STEALING HORSES
An album becoming a story.
A story becoming a world.
A band living its way through both.
Stealing Horses is an eleven-song concept album by Be Like Water.
It began with the music. As the songs emerged, so did something else: characters, places, fragments of a journey. A strange landscape began forming around the album until the songs no longer seemed to exist separately from the world they were creating. At the heart of it are a group of musicians travelling through a post-apocalyptic land where music has been banned. They are looking for something better. And somewhere along the way, they steal a piano.
THE JOURNEY
The story begins in a forest. Two people are searching for one another, communicating through music before they fully understand what it is they are searching for. Somewhere amongst the trees, a drummer is playing. Beyond the forest lies The Land — beautiful, damaged and strange. Music has been outlawed. The old world has fractured. Those who refuse to conform have learned to survive at its edges.
The travellers move through this landscape carrying their music with them. They encounter people and places that draw them deeper into a journey that is at once physical, emotional and increasingly surreal. There is love here. There is desire, conflict, fear and temptation. There are moments of extraordinary beauty and moments when everything begins to unravel. And underneath the imagined world lies a very real question:
What happens when you decide to pursue the thing you believe in, even when everything around you tells you not to?
Stealing Horses is a story about searching for truth, finding and losing yourself, love, transformation and the strange courage required to keep going.
THE ALBUM
The story is told through eleven original songs. Each belongs somewhere within the journey, but the songs are not illustrations of a fixed script. They have lives of their own.
Musically, Stealing Horses moves through rock, progressive music, blues, jazz and classical influences, with rhythmic and lyrical piano, expressive drumming and a powerful, soulful vocal at its core. Bass, guitar and saxophone deepen and expand the world around them.
At times the music is intimate and fragile.
At others, it erupts.
Two songs from the album — On Fire and It Ain’t Over — have already been released.
The remaining songs are now being recorded as the album continues to take shape.
LIFE IS ART. ART IS LIFE.
Something unexpected began happening while we were making Stealing Horses. The distance between the story and our own lives started getting smaller. Places we discovered found their way into the world. People became characters. Photographs suggested scenes. Scenes changed the way we understood songs we had already written. The musicians travelling through an imagined landscape began, in strange ways, to resemble the musicians making the album.
We stopped being entirely certain where one journey ended and the other began. That has become part of Stealing Horses.
It isn’t only an album with a story attached to it. It is a world being built through music, photography, artwork, film, live performance and the lives of the people making it.
And it is still evolving.
BEFORE STEALING HORSES
THE PREQUEL. Before The Land. Before the stolen piano. Before the journey.
There was the forest.
Created with photographer Elmar Rubio, The Prequel is a photographic journey into the world before Stealing Horses.
It captures a moment when its characters, symbols and visual language were beginning to emerge — before we completely understood what they were becoming.
Part fiction, part photography and part lived experience, The Prequel occupies the same uncertain territory as Stealing Horses itself: somewhere between the world we invented and the world we found ourselves living in.
WATCH THE GRAPHIC NOVEL by Elmar Rubio
THE WORLD
Stealing Horses is not intended to explain everything. There are recurring characters, objects and places. There are connections between them. Some are obvious. Others may only become clear much later. And some things may never be explained at all. The world will continue to reveal itself as the album, photographs, films and live performances develop.
The story is already underway.
STEALING HORSES - an eleven-song album, a journey through a world where music has been forbidden, a search for love, truth and something better. And somewhere inside the fiction, six musicians are living a journey of their own.