ABOUT "SNOWDROPS"

‘Snowdrops’ is a deeply personal song for me. It deals with mental health and recovery, and marks another step towards my aim of complete transparency about my experiences and feelings in my music—even if that feels a little uncomfortable at times.

The song takes its name from the first flowers to bloom after winter, and reflects on a nervous breakdown I had in 1999, when I was eighteen, following my first serious relationship. 

Growing up in rural Devon in the late 1990s—a relatively homophobic area at that time—I fell for another young man who was struggling with his sexuality, his mental health, and with sustained homophobic bullying. His own collapse—and the end of our relationship shortly afterwards—precipitated my own, and in the early spring of that year I was admitted to a psychiatric ward at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital.

The story in ‘Snowdrops’ is drawn from a section of my as-yet-unpublished memoir about that period of my life. A few days after being discharged, I was driving through North Devon with friends when I experienced an epiphany that changed everything:

A song came on the radio which felt like it had been written for me. The words—about pulling through, about not giving up, about having the music in you—reached right out of the radio and into my heart. In that moment I realised how foolish I’d been to risk everything—my art, my very life—for a boy. I realised that I simply had to get better.

It marked a turning point in my life: the moment I became committed to being an artist. Over the following weeks, music—and the desire to live—slowly came back:

Over the course of a few weeks, the lights in my life started turning on again. I picked up my diary for the first time in over six months. I started writing music again. Life felt… well, if not brilliant, at least okay. Like it was worth living for. And that was enough.

All proceeds from the single will go to the Intercom Trust, a charity that works to make the South West a place where LGBT+ people are respected, celebrated, and able to live with real equality. I spent eighteen months involved with the organisation after my breakdown, and that involvement—having something to contribute to, something to put my back into—was a key part of my recovery. Its work is still close to my heart.

The relevant section of my memoir is at the bottom of this page. You can read more about my time working for the Intercom Trust in yet another extract from my memoir here, and more about the current organisation at www.intercomtrust.org.uk  

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Snowdrops

Daniel Land

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Hello everyone, I'm delighted to announce my new single, ‘Snowdrops’. It is a charity single, and all proceeds will be donated to the Intercom Trust, an organisation I was previously involved with—one which works to make Read more
Hello everyone,

I'm delighted to announce my new single, ‘Snowdrops’.

It is a charity single, and all proceeds will be donated to the Intercom Trust, an organisation I was previously involved with—one which works to make South West England a place where LGBT+ people are respected, celebrated, and able to live with real equality. The charity, its work, and my involvement with it relate directly to the themes of the song.

‘Snowdrops’ is a deeply personal song for me. It deals with mental health and recovery, and marks another step towards my aim of complete transparency about my experiences and feelings in my music—even if it feels a little uncomfortable at times to put myself so vulnerably “out there”.

The song takes its name from the first flowers to bloom after winter, and reflects on a nervous breakdown I had in 1999, when I was eighteen, following my first serious relationship.

Growing up in rural Devon in the late 1990s—a relatively homophobic place at the time—I fell for another young man who was struggling with his sexuality, his mental health, and sustained homophobic bullying. His own collapse—and the end of our relationship shortly afterwards—precipitated my own, and in the early spring of that year I was admitted to a psychiatric ward at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital.

The story in ‘Snowdrops’ is drawn from a section of my as-yet-unpublished memoir about that period of my life. A few days after being discharged, I was driving through North Devon with friends when I experienced an epiphany that changed everything:

"A song came on the radio which felt like it had been written for me. The words—about pulling through, about not giving up, about having the music in you—reached right out of the radio and into my heart. In that moment I realised how foolish I’d been to risk everything—my art, my very life—for a boy. I realised that I simply had to get better."

It marked a turning point in my life: the moment I became committed to being an artist. Over the following weeks, music—and the desire to live—slowly came back:

"Over the course of a few weeks, the lights in my life started turning on again. I picked up my diary for the first time in over six months. I started writing music again. Life felt… well, if not brilliant, at least okay. Like it was worth living for. And that was enough."

‘Snowdrops’ is the first single from my next album, due out either late this year or early next year.

