CW: At one level, this album’s principal subject-matter is the journey through addiction and recovery, but it’s also about love, and perhaps about some dialectical relation between the two: addiction getting in the way of love, love being a catalyst for overcoming addiction. Some form of resolution seems to be found in the final song, ‘Love Will Find a Way’, which is very affectionate, almost penitential. I wonder whether there was any intention behind that structure?

JM: The sense that the album has a resolution is one I don’t have intuitively because the order of the songs was arrived at very late in the process. How you start and finish something has quite a bearing on what someone might think it’s all about. Incidentally ‘Love Will Find a Way’ was one of the first songs that was written.

CW: I may be misremembering but I thought I’d heard an earlier version of that recording where the feedback noise overlaying the piano outro was much quieter than it is in the current version, making it less tonally ambiguous, and more optimistic.

JM: That’s interesting but it wasn’t intentional. Sometimes in the process of mastering certain elements that initially sit low in the mix can be brought to the surface, often in a nice way. The passage you’re referring to was actually taken from the Siegfried Idyll, a Wagner chamber piece, and rearranged by our pianist Alex Wilson. It’s, for me, one of the greatest love songs ever written. I remember reading that Wagner wrote it for his wife Cosima, and that when he first presented it to her he sat on the piano as Cosima stood on the stairs looking down at him as he played it. For some reason Nietzsche, who was devoutly in love with Cosima, was there as well, presumedly writhing in jealousy.

CW: So you’re co-opting some of that mythology in your song.

JM: Possibly. The fixation with romantic love, and the return to it as a theme, I often think about in terms of there being a certain idiom in which love is talked about in pop music, one that has both tenderness and artifice to it. I’ve always found the way in which love is performed in pop music very powerful. And as you say, the album is about a period in my life which involved a certain amount of growth and recovery from times of being not very happy, and so it has that mixture of light and dark. But while telling that story I keep returning to this manner of speaking about love, a grand, universal, almost unreal kind of love.

CW: I think that’s what I was getting at at the beginning of the interview. The feeling that the gestural romantic idealism is at cross purposes to that darkness and pain that dominates much of the lyrical landscape.

JM: I think it’s fairly true to life, or my life at least, that the tendency to romanticise and idealise runs deep, but sits alongside a reality inadequate to that ideal. This album, of all the things we’ve released, has been the hardest to pin down what it is exactly that I’m trying to say. Autobiographically that would make sense, since half of it was written when I was in quite a bad way, making an enemy of myself. When I first started to develop what I can recognise now as my lyrical voice, a huge part of that was that I found it cathartic and gratifying to be excessively honest about my own experiences, and there was a certain power in that. I’ve always been a quietly shy and introverted person that tried to push against my shyness, so it was a relief to realise there was this way I could take ownership of the narrative of my own life and put it up in grand lights. But in recent years I’ve grown more sceptical of that. It’s very easy to start living your life as if you’re trying to make an artistic point.