Sometimes I feel like I have to take a fall to essentially get to the next phase of my life," Lewis says about Caer. "It's happened over and over. I've been through so many musical phases and through so many relationships with friends and lovers. I always feel like I'm standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down and thinking, 'This is the only way forward: onto the next thing.' It's sort of destructive, but I guess I thrive on rebirth.” 

 

Falling is a theme that surfaces throughout the album, which is why Lewis called it Caer - the Spanish word for "to fall." The album serves as a powerful lens through which Lewis explores his own personal sense of falling, as well as what he has observed about a world that feels as if it's declining. On a larger scale, Caer feels extraordinarily current, given what's going on culturally and politically right now. "The patriarchy is falling apart," Lewis says. "Our perceptions of who we are as human beings, because of technology and machines, are falling apart. We're living at a breaking point, and a lot of the themes on the album are talking about these fault lines." Lewis refers to such fissures on "Saturdays" (which features Haim). "It's a love song," he says. "'Saturdays' is the heaven place you go to when you're in love or even with friends, feeling your youth. But it's also about my feeling that the world is starting to tear itself apart and maybe we're falling through the cracks. But when you're laying in bed next to someone you care about, none of that seems real.”

 

 Lewis feels that Caer is something of a sister record to his 2010 debut album, the lush, gauzy Forget, in that it's a record with hidden doorways and secret passages; more is revealed the more time you spend inside of it.