SYA: What was Listen to the River’s songwriting process like, especially compared with the previous album?

DW: I write very visually, so if I know who's going to be playing different parts in a song, I can write the structures based on the mental image of who's in the room, who's playing it. With Ars Moriendi it was like we could have any instrument played by anybody and bring them in for it.

But with Listen to the River, we'd been touring as this solid group of people for a while, and there's something about touring together where you begin to trust each other a lot. I really wanted to do something more as a group, and that was very different. So rather than saying, "Does this song need a string section?”, it was like, "We have this song, so what is the clarinet going to do? And what is the trombone going to do?" It was more about how do we fit these instruments into the songs. I'd never written a record like that, so it was really fun - fun and also pretty tough, because I think I'm a bit of a control freak.

SYA: What kind of sound were you aiming for with Listen to the River?

DW: The big thing for me was melody. I was listening to a ton of pop music, actually - especially these really powerful women like Adele and Sia and Beyoncé. And I started to get to this place where I was just like, I want to feel like the melodies that I write are really singable so that, if I take away the music and just have the melody, would I still want to sing it? That kind of thing. That was a big focus for me. And it was good to be able to focus on that because the rest of the band was kind of able to do their own thing. Whereas in the past I was, you know, jack of all trades, master of none. On this I felt like I got to focus just on vocal melody a lot.

And then we started listening to sounds that are in pop music - we don't want that specific sound, but how can we create the same effect with a different instrument? So this song "The Older One" that's on there - there are these big horn swells, and we thought, we want to figure out how to make the horn section sound like a synthesizer. So how do we do that? We ended up going, "Okay, you try playing this trombone like a synthesizer, and you play this clarinet part like a violin", and we'd see if we could make these instruments sound like other things, or make the music accomplish something different. That was definitely a big difference.

SYA: You mentioned “The Older One”. Is there a connection between that song and “The Younger One”, “The Middle One”, and “The Doubtful One” from Ars Moriendi?

DW: Yeah, all those songs - well, except for "The Doubtful One" - all those songs are written about my siblings. I have three siblings. They were kind of snapshots or interpretations of where each of my siblings were at a certain point in their life. My plan was that Ars Moriendi would have all three songs, but when we got to it it turned out that "The Older One" was not very strong, and the other ones were a lot stronger. So then I felt determined that I had to write an "Older One" song for the next record and put it on there.

"The Doubtful One" is kind of an autobiographical interpretation, as well. So they're all connected in that way.

SYA: What’s the background for the spiritual crisis that this album documents?

DW: Well, I think I got very burnt out. We were doing The Collection, and I was working at a church, and within that community we basically had a house church going that I was leading a lot of. So, you know, I was doing like four or five things where I was leading these huge groups of people... At the same time, I started really questioning certain foundations of things. Like, you know, you just start reading any science textbook and go, "I don't know if there actually was a giant flood that covered the whole earth a few thousand years ago..."

The big one for me was that I just started meeting a lot of gay friends. And I just started being like, I cannot understand how a God who calls himself love - not just that he is loving, but that he is the epitome of the thing we call "love" - would be less loving than I could. Like, I would never take one of these people and, like, let them burn for eternity because of this thing that doesn't feel or seem destructive. But this God of love could do that? That feels really ridiculous.

And that started happening around the time when my ex-wife's dad also died very suddenly. While we were going through that process - which was part of writing Ars Moriendi, too - that was the big question people asked: "Was he saved? Was he a Christian?" And in a typical sense, no. He wasn't a Christian. So I started being like, "What? What kind of loving God would do that kind of thing?"

I think that through all that, I hit a pretty destructive, tough place in my life. I have this specific memory of being in my car and just crying and praying, and halfway through that prayer being like, "I'm not talking to anybody. I'm just talking to myself in this car." So I just stopped halfway through, and I think the next couple years I didn't do anything else. I was very depressed. I got very into astronomy, too, and the more that I read those kind of things, I think that that also wasn't healthy - it made life feel very pointless.

But yeah, somebody had given me this book of Rumi poetry and my family was on this trip at the beach and I was just like, okay, I'm gonna see what this is all about. And I opened to the first poem - actually, there's a mewithoutYou line that's taken directly from it. If you start reading Rumi, you'll be like, "Oh, every Aaron Weiss line is, like, word for word." It's either John Donne or Rumi. *laughs*

But there's this one poem where he’s talking about the world, and he says, "How did I end up in this brothel for drunks?" This is a paraphrase, but he basically says "I don't know where I came from, and I don't know where I'll end up when I die. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home." And I was just on the beach crying. Because I was like, "Oh my God, this guy from the 1200s is saying all this stuff that I've been wondering.” It just felt so sad and desperate but also so hopeful. So I soaked in that book - I mean, I was just flying through that book - and then started diving into some other Sufi stuff. And I went on this big journey. I was like okay, if I'm having trouble knowing what I believe, I don't want to just sit around. I don't wanna be the kind of person that says, I don't know what I believe, so that's it, and now I guess I'll be depressed and bummed-out my whole life. It's like, okay, then do something about it. So I started buying every religious book that I could and going through them. So you know, I was reading the Qur'an and the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching and Thích Nhất Hạnh and Gandhi and Yogananda and all this stuff. And I think through that I started to feel this kind of revival of... not the literal meanings, but I guess of the essence of the things that I grew up with.

And I started to realize that the essence of these things Jesus said still meant so much to me, and to some degree I stopped caring about if I could prove Noah's ark. It doesn't matter... I mean, what are those stories communicating? There’s some kind of hopeful thing that we’ve called God...

The Kaballah - which is like the mystic sect of Judaism - their word for God is the Ein Sof. And it basically means “nothing” with a capital N. It’s this idea that everything in our world, whether it’s an emotion or a house or a table, is something that’s tangible and something you can touch or feel. Even the emotion of something like sadness is something that you can wrap your brain around. And then we have this thing we call God, which is... the stuff that’s not that. *laughs*

So yeah, all this stuff just started to shape this understanding of religion being these beautiful stories of trying to explain this unexplainable thing we call God - you know, the Ein Sof... But it's still changing all the time, you know, and hopefully it always will be. I hope I'm always learning and changing.