RUST

RUST was written in the same bedroom as everything else, through a Toronto winter I spent in a deep depression. It felt like the snow was slowly swallowing me, and the song became the only place I had to put that — the isolation, the despair. I wrote it alone, out of a stretch of my life I don't romanticize. It just needed a shape, and this is the shape it took.

The rig was the same as the first song: a Scarlett 2i2 and the pink Cort, recorded and produced by me, mixed by Abel. I built it to move through a place. The intro is meant to feel like a slow walk down death row, toward the chair. When the song actually hits, you're not walking anymore — you're locked in the cell. And the ending is what it sounds like to lose your mind to something true.

RUST is the other half of TRY TO CAGE ME. Where the first song refuses to be imprisoned, this one stops fighting and accepts there's nothing to be done — that some cages are just mortality, and they don't open. Rina's cover is the view from inside that cell: a raven in the corner, not judging, just seeing everything, watching us from the inside out.

You imprisoned me in this rusty cell. Nowhere to run, I've got nowhere to run.