Sunlight

The title of Spacey Jane’s debut album, Sunlight, suggests sunny days and loose, languid parties—a scene which would fit nicely alongside their harmony-laden indie pop-rock. The reality, however, is a little different. The title track riffs on the idea of giving a houseplant all the sunlight it needs only for it to die—a metaphor for a doomed relationship. “Also it’s about sunlight being an illuminator of things, and if there are underlying problems when you love someone, those problems can really come to light and be quite obvious,” frontman Caleb Harper tells Apple Music. A recurring lyrical theme on the album is the journey from teenager to young adult, with Harper taking stock of his own life and the impact he has on others. It’s an emotional, personal ride. “A lot of things are pretty hard to listen to and hard to sing,” he says as he talks through a handful of the album’s songs.

Good for You
“‘Good for You’ is like me wanting so bad to be the best person for someone that I can be. But recognising that because of my own faults and failings, and because of things like depression, I’m not being the best person for my partner, and she knows it as well. I’m hoping that I could be better, but there’s no real timeline on that.”

Head Cold
“When I first started dating this girl, I decided to go clean and be sober for a while, and I was really struggling with that. She had asked me to do it because she didn’t want those things around and I understood that, but as I started to go down that path, some resentment built and I think I realised that staying off those things wasn’t going to fix the problem and it was something internal.”

Skin
“This is about infidelity and dealing with someone who’s a perpetrator of that and someone who’s been a recipient of that. Hoping that someone can still love you and look past those things, but knowing that I never personally could, and trying to grapple with that double standard in some ways.”

Good Grief
“My mother and I have had a really rocky relationship for years. I didn’t speak to her for the first year I moved out of home, which is a contrast because although we had a rough time growing up, we used to speak all the time and were good friends. And then at the beginning of last year we tried to make amends, but a couple of months into that we had a huge falling-out. I sent her this really long message and she just replied with ‘good grief’, and that was it, and we didn’t speak for months after that. That’s when I wrote ‘Good Grief’.”

Straightfaced
“I was in a relationship that was really not working out very well. I wasn’t in love and I wrote the song and just said that I’m not in love with you anymore before I’d told that to my ex at the time. That relationship failed, but it took another six months for anything to happen, we were up and down and all over the show. That song’s pretty hard for me to sing. I guess there’s a lot of regret around it.”