"As a teenager, I spent my fair share of hours poring over Sylvia Plath’s writing, but I always favored her poetry over her prose and The Bell Jar was foggy in my memory. Seeing someone so obviously and so directly affected by it made me revisit the novel. And I’ll say, I am also no exception to the rule: it fucked me up good and proper. It consumed me so thoroughly that when Dan Romer and I started writing what would become “Sleep Machine,” I knew there was only one idea the lyrics could explore. So what we have here is a song in which I try to explore the experience of moving from darkness into light and back again, via the power, and ultimately the impermanence, of electroconvulsive therapy treatment."
From J.O.Y.:
"As a teenager, I spent my fair share of hours poring over Sylvia Plath’s writing, but I always favored her poetry over her prose and The Bell Jar was foggy in my memory. Seeing someone so obviously and so directly affected by it made me revisit the novel. And I’ll say, I am also no exception to the rule: it fucked me up good and proper. It consumed me so thoroughly that when Dan Romer and I started writing what would become “Sleep Machine,” I knew there was only one idea the lyrics could explore. So what we have here is a song in which I try to explore the experience of moving from darkness into light and back again, via the power, and ultimately the impermanence, of electroconvulsive therapy treatment."