Next year [2017] I will be... seriously shaking some s**t up. This tour is the last hurrah for the way the songs are played. I’m super happy with the line up - I think it’s been a gloriously two dimensional rock n roll band for long enough. Part of me wants to be like Comsat Angels - what what we have lacked in recent time in our drive for permanent blitzkrieg is, maybe, elegance and space which is two words I would think of with Comsat Angles. It’s rock with elegance and space – think of a band who does rock and space and the first name you come up with would be Comsat Angels...’ -
Von, 2016
What happened right around the interview (Nov 2016) was the Ghost band lost some players, with lawsuits all around. Ben and Chris stepped in as new Nameless Ghouls. They toured from March to July 2017 and Von had to squeeze the Sisters tour for Aug-Oct to accomodate that. This apparently led to a funny (if gruelling) situation, where B&C played a festival gig with Von, hopped over to Ghost for some one-offs, and then resumed the TSOM tour.
This made it difficult for Von to shake things up within the given timeframe. 2018 was a sabbatical year for the Sisters, likely because Chris was too tied up with his other band. Come Hellfest in June 2019 and Dylan's there. In September, they start playing Show Me, a song with loads of elegance and space. A master plan was seemingly in motion. Chris didn't quit and wasn't fired; he was obliged to do his thing.
So... Von had an idea brewing in his head, and Chris was suddenly (conveniently?) away. Dylan auditioned through an earlier friendship with Ben, got in, and spurred Von to write spacious songs. If there had been a want to replace Chris, his Ghost gig made it easier. Chris recently tweeted that "I would never have left [Ghost]", but their frontman had other plans. So Chris was very much into it, which would've hampered further TSOM tours, anyway.
Von has often alluded to a writer's block going back to the early naughts, punctuated by songs (lyrics) like Arms and Far Parade. By the time Dylan arrived, the foundation to write new songs had already been laid. It remains an open question whether they would've (could've) cropped up in such multitudes with Chris. But the lack of output in the intervening years has been largely owned up by Von.
What got Von out of songwriting and back into it was, likely, just life. His Balenciaga collaboration for Paris Fashion Week came to be in March, 2017. Thus, Crazy Fashion Lady was apparently around when Von did the interview above. I wager that she initially egged Von to come out of his shell, before the pandemic turned her into an inspiration of another kind. Von needs a muse to amuse him, while the road to quality lines is often paved with his own heartbreak.
