Puma Blue on the Struggle and Catharsis Within His Upcoming Album, Holy Waters

Jacob Allen, better known by the moniker of Puma Blue, has never failed to captivate us with his ethereal alternative sound and sage lyricism, but we firmly believe his upcoming sophomore album, Holy Waters, will be his most important body of work yet.

The English singer-songwriter's new album drops on Sep. 1, and today, the world got another taste of the stunning collection thanks to his latest single, "Dream Of You," complete with an evocative black-and-white music video. We've been counting down the days, and ahead of the release, we got the opportunity to chat with Jacob all about the album, its heavy yet cathartic and joyous themes and what made its recording process different from anything else he's made before. Discover it all in the interview below.

Sweety High: What does the album name Holy Waters mean to you? Why did that title track feel like the best summation of the album as a whole?

Jacob Allen: I'd never named a project after a song before. It always comes from somewhere else, even if it's lyrics, but there's a big theme of death on this album—dealing with death, or accepting death as part of life. The song "Holy Waters" is about my personal struggle with my own death, I suppose, "Holy Waters" being this current that can pull you underneath. I saw it as "holy" because it's bigger than you. When it's your time, it's your time. I saw it as this powerful water current that can threaten to pull you underneath, and it's your job to either struggle against the tide or let it take you.

That song, in particular, is actually about how, when it's your own decision, it doesn't necessarily mean it is your time. I'm saying the opposite—that the waters were threatening to pull me underneath, and I was deciding to get above it. But the reason it felt like a good title for the album as a whole was that those waters seemed to almost be lurking around my ankles for the whole writing and recording process. It felt like death was always in the background and always there, whether it was thematically in the songs or something that was going on in our lives as a band. It seemed to sum up the struggle of the album.

(Photo credit: Natalie Hewitt)

 

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SH: Why do you feel those themes are so prevalent on this album? What do you hope the listeners get out of that exploration?

JA: I don't know if I've thought about it that far. As an artist, I've always got to be as honest as I can, first and foremost, and then consider my listeners at the end of the process rather than during the process. Otherwise, I get too caught up in trying to give the listeners what they want. And guessing what they want is a losing game, anyway, because I don't really know what my fans want or why they listen to me at all—and that might all end one day. The drive to make music comes from a need to be authentic and honest and express what's true in my life.

In the band, a lot of us were personally experiencing loss over the last couple of years. Everyone in the band lost somebody, and I lost a few people. I've recently lost someone, post-album being wrapped, and it felt like I couldn't get away from writing about it. There are a couple of songs on the album that aren't about death and explore other things. It wasn't this goal that every song had to be under that umbrella. It wasn't a concept record or anything like that. It just happened that through writing lyrics that felt honest and through spending more time with the band on this one than I've ever done before, it kept coming up, and so I decided to lean into it as opposed to shying away from it. If there's anything I hope the listeners get out of it, I think through the pandemic, a lot of people lost people or had to face death on death's terms, so I hope that it brings catharsis. But it might not be an album for everybody. I don't know. I haven't really thought about how the subject might be too much for some people. But that's not really my job.

 

SH: How did you go about the production of this album?

JA: My initial EPs were just me and a laptop and the sound of my bedroom, and I'd imagined that the first record, In Praise of Shadows, would be a little bit more of a hybrid of what we sound like live, and then me in a bedroom again, but there was a limit to what I could do because of the pandemic. I was forced to make the album quite insular and laptop-based. I ended up coming away from it knowing that the next thing I did, I really wanted to involve the band more.

So on this record, album two, it was really important to me to record all together live in the studio, which is something we haven't done very much before, besides in chunks and pieces here and there. This time, pretty much every song was either recorded live or had a huge live element to it.

It was crazy to get to do that. I intended to give the band these fully finished demos, and then we'd play them together, but actually, it became way more collaborative. We all ended up writing together, and some of the songs even came from jams. The production came from a very live and collaborative place, and because that felt so old-school, I decided to delve into the idea of using the studio more as an instrument. Me and Harvey [Grant] in the band (he's a sax and keys player) got really into doing things the analog way and running things through tape backward, and it just got to be really fun. I was influenced by the way Portishead used to combine live elements with production elements. It was about retaining what I love about being a producer at home, but also having this live quality to it and having the band more prevalent on to music.

(Photo credit: Natalie Hewitt)

 

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SH: Do you have a favorite aspect of the different energy that recording it live brought to the table?

JA: The improvisation was really amazing. Live, I always encourage the band to improvise as much as they feel, so there's always a structure, but everything else is very loose. We had that same energy in the studio, so instead of having to choose a take based on which time we nailed it best, it was more about which take we liked the most. We were doing different things on each one, so it was about which one set the best mood or carried the story the best, or which one excited us the most. It made the music more about the feelings and the chemistry.

You can always stack tracks up and do multi-tracking and play along with yourself, and that's always going to be a fun thing to do, like layering paints, but there's something about all being in the room together, having what is essentially a conversation together, that's just so much more of a dance. Everyone's, in microseconds, adjusting to each other or staying out of each other's way to create space or deciding to accent a moment. You can only do that in that way when you're all doing it together. I loved being able to record those things, and there are maybe two tunes on the album that were very heavily improvised that way. They're some of my favorite things I've experienced as a musician, and I'm just so grateful we were able to record them and capture them forever—those moments where I'm playing with my friends and everyone is just interacting in the moment. And it will live on this album forever, and that's what's really exciting to me. It's like having family photographs or something.

 

SH: Do you have a favorite track that came out of that process?

JA: Probably track five, which is a song called "Too Much." It was the first thing we did when we got into the studio, before looking at any of the songs I'd brought or demos that I had recorded. We were just jamming. We'd already set everything up, and before we got into the serious stuff, we just started to play, and the first thing we played was the first half of that song. It just came out very organically, and we had no idea it would be something we would use at first. It was just this very flowing piece of music. We worked on it for a couple of hours, and it eventually became the second half of the song. That side of it was a lot more free, and we didn't really have a set idea of where to go with it or a structure or a plan. I just love hearing it back and remembering how loose it was and the way everyone contributed, rather than me handing out roles, like with some of the other songs. Everything that's on there is something the band member wrote themselves. The keyboard part belongs to Harvey and the bass part belongs to Cameron [Dawson]. It was a very exciting process to get lost in. I love that one because, to me, in my memory, that's the sound of that starting to happen, and the two halves of the song feel the two ways that it can go. The beginning was very refined, and the end feels very loose.

(Photo credit: Natalie Hewitt)

 

SH: Did you feel with this second album that there was added pressure to follow up and exceed the first?

JA: Honestly, with the way we can share music through SoundCloud and Spotify and stuff, it felt like the first two EPs almost congregated as a first record, and I actually felt the pressure more around the first album because it felt like a second album. It took me ages to write, and while I was really happy with it when I finished it, I think in retrospect, I'm not as proud of it as I am of the EPs, weirdly, even though it's more refined. It just didn't quite do what I wanted it to do in terms of how I made it sound and how I pulled it all together, whereas this one felt so free. It just felt like a third record where anything goes, and we could just do something that felt true to us. I feel more proud of this than any of my work before it. It took a while to start writing it, but then once I did, and once the band were involved, it just snowballed. There are a lot of songs that didn't make the record because we were trying to keep it to two sides of vinyl. I felt more pressure last time, and this time felt very freeing.

 

Ahead of the album release, also be sure to check out the music video for the latest single, "Dream of You," below:

 

For more of the stories behind great new music, click HERE to read our interview with Maddie Zahm on her latest single, "Where Do All the Good Kids Go?"