An Affair to Remember

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."

As we near the end of our conversation, after having recounted their story from Point A to Point B, perhaps for the first time ever, there's a glint in both Jonathan's and Devlin's eye, nothing too dramatic, but merely, to borrow a phrase, a remembrance of things past. I imagine it's not unlike the way a divorced couple feels about their child, that symbol of a love that's gone but not forgotten.

"You know when you take a photograph, and everyone's happy, and it feels great?" Jonathan asks in an attempt to explain These Weeks to me. "Or you're having a really nice evening, but you sort of know that it's not going to last, it's finite, you know? It has an end to it. And all you're going to have is like a vapor trail, you know, the memory of it so to speak. To me a lot of the record is about memory, things you can't get back to and all that -- Jesus, am I making any sense?"

"Yeah," says Devlin almost immediately, for she, of all people, would know best.