Kevin’s father passed away 13 years ago; his Grandfather 17 years before that. As such big influences during his childhood, the recent tensions regarding the American police force have made him wonder what kind of conversation he would have with his Dad if he were still alive today. “I think there would be a poll within him to defend the fraternity and I understand that; you spend your life in a thing, y’know, it’s hard,” he begins. “My Dad spent a lot of time as an officer working in internal affairs – their job is basically policing the police and I wonder if that part of him might’ve seen the error in a lot of these practises and the institutional actionary; the racism at the core of it. It’s a complicated conversation. It’s not complicated in respects to Black Lives Matter – that is clear and true and right; it’s not complicated in respects to institutionalised racism, that is clear and real and present – I just mean it’s complicated like anything with people. Fucking cops are people too. Institutional racism affects everybody in all directions and it means a lot of these guys and girls grew up with poisoned fruit; being fed nonsense about people and then what happens when you weaponise that sensibility and you throw it in the middle of like, fraught, fearful, high stakes context? It results in disaster.” “I see it in a place like New York where, on the South shore of Staten Island which is a very white – it’s not an affluent place necessarily but it’s very white. There’s kids I went to high school with that never spent an hour in communities of colour, that then go to Police Academy and get placed in East New York or Brownsville or places that are predominantly black and predominantly economically struggling and they’re asked to police those communities. These are kids that should be policing the South shore of Staten Island because they know that community,” he continues. “There needs to be some kind of sensitivity brainwashing that happens, like a positive version of Clockwork Orange or something where cops are made to unlearn all of that. But how the fuck do you do that? That’s not real.” Politics aside, Kevin says that his songs are simply about people – “they’re just broader character studies rather than writing a song about something that’s more specific like love or drugs” – causing these explorations to be bigger than his own personal scale. “I write it because it moves me to write it,” he explains. Take ‘No History’ for example – a song that directly follows ‘Freddie Gray Blues’, it addresses 9/11 but focuses on the happenings in the “days, weeks and months following it”. “My brother John was working in a building on Harrison street; he got in early and was setting up for a conference at 8:45am. There was a huge skylight in the room and from that vantage point it was perfectly framing the towers. He finished setting up the table, looked up and watched the first plane hit the building. It was before and after; that was his life and then his life after that. It’s what came to me, some of that stuff when I was thinking about the song,” Kevin says. “I remember being at his house one month later and all of our family were trying to do something normal like watch a football game and eat lunch or something out in New Jersey, and he had a ten-month-old girl. Bush came on and interrupted football which is a very American thing – you know you’re going to have maximum viewership during that – and Bush said: ‘We’re going into Afghanistan and we are supported by the will of the world.’ It stuck to me, that ‘we are supported by the will of the world’ – that’s in the song too – and I just watched my brother holding his daughter. That’s the stuff that I remember; that’s how it affects people.” Kevin grew up in the neighbourhood of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn; his mother also grew up there and whilst he’s moved around during his life, he has once again settled in the neighbourhood of his childhood. He describes the area as “an interesting mix” with Irish and Italian policemen and fireman making up most of the community, as well as Asian and Muslim communities. He married his wife Carey in 2013 and the pair welcomed a daughter in the Spring of this year. When searching for baby photos of himself to form as part of the baby announcement, Kevin came across the ‘Instigator’ artwork, describing it as a “eureka moment”. “I could talk about the component parts of everything that’s happening in that picture, all day,” he laughs. “And when I look at it, I see myself as the fourth or fifth thing I see. My brother is the real star of that picture for me, without question. And the best supporting actor is the tumbler of scotch on my father’s knee while he sits there, thinking ‘oh my fucking God, these kids need to stop screaming.’ It’s funny and it’s striking but it’s also a crystallised childhood memory around that whole feeling and time and the relative innocence of it; just two little boys obsessed with professional wrestling freaking out on Christmas, y’know?” He says that the simplicity and sweetness of the picture also prompted the second verse of ‘I Was Alive Back Then’, with the word and the idea of an ‘instigator’ stemming from “those two boys wanting to tear the world apart.” Christmas was always a big event in the Devine household; as an Irish Catholic family, there were often 15 or 16 people over on Christmas eve. “When you’re a kid there’s always such a big thing around Christmas; the whole end of the year was almost like this magnet that was pulling you towards that,” he says. “Your satisfactions obviously change as an adult and I’m not saying the world is any less beautiful, it’s just different – that innocence, that’s what I’m talking about. Christmas was a time that I associated very much with the sense of possibility, safety, familial connection. It’s a time before the bad parts of the world get in there and get their teeth in, y’know? The world is both things – it’s beautiful and it’s hard.” Now he has a child of his own, Kevin says that fatherhood hasn’t really changed him as a person; it has simply ignited instincts he didn’t know he had. He spent every day with his daughter over the summer, with handful of festivals and shows tearing him away. “When I was driving I would be doing this phantom clutching thing, like I was holding or cradling her and I had to be like ‘oh yeah, she’s not here’,” he laughs. “Music is my livelihood and my career but she is my life now too and so there is a lot of learning how to balance those things and learning how to appropriately honour both of them,” he continues. “I’ve never had trouble investing my work with meaning but now it’s also for her and it’s modelling for her another way to make a living in the world, like ‘you can do this too’. I do feel different but I don’t feel unrecognisable.”