Track By Track: Six Impossible Things – The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living

Italian dream pop duo Six Impossible Things released their latest EP “The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind of Someone Living” last year. Lorenzo, a guitar player in the band, was kind enough to break down the meanings of their songs exclusively for Thoughts Words Action.

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Hi Thoughts Word Action, thank you for your time and space. Here’s Lorenzo, I play guitar in Six Impossible Things, a dream pop band from a little Italian town called Lodi. I started playing in local punk bands when I was only 14, and that’s probably the main reason why I still play and write music today. Me and Nicky (vocals, keyboards), we both listen to a lot of underground music and we feel a strong connection to the scene and we also had the opportunity to play alongside many hardcore and screamo bands. On September 27th we released a new 5 songs EP called “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”. The title of the EP comes from an artwork created in 1991 by Damien Hirst, an English artist and leading member of the YBA (Young British Artists). It’s basically a preserved tiger shark submerged in formaldehyde in a glass-panel display case. I came across this work of art during lockdown, while we were writing this record, and I immediately fell in love with the title and the meaning behind it. It felt like it was able to perfectly portray what we were trying to express in these songs: to be alive without actually having a chance to live your life. 

In the opening track “Lemme Give Your Heart a Break”, Nicky sings about having anxiety attacks and being scared to talk about it with someone. These are those moments where it feels like your head is splitted in two, a part of you is worried about yourself, and the other one is terrified by the idea of losing the people you love. 

“Twenty Something” is the only song on the record that was written before the pandemic, and the only song written entirely by me, except for track #4. It’s a little bit different when compared to the rest of the EP, nostalgia-soaked lyrics and emo-guitar-driven choruses, instead of the darker approach to the lyrics and melodies that characterize the rest of the songs on the record. 

“Happy” feels like a bridge from our last record to the new one. It was written by Nicky in one of her darkest moments of 2020. She recorded a demo of the song in her attic and sent it to me, but we waited until lockdown to finish working on it properly. Lyrics are meant to hit deep so we really focused on the vocal parts during the recording sessions. 

There’s a poem by William Blake called “London” that I discovered after writing “…mind-Forg’d Manacles”; he wrote: “In every cry of every Man, in every Infant’s cry of fear, in every voice: in every ban, the mind-forg’d manacles I hear.” This poem has many striking similarities to what I meant while writing the lyrics of this song so I got the title from it. 

The closing track is something like a funeral march based on very low piano chords called “What’s Left of Me”, written by Nicky after she experienced the writer’s block during the creative process of the new EP. 

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