Robert Smith on writing about the death of his brother on ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’: “It’s helped me enormously”

nme.com:

I Can Never Say Goodbye‘, featuring in their upcoming album ‘Songs Of A Lost World’.In a new and long-ranging interview filmed by the band for fans in conversation with Matt Everitt (shared via unlocking their ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ website), Smith has shared that writing about his brother’s death in his music helped him “enormously”.Speaking about how he approached addressing such a personal and emotional topic on ‘I Can Never Say Goodbye’, he explained to Everitt that he decided to tackle it in a simple, narrative way. “I wrote this song a lot of different ways, until I hit on a very simple narrative of what actually happened on the night he died,” he said. “It went all around the houses and I went everywhere with this song to sum up how I felt.

In the end, it turned into a reasonably bleak little vignette.“I wrote the song about it, and the music itself was what I wanted to breathe.

I didn’t want the words to dominate the song, in a way that the music can become a backdrop to what you’re singing. In this, I think the music is more important than what I’m singing in a way.

It’s a very difficult song to sing. People say ‘cathartic’ too much, but it was. It allowed me to deal with it, and I think it’s helped me enormously.”While writing the song, Smith said he had input from others about trying to get the tone correct when describing his brother’s death. “Trying to achieve the right balance between the outpouring I had after the event, and just trying to take the right part of that and put it into a song,” he said. “Some of the versions of that were so overwrought.