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It’s my Devil telling me, ‘Compromise who you are, and all this can be yours…’” “In that song, sometimes I’m writing as myself, but sometimes I’m talking as my subconscious and my depression, which is standing in the way of my goals, and telling me I’m not good enough. She points to recent single Circle With Me as a further example. “Eternal Blue is pure selfishness, because this music for me is what I need to move on from a lot of feelings and aggression and really dark, intrusive thoughts that I constantly have.”
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“Heavy music is one of the best ways to help yourself connect with those feelings, so you can get over it move on, even if it’s just a couple steps onward,” Courtney says. Its title is as much a phrase to encapsulate Courtney’s story as it is this collection of music. Though predominantly recorded in Joshua Tree, California, at the turn of this year, much of Eternal Blue’s writing took shape during this dark time, and resultantly the scars of that journey are writ large across its 12 tracks. “I would prefer not to deal with these feelings, but doesn’t make me like a flawed person.” “It took him to make me realise that it’s not normal, and it’s not that there’s something wrong with me, this is just part of who I am,” Courtney says. ‘We’ve got to do something about this,’ he told her. It wouldn’t be until just two years ago that Michael gently approached the subject of his partner’s “ebbs and flows of emotions” those three-day stints “of crippling self-doubt and anxiety where I couldn’t get out of my bed”. “I’m very lucky that I am around, you know, because the teenage brain is so much different than the fully developed adult brain.” I was manipulative enough to slip through the cracks, so that I never had to deal with anything. “ I never knew what was, and I thought that that was just how things should be… I probably cried out for help a lot and but didn’t, because everyone around me was going through so much stuff. In a new school in a new town, she struggled to find both a place and friends. “I left my whole life behind,” says the eldest of six siblings.
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Born and raised in Alabama in the Deep South of the United States, aged 15 she relocated 2, 000 miles north to Victoria, Vancouver Island, off Canada’s West Coast, following her parents’ divorce and her mother’s re-marriage. “There’s people who are using it as a distraction, kind of how I was at the end of IWABO – I was using that as a way to not have to go, ‘Okay, you have $ 100 to your name, it’s time for you to move on.’ And then there’s the people like who we are today, who are like, ‘I have to do this, I’m compelled to do this, and nothing can stop me.’”Īs turns of phrase go, few will ever be as haunting as Courtney’s revelation that her life has been “plagued by depression”. “I think there’s two kinds of people ,” she reasons. When Courtney and Michael married, in 2016, guests were asked not to gift the couple new toasters or ‘Live Laugh Love’ artwork, but to instead spare them a few dollars to help cover the costs of mixing and mastering the home recordings that comprised their debut EP, released in 2017.Ĭourtney today describes the belief Michael and herself shared in their fledgling outfit not simply as naïve, but “delusional”. Their former manager in IWABO, Jason Mageau, would tout the name Spiritbox to anyone who would listen (and, when his praises fell on deaf ears, he’d simply start a label, Pale Chord, in order to release the band’s music himself). They, too, had the help of their friends, who would take promo photos, or help realise video shoots for pocket change. And soon enough, they had some music – progressive, heavy and atmospheric, while owing more than a little bit to the band TesseracT – and a new band to call their own. But, as inseparable “soulmates” romantically as well as creatively, they still had each other. Employment for the then- 27-year-old Courtney would instead be found waiting tables for $ 8 an hour Michael, similarly, took on the task of slinging pizzas from the back of a delivery car (the pair now work together at a data-entry company). “The longer you’re on tour, the more we don’t have to, like, get a job or try to find somewhere to live other than your parents’ basement.”Ī lack of viable prospects for the former precluded the latter. “I think most people in mid-level bands, we are all just running away from reality,” she reflects.
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Turns out, when you’ve spent the past few years of your life “touring the country with your favourite bands”, real life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Looking back on that decision to “hand in my two-week’s notice” and get the hell out of dodge, she laughs a knowing laugh as she recalls where that choice led to next. Courtney LaPlante – engaging, affable, effortlessly cool – is today sat in a Los Angeles hotel.