How long does it take to recover from the loss of a loved one? Days? Weeks? Months? Years? Decades? Never? With the loss of my own mother, Fifteen Years by Welsh singer songwriter, Al Lewis hit hard and hit close. Not just in loss and grief, but this December will be fifteen years since she left this earthly plane and Al’s album reminded me of that and all the things I love and miss about her.
Channelling his own experience of love, loss, and mental struggles into a cathartic and healing album, Fifteen Years was an album fifteen years in the making. The ten track album permeates with a profound love that cannot be described by mere words. To understand it, one must listen to Fifteen Years and experience that love first hand.
Through Al’s experience of coming to terms with the loss of his father, he in return discovered a side of his father he did not know. Amongst his father’s belongings, Al found paperwork on his parents’ divorce, his Dad’s struggle with Multiple Sclerosis, and more.
On sorting his father’s belongings, Al says,
“It was bittersweet, but it helped me sketch in the man. I felt like I knew him better afterwards.”
Learning about his father, not only opened questions for himself but his creativity. The title track spilled out of Al as he began to make sense of the grief he had been running from.
He explains,
“I’d just become a Dad myself, and I was ruminating on the cyclical nature of life, and how the man I saw in the mirror now looked more like my Dad than I ever had.”
Fifteen Years wastes no time in diving head first into the emotions, opening track “Sunshine in Sorrow” looks at love and losing that love of a significant other and “Never Be Forgotten” speaks of the memory one carries about those that they have lost.
“Where Do I Go from Here” featuring Kizzy Crawford is hauntingly beautiful and explores the need for advice from our parents, even if they’re on the other side. While the uptempo and hopeful “Thirty Five” featuring Darling West is a stunning look at knowing that love is out there waiting and that one must persevere and not give up hope.
One of the best lyrics of the album lies within the title track, “Fifteen Years”.
“I couldn’t move from all the spiderwebs tangled in my head.”
In that one line, Al captures the sheer weight of grief and what it’s like to move on. Sometimes the more one struggles with grief, the more one gets stuck. Sometimes the best thing to do is to surrender to the grief. In surrendering, the web of grief loosens and allows one to move on.
To say I connected with “Fifteen Years” is an understatement. In my parents’ yard, the apple tree that my mom and dad planted still stands and yes, I absolutely ugly cried when Al sang out the apple tree in his own life. The connection Al creates is honest, raw, and visceral.
In Welsh and in English, “The Farmhouse” is a powerhouse of a song that delves into the loss of heritage, legacy, and is against those who need to modernise everything.
The title for the song “Feels Like Healing” is or should be self-explanatory. Grief doesn’t leave but the holes in one’s heart and soul do heal and Al shows that through the song. He further expands on this healing in his podcast of the same name. The Feels Like Healing podcast deals with channelling loss into the creative world.
On releasing the album, Al says,
“Releasing an album like this, I want to reach anyone who finds themselves in the same place I did, navigating unthinkable loss and trying to ride out the experience of grief. I’d hope anyone out there going through something similar might listen to these songs and realise that they’re not alone in this journey.”
Fifteen Years is an extraordinary journey in healing one’s heart and soul. It magnificently represents how one can handle grief not by running from it, but by sitting with it and learning from it.
MUST LISTEN TRACKS: “Never Be Forgotten”, “Where Do I Go from Here”, “Thirty Five”, “Fifteen Years”, “The Farmhouse”, “Feels Like Healing”
