The Tale Behind “Pozhato”. Here’s one of the very few videos where Fedor (the founder of our band) actually “sings” side by side with Yana, then bursts out laughing as he mimics the creak of an ancient tree. The footage comes from a twelve-camera shoot at our Theodor Bastard concert in the Eifman Academy Theatre, and the song’s back-story is as strange as that laugh.
After so many years of making music, you can lose sight of why you began. While we were shaping the tracks for Volch’ya Yagoda we felt exactly that: stuck in a musical bog, spinning our wheels, rejecting every note we wrote. It was late 2019, the eve of the pandemic—the peak of our creative despair.
So Fedor ran away. He had just bought a small cabin in Karelia. One gray autumn morning he pulled on felt boots and an old sheepskin coat and wandered into the forest, shuffling over moss hummocks and wind-fallen trunks. Several hours in, he heard a sound so eerie it seemed alive—a drawn-out, mournful groan. Frozen in the thicket, he realized it came from a dying tree: its bark and limbs grinding together, complaining, almost weeping.
Listening, he suddenly saw himself in that tree: bent, stubbled, weighed down by thought. Old Russian proverbs welled up—“Life is long, but each moment is precious,” “To live a life is not to cross a field.” It felt like touching a hidden spring of folk wisdom, what Jung would have called the collective unconscious. In that instant the fog lifted. It was like tumbling into a fly-agaric fairy-tale, only to find the path home.
When dusk fell and the cabin lights glowed ahead, Fedor’s heart eased: Everything I’m searching for is already here—in this warmth, in the people I love.
The next morning he returned with a field recorder, wide-awake and clear-headed, and captured that infernal creak. You can hear it in the track on album, taking the place of a solo.
When the rest of us first listened, each of us pictured something different—yet we all felt the same chill. Yana caught the spirit at once; together she and Fyodor shaped the chorus and its melodic turns. That day we turned a page. “Pozhato” became a way back to ourselves, made without looking over our shoulders to see whether anyone would approve. We had drunk again from the very source that once set us on this road.
Theodor Bastard
The Tale Behind “Pozhato”. Here’s one of the very few videos where Fedor (the founder of our band) actually “sings” side by side with Yana, then bursts out laughing as he mimics the creak of an ancient tree. The footage comes from a twelve-camera shoot at our Theodor Bastard concert in the Eifman Academy Theatre, and the song’s back-story is as strange as that laugh.
After so many years of making music, you can lose sight of why you began. While we were shaping the tracks for Volch’ya Yagoda we felt exactly that: stuck in a musical bog, spinning our wheels, rejecting every note we wrote. It was late 2019, the eve of the pandemic—the peak of our creative despair.
So Fedor ran away. He had just bought a small cabin in Karelia. One gray autumn morning he pulled on felt boots and an old sheepskin coat and wandered into the forest, shuffling over moss hummocks and wind-fallen trunks. Several hours in, he heard a sound so eerie it seemed alive—a drawn-out, mournful groan. Frozen in the thicket, he realized it came from a dying tree: its bark and limbs grinding together, complaining, almost weeping.
Listening, he suddenly saw himself in that tree: bent, stubbled, weighed down by thought. Old Russian proverbs welled up—“Life is long, but each moment is precious,” “To live a life is not to cross a field.” It felt like touching a hidden spring of folk wisdom, what Jung would have called the collective unconscious. In that instant the fog lifted. It was like tumbling into a fly-agaric fairy-tale, only to find the path home.
When dusk fell and the cabin lights glowed ahead, Fedor’s heart eased: Everything I’m searching for is already here—in this warmth, in the people I love.
The next morning he returned with a field recorder, wide-awake and clear-headed, and captured that infernal creak. You can hear it in the track on album, taking the place of a solo.
When the rest of us first listened, each of us pictured something different—yet we all felt the same chill. Yana caught the spirit at once; together she and Fyodor shaped the chorus and its melodic turns. That day we turned a page. “Pozhato” became a way back to ourselves, made without looking over our shoulders to see whether anyone would approve. We had drunk again from the very source that once set us on this road.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6HT9...
6 months ago | [YT] | 28