The World Is A Beautiful Place...: "The election was like the elephant in the room"

It's no secret that America has been going through some difficult times since the election; there's been protest after protest as those horrified by the actions of the latest president are trying to regain control of their country. The World Is Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die's David Bello is one of the many that found his life changing back in November, and in more ways than one. Towards the end of last year, founding member Nicole Shanholtzer left the band, plunging TWIABP into an uncertain future. Along with this, the impending election gave David and co. a whole new world of worry. It forced them to reassess what the future for TWIABP looked like, a moment that's resulted in one of the band's strongest releases to date. "We'd gone through this rough patch with the band and uncertainty, and we all finally got in the same room together, and it felt good to be all together writing these songs," David starts. "We were all worried. There were a lot of things going on in our personal lives at the time and that all got reflected in what was going on with the band." Personal issues haven't been at the forefront of TWIABP's output until now, which is surprising given they more often than not hit the nail on the head when it comes to emotion. "My instinct is to avoid writing about specific elements of my life in ways that are very clearly ‘This is about this, and this is about this'," David says. "I try to avoid that because I feel that's not the way I learnt to make music and write lyrics. The fact that we're able to put those in there in such a way that it is relevant outside of ourselves is a big change in the way we conceptualise what our songs are about." What ultimately led to their upcoming third album, ‘Always Foreign', coming to fruition was the election. "I started getting these ideas for what songs could be about. We were all together when Donald Trump got elected, and we were like, this is a big wake up call. The people in the country who hold these beliefs, these bigoted thoughts, having power in that election - that was almost like the elephant in the room, we couldn't not write or talk about it. Even when we were just setting up our gear, moving gear from the practice van, to our houses or whatever it was, we were talking about it because we were worried and scared."