the earth broke open and the beast crawled out

Randy Ortiz, “Battles”

L’O: Your 2011 album, Ceremonials, was released around Halloween, and now Everybody Scream is following a similar timeframe. What’s the significance of Halloween for you?

FW: It’s more to do with the holiday’s pagan roots [in Ireland] than dressing up, really. Halloween was the time when the veil between the living and the dead was said to be at its thinnest. For this album, I didn’t realize how close death was. It was sort of like, Oh, death is just a doorway. Also, if the last album [Dance Fever] was a fairy tale, this one is a horror film, so it all made sense.

L’O: You’ve mentioned that mysticism and healing are big themes for this record.

FW: Modern medicine saved my life, but people couldn’t really tell me why. I had to find meaning. I became really interested in witchcraft, magic, and medicine, because what happened to me was so violent. I wanted to study the different forms of healing, which led me down a path of exploring esoteric and pagan rituals as well as British occultism. I also spent a lot of time researching at The Warburg Institute [a research center in London]. It was my way through the two years, figuring out how to stitch that into the album and make meaning of [the experience].

David Duchovny as Fox Mulder