In 2023, Thomas Azier’s wife was diagnosed with lymphoma, about a year after the birth of their son. What followed was a year that felt like living on the edge of something constantly collapsing. Nights stretched endlessly—sitting beside her, watching numbers on a thermometer drop too low, wondering if this was the moment things would turn. Meanwhile, life didn’t pause. There was a baby to care for, work that kept moving, and a relationship suddenly forced into an entirely different reality.
He was a father, a partner, an artist—but also just a human being, still carrying desire, still feeling closeness, still longing for the person lying right next to him. That contradiction stayed with him. We don’t really have songs about that. About love and sexuality existing alongside illness. About wanting someone who is still here, but also not, in some way.
During that time, words failed him. The experience was too close, too layered, too overwhelming to capture. But music came. He kept returning to the same few chords, circling them, as if they could hold something he couldn’t yet say. It became a kind of quiet survival. Only later, when the dust settled a little, he could begin to reach back into those memories—like taking small sips from something sealed away—and turn them into fragments of language.
What held them together was not strength in the heroic sense, but people. Nurses, daycare workers, small moments of empathy. A kind of fragile web of care. Through that, connections began to appear—between a private struggle and something larger. The way life can unravel from the smallest pressure. The way so many people live close to that edge all the time.
“Year In A Spiral” grew out of that space. A repetition, a cycle, a reflection of life on the brink. At some point, the music opens up, almost like it stops belonging to him. Like something else carries it forward. Maybe that’s what release feels like. Not resolution—just a brief sense of being held by something bigger.
Even now, sharing this feels almost wrong. Too exposed. Like these songs were never meant for the machinery of streaming, for quick consumption. There is a sense that they could have remained private, untouched.
But they were made to open something. To say: this exists too. This kind of love, this kind of longing, this kind of fear.
In a world this fragile, perhaps the only real strength lies in the willingness to stay open. To not turn away from each other when things become unbearable.
Sources
Thomas Azier – VPRO 3 voor 12
One Response
Great songs, both of them.