‘Wonderful to be’ starts with the chucking sound of a train, of metal on metal, and the sound weaves in and out of the track throughout. Railway stations are in-between places, limbos, where you’re not quite here and not quite there, still in transit. With ‘Wonderful to be’, CHERRISH captures this feeling of being perpetually caught between two places. There’s brutal honesty here – ‘even when I’ll try to kill myself some day / it’s so wonderful to be alive’ – and it doesn’t feel melodramatic or excessive but rather fairly matter-of-fact. But what’s clear is that, for CHERRISH, optimism isn’t just some altered perspective on the world, but something that’s hard-fought, something to be treasured.
