An Affair to Remember

Indeed, it didn't take long for Jonathan and Devlin to realize that Half Film simply wasn't going in the direction that they had envisioned. Compare its final LP, Road to the Crater, against These Weeks and it's easy to see what's missing: everything. If previous releases were pleasant sketches, collections of twinkling riffs and sincere, albeit tepid, vocals, These Weeks is a mesmerizing solar system of sounds. Soft-sung vocals orbit winsome slide guitars, bass lines trace elliptical patterns within a swirling atmosphere of reverb and noise -- and all of it revolves around a tight center of gravity, the lyrics, the themes, the dense history of a 10-year relationship pushed to its limits and finally crumbling.

By the time Road to the Crater arrived in stores, Half Film was no longer. At this point, the dot-com crash was in full swing and Jonathan and Devlin were disillusioned with both the city and their attempts to fulfill their musical vision in it. They needed a chance to clear their heads and get to work on something they could be truly proud of. They found it in Spain.

"We cut all ties; we didn't have any jobs to come back to," says Jonathan.

Having saved a chunk of money, the duo set off for Valencia, where Devlin's mother kept a small vacation home. They took their instruments and a four-track recorder.

"It wasn't a holiday," insists Jonathan. "When you go on a holiday you know you're always going back. This was like an open-ended thing. We didn't know where we were going to be, or what we were going to do afterwards."

Depending on the kind of person you are, an extended vacation on the coast of Spain may or may not come to mind as you listen to the languid sounds on These Weeks. If you're like Jonathan and Devlin, that's exactly what you think of.

"It's just sort of our natural mood," he says. "We were really enjoying ourselves there and really into it, but to me, languid is sort of what Spain does; it's total bliss -- I think languid is bliss."

In addition to languid, other adjectives that come to mind are graceful, pensive, airy, and bright -- but not bright like shiny-happy-people bright. Mediterranean bright. The way the sun strikes the eastern coast of Spain, the hot glow that reflects white off beige rocks, a magnesium intensity, warm and brilliant -- you hear it shimmer in Jonathan's slide-guitar playing on songs like "... At the Edge of the Water" and "Approaching the Coast," where the guitarist's whispered vocals mingle with the shining notes like someone telling secrets to a sunrise.

Other evocations of the Spanish setting include the rustic acoustic-guitar plucking that pops up here and there, the songs' gentle pacing, and the general atmospheric haze that floats throughout. In many ways, the songwriting and arrangements seem almost effortless, which, perhaps, they were.

"It was so fucking weird," says Jonathan, "because for the first time in 20 years I was getting up and not going to work or school. All I had to think about was music."

"And at the time we were a couple, so it made it a little bit easier," adds Devlin, which of course points to the record's true center, the tension that makes you come back to its songs again and again. "You know, things happened after that, so lyrically you might pick up on other stuff, but we thought the music was happy," she says, chuckling at the irony.

While many of the lyrics are vague, they resonate with the last chapter of Jonathan and Devlin's relationship. "It looked like war, and it felt like war/ That final night when you let him in," sings Jonathan on "Approaching the Coast."

"I always feel like a murder has just happened," says Jonathan about that song's lyrics. "It's about a couple who are really, really close, but it's also about a couple who are being torn apart by themselves as well."

With other songs the subject is unmistakable. On "No One Lives Here," a tune about the room the couple used to share, Devlin tells us, "And now paths lead the way/ To much shorter days/ A building filled with discarded sound/ And what we never found."

Certainly one of the most amazing things about the record is that it was even finished. Having written the songs in Valencia in the summer of 2000, the couple, along with producer Vallier, recorded bits and pieces sporadically over the course of the next two years, typically on weekends or when they could get time off from work (at what Devlin refers to as "boring day jobs"). Finally, though, in the winter of 2002, the pair began to buckle under the pressures of living and working together.

"The main thing I noticed at first was just the change in the physical way we were making the record," says Vallier. "At first it was all of us working together, and then there was a lot of me just working with Conor, me just working with Eimer." Ultimately, though, Vallier remembers that the couple never let their breakup interfere with the task at hand. "In the studio, creatively, maybe it inspired them. Maybe it made the record what it is. I don't know," he says. "Maybe it gave them each a different kind of strength."