White Sheet is the heaviest song on the EP I just released, and feels a little different from all the other tracks. But it’s one of my favorites. I wrote it not long after my mom died of cancer, so I was still in a daze. I felt depressed, all my limbs were heavy, and I just wanted to sleep all day every day. I’ve struggled with depression my whole life, so I was thinking about how hard it is to be ambitious and successful when nothing really seems meaningful. In a way, depression can sometimes be a gift, in that it gives us a little perspective on work and money. 

I wrote the song in one sitting and sat down at the piano to put some chords to it, but it was kind of a mess, as you might expect from someone in that state. I later took it to my producer, Timothy Robert Graham, and we chopped it up together and turned it into a proper song, my favorite collaborative songwriting session to date! I had been spending a lot of time with “Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer” by Of Montreal (what else do you listen to when you are depressed???), along with “Strange Mercy” by St. Vincent, two of my favorite albums of all time, so they ended up influencing some of the direction of the song. The crunchy bass and that guitar solo at the end that Tim wrote definitely were intended to evoke some of our favorite parts of St. Vincent’s writing. 

The finished product was minimalist and simple, but it captured the emotion I was aiming for. I still repeat the last lyric of the song often, “lying in bed, is that so bad?