As mentioned earlier, all proceeds from the single will go to the Intercom Trust, a charity that works with exactly the same kinds of vulnerable LGBTQ+ people I once was. After my breakdown, I volunteered for the organisation for over a year, and that involvement—having something to contribute to, something to put my back into—was a key part of my recovery. Its work remains close to my heart.

You can read more about my time working for the organisation in an extract from my memoir here:
www.danielland.co.uk/home/blog/7529394/in-memoriam-dr-michael-halls

And more about the current organisation here:
https://www.intercomtrust.org.uk
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  1. Snowdrops

lyrics

You can grieve it all, in time
You can memory-hole your crying
Turn your melancholy into line

And you
You wrote best when you're not in the dark
When you're living with an open heart
Though you wanted him more than Art

Oh, I
I sang a melancholy song
I had no direction I could turn
But the sky's electric blue above...

May you never fall apart
Even though you're connected to the dark
You're seeing in colour, now

And there's a limit to the nightmare
And you're lyrically light, now
It is your song

And when the lovely light of May
Puts your sorrow in a different shade
And you're never going back to grey

Oh, light
May you delicately fall
And light the new direction I must go
And the sky's electric blue, azure

May you never fall apart
Believe in your connection to your art
You see it in colour, now

Extract From my unpublished Memoir

After I was discharged from the psychiatric ward, I went away for three weeks. I spent most of that time in North Devon, with my friends, the Brody family. In the run-up to my breakdown, my schoolfriends Noah and Maya Brody had grown increasingly concerned about my welfare and had involved their parents, Tomas and Ruth, who reached out while I was in hospital and offered me a place to stay—an escape hatch, basically; somewhere to recuperate—at their home on the edge of Exmoor. It felt good to be away from my usual haunts. North Devon was a different territory. There’d be no chance of bumping into Seann here. I could heal in my own time.

The Brodys welcomed me into their house with open arms. They kept encouraging me to extend my stay. I stayed long enough to finish the mountains of coursework that was required if I was to be within a shouting distance of passing my A-Levels—which was far from certain, given how many weeks of college I’d missed.

They gave me the time and space I needed to recover. They drove me to Barnstaple, where I combed the market for second-hand books or sat on Castle Green Hill, the spot where my school friends and I once gathered to smoke. The rest of the time, we were out at their place in Brayford, in the very foothills of Exmoor, watching television, making food, and sitting talking in front of the open fireplace. Easter, which was early that year, was as cold as it had been the previous year. 

The Brodys were real thrash it out, let’s have it all out in the open kinds of talkers, and I spilled my guts about everything, and cried and cried. And in this totally different atmosphere I started to feel a bit better. I started to wonder if the problem wasn’t just Seann, but also the environment I was living in—the college, shitty little Tiverton, the atmosphere at home.  

And then, one beautiful, sunny spring morning, as the Brodys were driving us into Barnstaple, a song came on the radio which felt like it had been written for me. It was “You Get What You Give” by the New Radicals. That song, that band, eventually became a kind of punch line, a one hit wonder, but right then, the words—about pulling through, about not giving up, about having the music in you—reached right out of the radio, and into my heart. I realised how foolish I’d been to risk everything, my art, my very life, for a boy. I realised that I simply had to get better.

By this time, my doctor had prescribed me a different antidepressant, Amitriptyline, which made all the difference. From the day I started taking the pills, until I came off the medication, eighteen months later, I never suffered a poor night’s sleep. And although it took a while for my depression to lift, being able to rest changed everything.

Over the course of five or six weeks, the lights in my life started turning on again. I realised I was more in control of my feelings. I found myself thinking about Seann less often—when I did, it wasn’t the agony it had been. I went a whole day, and then a week, between crying spells. I started to realise that perhaps Seann and I hadn’t been as well-matched as I had thought; that there might be other men in my life—eventually. I started getting out more. I had my hair cut, chemically relaxed, and lightened in colour. I reached out to people, re-established old friendships, and formed new ones. Pretty soon I had a job, in a cool, retro video shop. I had money, and there was good music out there in the world to spend it on. I picked up my diary for the first time in over six months. I started writing music again. Life felt… well, if not brilliant, at least okay. Like it was worth living for. And that was enough.