“Forest is really a product of me trying to refine my sound and find a consistent voice in my music. When I was making all of the beats for this project, I tried to find really emotionally-charged and atmospheric samples to run relatively simple drum tracks over. When I first started doing my own vocals, I would kinda just write whatever lyrics and throw them together on a song, as long as they rhymed had a certain flow to them. Now I’m focusing less on rhyme schemes and filling time, and trying to write lyrics that are actually meaningful to me, that are expressive and don’t take a backseat to the instrumental.
I kinda stumbled into this project on accident, to be honest. I made the title track “Forest” a couple of days after I went for a walk by myself in a small area of woods near my house. I’m from a small town in Canada that’s pretty environmentally conscious so there are forests fucking everywhere. I started developing this concept of a proverbial “forest” in this song, but all it really means is a state of solitude and reflection. The song turned out great and I felt like I had more room to expand on the concept, and that eventually turned into these 6 songs.
The entirety of the work was done in the summer when all of my roommates had moved back home for the summer, so I was spending a lot of time alone, probably too much to be honest. Especially at night. I was trying to flesh out this idea of being stuck in your head all of the time that I really did get stuck in my own head and it took me to some kind of dark places. But I see that as a positive in the end, because I let go of a lot of those nasty feelings on the album and now I don’t have to carry them around with me. Plus, I feel like a lot of those feelings of disillusionment and isolation could resonate with a lot of people who are going through similar things.” – blvck mass
