White & Blue are the colours in the flag of my home country, Finland. Lockout, in turn, is a means of an employer to pressure their employees during an industrial action. They literally lock their employees out. In the context of Lockout (White & Blue), the state is the employer and the citizens are the employees. Democracy is our work. During the previous government in Finland (2015-19), I began increasingly to feel that some groups of people were being locked out of the society. Some parties want to weaken working conditions and social security in a way that nearly would bring back the slavery. Some other parties want to define Finnishness and who can be Finnish. For them the end justifies the means, which include conspiracy theories and fake news, etc. Old, already healed wounds of the Finnish civil war were being ripped open and the dividing lines were being created again. Their purpose is to demonize the ‘enemy’ so it would be easier to face them as inhuman creatures, rather than compatriots. Home, religion and fatherland would be the ‘holy trinity’ defining the nation. To exaggerate by generalizing: in their opinion, women’s place should be between fist and stove, gays (and other ‘non-straight’) should be in the closet or in the concentration camp, and non-Christians (= non-protestants in this case) should be out of the country or in the concentration camp, too. This is not my Finland, though. This is a Nazi dystopia. Finland has been at the forefront of the fight for equality for most of its independence. This is why for me white and blue have always represented freedom, equality, solidarity and empathy. And I want them to remain this way. This is also why I didn’t want to make Lockout sound too gloomy; instead I wanted it to musically confront the topics it deals with. So you can even dance against hate and injustice, for equality and tolerance if you want.
Hewey – Fragile Dream