Simple ideas combine to convey complex emotions and states of being in the music of Caroline Leisegang. The South African composer owns the rare ability to express profound, often contradictory feelings, with a repetitive two-note interval here or a regular rhythmic riff there, passing moments that together leave lasting impressions on the next moment and the moment beyond. COMES THE NIGHT, her fifth studio album, rises from intensely personal elements of autobiography to speak of universal truths, of joy and sorrow, of beauty and the tension that threatens to tarnish it, of life as an unfolding story passed from generation to generation. The work grew naturally from her experience of becoming a mother for the first time just as the world was reeling from the initial shock of the COVID pandemic, and from the opportunity that both created for reflection on the nature of self and relationships with others. While the transformative effects of new motherhood in the time of lockdown brought Leisegang’s music-making to a halt, they also delivered fresh insights and feelings that shaped the emotional landscape and intense energy of COMES THE NIGHT. “I’m exploring new sounds here, I’m exploring new ways that my composition can go,” she tells Apple Music. “I see the whole album as a book. You have a ‘Beginning,’ you have an ‘End,’ and you have everything in between. But I see ‘End’ as being the prelude to a sequel. It tells you that there’s something brewing. It’s like a storm that’s developing, but that hasn’t broken. So, I’m asking the listener, please, please stay around and we’ll see what happens after.” The album’s back story long predates the birth of Leisegang’s daughter. It began with a trip she made to Paris to celebrate her 21st birthday and a visit to Shakespeare and Company, the French capital’s famous English-language bookstore. Drawn to a work by Charles Bukowski, she became immersed in its tale of a young woman on the road to self-discovery. “It’s his take on a girl coming into the world,” she recalls. “She’s American, she’s in Paris, she has a twin brother. This duality of not quite being mature, not quite being immature, not quite being present but not quite being missing, fascinates me. I always felt there should have been something more to it, as if the story wasn’t over. This was exactly what I wanted my album to feel like—that there’s more to come.” COMES THE NIGHT, its sound enriched by the addition of strings to the solo piano writing that hallmarked the album’s predecessors, represents a clear development in Leisegang’s art. Yet its expressive language contains echoes from Øyeblikk, her debut recording. “Victorine,” she notes, connects with the spirit of “Forelsket,” Øyeblikk’s opening track; it also embodies her toddler’s full-throttle vigor. “The piece is about my daughter. I went to Paris to watch Taylor Swift, which was the first time I had left her at home with her dad. And she said, ‘Please buy me a French doll.’ I looked everywhere and found this little mouse called Victorine, who became her little protector. The music builds and builds for six minutes and then there’s nothing. You can feel there’s no resolution. I think it’s the perfect musical capturing of my relationship with my child. There’s a lot of beauty in motherhood, there’s a lot of tension too, and that’s exactly what I’ve tried to capture, both the lightness and the dark, in COMES THE NIGHT.” Leisegang took to heart the advice she received from John Ashton Thomas, one of her composition teachers during her time in London as a postgraduate student at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. He told her to ditch computers, embrace pencil and paper, and cultivate the traditional skills of classical composition. Above all, he encouraged her to write from experience. “John taught me how to write a structure. And he said, ‘You’re going to go out into the world and take in what you see, and you’re going to write music.’ It was the best thing that could have happened, because I was not anywhere near being a composer before that.” She adds that her music, while not easy to pigeonhole, is rooted in the classical tradition. “I think classical music is the most perfect way to tell a story. But I want to give the listener the chance to make it their own, to do whatever they want with it. It’s my offering. I’ve had COMES THE NIGHT as my work during its creation and then I give it to the world.”