Ronan Harris of VNV Nation: But Empires was a dissertation of the mechanism of the rising and falling of empires and the structures that they create. Whether that be on a personal level or whether that be on a world level, so it’s always that power level between the large and the small. Future Perfect, going on from that, it’s my dissatisfaction with the world around me, not just in dissatisfaction of pollution or whatever else, dissatisfaction of the spiritual, in a spiritual sense. I don’t believe we all have to be mad religious fanatics, but I think there's a certain sense of…
Star: If they're afraid to be touched
VNV Nation: Right, there's this conformity which comes with being part of a major religion, and yet there are people who feel personal experiences that touch them and make them feel special, serene, they have really seen through to the hearts of what it is to be, the spiritual level of being a human. There is something enlightening about it, there is something elevating about it, there's something, it takes us beyond out meager selves, that we’re not just a bunch of monkeys that have, you know, evolved from some, you know, species on the planet for absolutely no purpose other than to just walk around, making building, driving cars and going to crispy creep. It’s,… life has a little bit more meaning than that, and I like to see that there is a great deal of magic in this world. There are levels of magic in this world if you want to see it like that, there is mysticism and meaning in all that we do.
Star: So is matter and form a kind of a realization of that?
VNV Nation: You know what, yes, you could say that. I mean I’ll just finish-up with the Future Perfect first.
Star: Sorry.
VNV Nation: No, no, no, no, I could talk for hours, and I’m trying to keep this concise. But for Future Perfect, I had the same thing going on within my own world, that is to be satisfied with my life. And there were a lot of things about my life that really seariousy needed changing because, between the Praise the Fallen period and the Empire period I’d gone through some real serious hell for a lot of reasons, which was my own doing. Actually me, it was a baptism of fire, if you will, I was going through situations in which I needed to develop and grow because I’d had this arrested development in my contentment, this life of bliss that I’d tried to forge for myself which was a complete façade. I saw that with a lot of people around me and I wanted to I suppose share my thoughts and share my feelings to let people know that even in a cow town somewhere in the ass end of Nebraska someone might say you know what, I’m not all that different, there is someone else who thinks like me and it makes me feel OK to be who I am. That was what I wanted and that's what I thought with Praise the Fallen, which I never even wanted released, by the way, I wrote it not to be released.
Star: I had to pull over, I was driving along,…. The very first time, my first experience with you guys. I had just bought it [Praise the Fallen], I was, you know, getting a CD like I normally do, popped it in do-do-de-do…… I seriously had to veer off the road…. And, you know, I was the little girl in Denver with those tears pouring down her face, that was me, I had to…
VNV Nation: I hope they're positive tears…
Star: They are, they really are, just because I finally found somebody…
VNV Nation: Oh, you know, you feel your heart. But I mean I do the same thing, the first time I sang Beloved was here in a studio. I brought this up as an example because it’s a very popular song, and I was sitting in a room singing with the headphones on and Mark had no idea how this was going to sound. And I took it back to the studio, mixed it and played it to them the next day. And I sat back and Mard said, Jesus, that's incredible. And I said it’s powerful, isn’t it, and he said yes. That's the power of passion, that's what I wanted to feel, and how I would want to describe my feelings for somebody, how I would describe it… it’s also based on a short story in part and based on a part of my life. It is not based on an ex, which is a great thing to say because I will never immortalize anybody in a song. They're incidentals to my life. My life is…
Star: Songs are or people are?
VNV Nation: People will never be immortalized in my songs, I’ll never write… I mean I’ve been asked this, you know, you always get girlfriends who ask, is that song about me, are you going to write a song about me? No, I’m not, write songs about my world and what it looks like through my eyes. That's all I can do, I can’t write it about somebody, I’m writing about what I’m thinking and what I’m feeling at that time about a certain situation. In many ways it’s abstract, there’re coded references that sound like lines from your diary, events that might have happened.