More on what the word "green" had come to mean and why Woods IV is the Green Album...
DG: “Green” was everywhere and I couldn’t escape being reminded of everything that I lost. It knocked the breath out of my chest every time I saw it like a punch in the heart and I saw it everywhere, mostly in modern advertising. There was a time when I was on my way to work in Seoul, Korea, when I stepped out of the subway to see a huge 50-foot environmental awareness billboard that read “Love Green” in huge green block letters. Knowing I would encounter this word throughout the rest of my life often enough and knowing that I was severely attached to it enough for it to have the potential to continue to wear me down and eventually destroy me, I needed to do something for my own survival, even if it meant tricking myself by changing the meaning. At the very least, I distract myself from the love that I lost with the consolation that I am reminded instead of Woods of Ypres and the album that I wrote about the love that I lost, of the same name, Green. My little experiment was a relative success in salvaging what was left of me. It was also the source for some unique, once in a lifetime type inspiration that I would use to create something heavy, intense and convincing, as a kind of souvenir. At least now, “Green” reminds me somewhat more of the album, than the unfortunate events that inspired the album, the same way that seeing any forest reminds me of Woods of Ypres more than it does the personal tragedies that often inspired the music. We are the trees, and now we are “green,” too. However, these are still small battles won after the war had been lost, and I still long for all that was. It’s certainly not the album I ever wanted to write but it did indeed become my story and I wanted it to be told. It was also a way for me to communicate my feelings one last time, like a message in a bottle on the ocean. See track ten: “You Are Here With Me (in this sequence of dreams).” I thought that was a fitting place and a bittersweet sentiment on which to finally part ways, in song. Some warm, nostalgic class, post-reactionary-doom-metal-chaos.
How directly autobiographical is your writing?
DG: Maybe it finally borders on “too much,” but in my defence, on the right side of the border, and doesn’t go over. I imagine (hope) that this is last time I will ever write an album like this. Woods songs have always been cathartic for me, paying tribute to some terrible experience with self-satisfying song. I already knew when embarking on my adventure to Korea that I would eventually write the “Green” album, and I’m very happy that we were successful in putting it together and making it happen as quickly as it did, in less than two years since the release of Woods III. I know that the “green” album was the only album I knew how to write in the condition I was in and I felt that it was a good idea to purge all of those feelings and get them out of my system and into song all at once and asap, so those themes didn’t continue to reappear in my songwriting, or my real life, in the future. I also had to make this album before too long, to deliver myself to a place of peace and prove to the rest of the world that I didn’t die, it didn’t kill me. I guess all that experience brought me to a point where I was weak enough to call it quits, but also too tough to die, which is very characteristically “Woods of Ypres” of me.
