Track By Track: House of Wolves on Daughter of the Sea

Daughter of the Sea is a chronicle of that time away, as much a journal as an album: it finds him enjoying new loves even as he longs for old ones; he struggles with the loneliness of an American abroad as the sounds of the Irish coast infiltrate his songs; he indulges blind faith in something as he wakes up in an abandoned office space. It's an intimate eight-song portrait composed almost entirely of impassioned guitar strums, occasional piano, and gorgeously delicate vocal melodies. Read what Rey has to say about each track below as you listen.

Beautiful Things

"I have this thing with time; it’s so fascinating to me. ‘Beautiful Things’ is about the smallest things in life, the tiniest moments that pass us by and are forever gone, the moments that people miss when they are busy doing something else. Those ordinary moments captivate me and are so beautiful and I get lost in them, I was enveloped in these thoughts when writing this song. We recorded it in a living room at dusk with the fire crackling in the background and on two hours of sleep, at the time I was thinking this is a perfect example of the song’s theme… a quick exceptional moment in time that soon passed by."

Daughter Of The Sea

"I had flown to Ireland to record this album last May, we were three days in to recording, and I was jet-lagged and had a sore throat, it had been raining all morning, I was playing the guitar part of this song in between takes and the producer, Darragh Nolan, asked what I was playing. At that point I only had the guitar parts, he asked if I could finish the song so we could record it later… so I left the studio to go write the lyrics, looking outside my bedroom window, soaking up the atmosphere of the wet dirt and Irish sea, I spent the afternoon writing. Somehow this song literally just fell into my lap, the lyrics felt like they were given to me from the mystical Celtic Dryads sprit of the trees or something... as I walked back into the studio the sun had just peeked through the clouds and the birds were talking, Darragh hit record and we tracked it in two takes. The song is about a boy who loves and misses his girl, she’s from the sea and they are separated…he’s remembering her in his dreams and calling to her in a dream state to come back to him."

One

"'One' is one of those songs of feeling totally alone even when you're in a so called "good relationship", feeling departed and betrayed, the song spun from the web of desires for synchronicity and for the waiting to be over… is this for real or not?... and reaching for something new with them."

Martians

"This song is about cautioning a new love that what you don't know could hurt you, the grass is not always greener. I’m sinking in the quicksand of falling in love and I’m wanting her to see the true me before I get enveloped and fall too deep, time passes and it breaks, I'm finished with lifting her up in the sky and and waiting for her to wake up and realize us."

Take Me To The Others

"This song is about how it’s okay to be your authentic self, it’s okay to be you and if you live by a pure honesty of who you are and what you want to be and do, then you will be where you are supposed to be in life, meet the people you are supposed to meet, and be who you are supposed to be and live the moments you are supposed to live in this time and place. I subconsciously wrote it to myself telling me it’s okay to let go of someone who I loved and that didn’t love me back in the same way; it's about breaking free of your old self and being born anew."

Love

"‘Love’ stemmed from a feeling of knowing deep down inside that a love I had is not going to last, even though there are good parts, all that shit doesn't matter, when there's a disconnect at the cellular core, that's broken love mixed with hopefulness about the situation at the same time. It’s about that surreal place where you don’t feel like yourself anymore, you know something has to change but you can’t… that's where I was when I wrote that song."

Rain

"Believe it or not I wrote the lyrics to this song when I was six or seven years old. It was a rhyme that I wrote because growing up in Southern California it never ever freaking rains, so I was always fantasizing about rain and weather and being in a beautiful dark gloomy snowy place, I longed for it, so this was my Native American rain dance song that I wrote as a little kid."

Just Shy Of Survival

"The title says it all. I wrote this while I was living in an abandoned office space for six months... I’d hang out during the day in the city and different places around town, then at night I’d sneak into the office building and sleep on the empty floor by candle light so the security guards wouldn’t notice me. I was living with my girlfriend, but we broke up and I had nowhere to go, so I crashed at this abandoned office space... it was a pretty bleak and barren time, and I was re-thinking my whole last few years with this person that went nowhere… I was feeling something has to give… I’m writing about completely letting go of what you want to happen in your future, or what you think will happen in the future."

Daughter Of The Sea is out 7 April via {Dusk, Dais, Dawn}. You can pre-order the limited edition hand-crafted CD here.