TOUCHE AMORE

INTERVIEW WITH VOCALIST JEREMY BOLM BY MICK R.

There is no telling how loss is going to affect a person. Most of us are familiar with the stages of grief as they are popularly enumerated. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. An orderly, linear path, with an assured destination. You accept the loss and move on. Or maybe you don’t. Perhaps you'll skip a step and loop back around, or experience stages out of order. You may even experience multiple stages simultaneously, or none of them at all. There is no timeline for this process. Your emotions don't keep a calendar or take days off. There is no hourglass to watch. There is no way of knowing when the wheel of emotions will stop its mutilating grind.

Ultimately, your experience of loss is your own, and no one can tell you when what you’re feeling is right and how you will proceed to heal. Touché Amoré’s Jeremy Bolm wrote an entire album about the loss of his mother to cancer, and many of the emotions he felt while writing that record, he still feels to this day. The experience of living with these emotions and processing them publicly is the emotional cog that turns the entire apparatus of Touché Amoré’s latest album, Lament, out on Epitaph Records.

“Lament is about what my life is since [2016’s] Stage Four came out,” Bolm explains. “The issues that come with being so direct and honest about my own grief and how that has affected my life, with an audience responding to it, and the connections that I’ve made with people through that suffering.”

Understandably, having one’s emotional state during a vulnerable period of their life serve as the focal point for an entire record can be taxing.

“Writing Lament was a way to get out my feelings on how Stage Four has affected me,” Bolm says. “And the guilt that I have for not really being able to be there for people, but also me expressing that shit is hard to navigate.”

To Bolm, being able to cultivate a communion of experience and emotions with his fans through his work, and sharing a common journey of grief with them, is one of the things he appreciates the most about being in Touché Amoré. Bolm says. “This band has always been sort of my therapeutic way of dealing with stuff.”

Unfortunately, drawing a map of his emotions for others to follow has made Bolm a sought-after navigator of the rough seas of anguish for fans experiencing loss in their own lives. These moments hit him hard.

“It kind of hits me out of nowhere,” he says. “I’m on tour and walking to get a coffee, or in a record store flipping through records, someone will approach me, and I’m more than happy to talk to anybody. I'll take a headphone out and be like, ‘Hey, what's going on?’ And it seems like it’s going to be just a nice conversation, but more often than not, they say, ‘Just want to let you know my sister died of brain cancer, and your record was really there for me.’ I’m realizing that it can be, for a lack of a better word, triggering ..."

Bolm confirms that moments like these occur on a near-daily basis, if not in person, then through social media or email.

“It's a position that I didn't realize I would fully put myself in releasing [Stage Four],” he admits.

The role of impromptu therapist is one that he is not comfortable playing, and the expectations placed on him by fans in this regard can feel inappropriate and painful at times. Still, Bolm doesn't begrudge fans for wanting to give voice to their grief when they meet him.

“I totally get it,” he affirms. “There are so many bands in my life who have put out records that have meant something to me, and I have had the opportunity to tell them that. I guess as a younger person, I never thought about how if a record is deeply personal to that artist, me telling them how the record made me feel could potentially affect them.”

So, why Bolm is still open to these interactions, as painful as they can be?

“It's because I live with being so appreciative of anyone ever giving a shit about what we do and continuing to listen to what we do,” he says. “I feel like I owe them my life.”�� �� ��