Amber Run Frontman Joe Keogh Gets Candid About His ‘Very Lonely Time’

It’s been almost seven years since Joe Keogh, front man of U.K. indie rock band Amber Run, waded out late one winter night into the icy waters off the coast of Brighton, with no plan of returning to shore.

Keogh’s reflections on his suicide attempt are woven into the band’s fourth album, aptly titled How To Be Human, through which he and band mates Tom Sperring and Henry Wyeth explore the raw challenges, opportunities and emotional whiplash of young adulthood.

“We wanted to dive into the moment between 20 and 30, when you’ve lived enough life to know what you want and go after it but you don’t quite know enough to achieve it yet or to realize what you’re achieving once you are doing it. It can be a very lonely time,” he says.

“And I have started to not shy away from my own dealings with depression and suicide. It’s only in the last two years that I’ve feel brave enough to have that conversation. This record was a really interesting and painful lesson of taking ownership of my feelings. I‘m very grateful to it, and I hope that by sharing it one other person might be able to see a little bit of themselves in that story and that they are not totally alone in those feelings.”

Particularly salient is the song Funeral, which Keogh says “was written as a eulogy that I would have given at my own funeral, about just
just
the anger that I would’ve felt if someone close to me had made the same decision that I had made.”

Thankfully, Keogh’s story didn’t end on that dark night. “I wish it was a sexier story where I could talk about the strength of character I had within me that said ‘No.’ But I truly think it was fear,” he recalls.

“I walked into the ocean and was trying to float away in some grotesque romantic—with a capital R—manner. And I think I’d been under the water for a couple seconds and I just got scared and thought maybe I’d made the wrong decision and maybe things could get better. That was the first time I’d had that thought. I guess I had to go right to the edge to see that it wasn’t what I was actually meant to do.”

Instead, he found his way back to shore and walked home. “It was 2 a.m. I was freezing and I remember going into the house and having a warm shower. Everyone else was asleep, and I just got into bed and I remember my partner was asleep and I just apologized to her.”

Keogh says the trauma he experienced was a culmination of getting caught up in the superficiality of success, then spiraling into an identity crisis after the band was dropped by its label RCA Victor/Sony. (The new album is out on the label Tripel.)

“When we started to catch the wave that was the beginning of our career and all the opportunities and the glitter that is being a part of a band and being a part of the entertainment industry… I think we got a bit caught up in that, and maybe we bought our own hype as well as sold it,” Keogh remembers.

“And it was when we got dropped by our label and we lost a member at that time as well—they decided to leave because they didn’t see a future in the project—I started to spiral with self-doubt. I started to question who I was to the people around me, because I had always been Joe who made music and now I might not be that any more. And I think that opened up a hole in my personality. If I’m not that to other people, then what am I to myself? And that started to twist and distort into a real crisis of self.”

While Keogh says those closest to him were offering help, “I think I was actively choosing to not listen to it. It was the wrong choice. But I’ve learned, and I feel incredibly grateful to the people who were there at that time, and the new people who have entered my life. These conversations are no longer so difficult. I no longer feel the importance of being stoic and immovable. And that to bend isn’t to break.”

Keogh says he’s been compelled to share his story for several reasons.

“For one, just within our band, I’m not the only person who’s really struggled with their mental health. And you start to realize what a pandemic it is and how if three of three members of our band have struggled pretty intensely with it, then there must be countless, countless others.”

For another, “When we first started this band and we were 19, 20 years old, we said everything we do has to have vulnerability and emotional currency because that’s the music and art that really resonates with us. We started to realize that maybe at points we were saying we were being vulnerable and talking about things but we really weren’t. We were flies on the wall of other people’s pain and not being authentic about our own experience,” he says.

“Maybe because we were scared of what people would think, maybe we didn’t think people would actually care or engage with it. Who knows? But there comes a moment when you start to realize the only story you truly understand and you have the license to tell is your own. And that is scary and it’s vulnerable and it’s beautiful.”

Which doesn’t mean the process has come easy. “It’s like ripping off a scab. You can almost forget that it’s there for a little bit and then when you talk about it, it rubs and just feels like you’re back in the same place again, feeling those feelings and walking the same walk so that you can try and express to the best of your ability what it was you were going through,” he says.

“So I feel like I’m constantly flying back from where I am now. And while I think that is helpful and useful, I also find to rehash and to retell is often to relive.”