pretty damn proud that despite all that shit, I was still able to make it work for the band and my family, and realistically for myself. It was a much-needed win. To know that I still had something in me, and something to give.
It’s an odd feeling. The realisation that you’ll never see someone again, never be able to tell them new things or share new experiences. It’s a different kind of fear. The person you were at that time will be forever locked in time; they’ll never see the version of you that you might become. That person you were essentially dies with them. It took so much of me to attempt to move forward in ways that I think my dad would have wanted me to. In ways that I myself could be proud of.
We argued a lot in the early years of the band’s creation. He was an engineer, a man of science and pragmatism. Rational and calculated. I believed for a while that he wanted me to follow a more traditional life path. Get educated, become an engineer just like him, or something of that world. To work hard, make money, start a family.
He was lying to himself too; it wasn’t until he grew tired of his own work and ultimately scrapped it all that he started making cider by himself, started making cheese and cured meats, started creating, started over. That he realised life is the pursuit. The pursuit of creating things that make you happy and proud. That’s when it clicked for him, I think. He finally understood why I was in the band in the first place.
In the end, I knew he was proud of me. That thought alone became the fuel to get through Iceland. A mantra for making sure I gave myself over 100% to the process, and to come away surprised, that I could still enjoy something, anything, at that time in my life.
It was our second album, but to me it felt like starting over. I thought to myself, “Is this why people make music in the first place?” The need to create. The regeneration of cells. The human desire for “the new”, the exciting, for change, for innovation. For me, it is. Every song, every project, it feels like starting again, not in a negative way, but in the best way possible. I love that feeling. Starting over, building something from scratch, diving headfirst into a new passion and piecing it all together. That is a posthumous gift from my dad. He was the same, every week, a new hyper-fixation to be mastered.
Loss doesn’t have to be the end. You don’t have to be swallowed by it. Grief doesn’t go away. It only changes shape. It can’t be shared, but you don’t have to face it alone. Find the things that matter to you. Find the people that matter to you. Blanket yourself in them. And know that it’s okay that the only thing you did that day was breathe.
