Björk à propos du titre Black Lake

I think I was mostly focused on emotion. This is the record’s hardest song for me. It was written three months after the divorce. I flew to Japan and didn’t manage to adjust to the time difference, because… you know…
[silence].
It was really the bottom for me, in that process. I had checked into this wonderful health retreat to recover from the jetlag, it was just me and James [Merry, Björk’s assistant] and his boyfriend Jón, acting silly and having laughing fits. And there were these hot springs and everyone was wearing Samurai clothes, as if we were in a Japanese animé.
I would operate on Icelandic time, sleeping through the day, spending my nights soaking in the hotsprings by myself. And I wrote this song, insanely jetlagged, and I had to work through this feeling…
[silence]…
It’s like, when you’re trying to express something and you sort of start, but then nothing comes out. You can maybe utter five words and then you’re just stuck in the pain. And the chords in-between, they sort of represent that. Those minutes of stuttering silence. Then, you maybe manage a few more words, and then you’re stuck again.
We called them “the freezes,” these moments between the verses. They’re longer than the verses, actually. It’s just that one emotion when you’re stuck. It is hard, but it’s also the only way to escape the pain, just going back and having another go, trying to make another verse.
Black Lake also employs a method that I used a long time ago, in a song off Post that’s called Possibly Maybe. In that song, each verse was named after a month, it was nine verses for nine months. Actually, some of those verses wound up being cut, and of course it’s not at all as dramatic, but it shares with Black Lake a… a temporality ? As in, the song progresses through time. The first verse happens a month after… I can’t remember for sure, but the second verse is maybe a week later, and the next verse is a week after that.
By the time we reach the last verse, something has changed, something is different.

reykjavik grapevine - Janvier 2015