Behind The Tracks: Isilmé - In The Dark (Single) (2022)

“When I first listened to the guitar demo that Eric (guitarist, vocalist) had written, that would eventually turn into “In The Dark,” there was a soft and yearning feeling that immediately jumped out. The first lyrics I wrote down, I was trying to describe that wonderful, terrifying sensation of finding yourself deeply in love with someone. That dreamlike moment when you wake up in the night and feel the weight of them next to you. It’s dark, time isn’t real, and you’re just laying there listening to them breathe, full of all these emotions. It’s painfully vulnerable and exhilarating at the same time.

This was particularly easy to conjure up for me, given that Eric and I are in fact deeply in love, and it was in the first year of our relationship that we started working on this track. Sharing thoughts during the writing process was kind of like passing little love notes back and forth. (We’re still nauseatingly into each other, for the record.)

Pulling from the idea of pining over your sleeping sweetheart, the second element of “In The Dark” comes from Greek mythology and the myth of Selene and Endymion. Selene, the goddess of the moon, falls in love with the sleeping form of the handsome (and human) shepherd Endymion and visits him every night in his dreams. She pleads with Zeus to bestow on him perpetual youth so that they might never be parted, and Zeus grants this wish by putting him in an eternal slumber, never to grow old or to wake. The story felt like a natural fit, and a crescent moon is something we used from the beginning for visuals with Isilmé (which also means moonlight in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish).”