You know that feeling where you think an intrusive alien probe-rod would be better than one more second on this stupid earth? Yeah, me too." But wait! This jolly tune just happens to be about a desperate human who prays every day that aliens will come and take him to another planet. This is the dancefloor filler, one to get the disco kids bopping like penguins at a seal fight. "Seemed like the natural place to go after the last number. Don't even bother listening to this song. There's no heroism in this, it's fucking pathetic. 34 years old and I've still not learned anything from 17 years of fairly regular alcohol consumption other than, "I like drinking but sometimes it hurts." Whenever it gets dark, it's totally my fault that it does. "I mean, do we really need to go into this one? Read the title. Sometimes you shouldn't ask toooo many questions of a song." I couldn't find anything, and that's probably because the right thing just came out of my stupid mouth the first time round. "We know!" I hear you cry, "it's an absolute abomination of a song!" To that I would say to you, "Sir/Madam, please find another corner of the internet to darken with your turdy quips!" But really, it was a very quick process apart from the DAYS I spent trying to find something more erudite to sing in the choruses. "This one took very little time to come together. When the imagery is already laid out on a plate (or the floor) for you, well, you should make lemonade with it. The camerawork was positively Hitchcockian. It was just so well directed and strikingly beautiful. You can have Hypocritical Shitter for your next band name, by the way. But bear with me whilst I write an entire fucking song about one of mine. The possibilities are limitless therefore I CANNOT BE SURPRISED BY WHAT HAPPENED IN YOUR DREAM. "I don't care about other people's dreams. It came to be something much more than it started as.Now, we hand you back over to 'Hypocritical Shitter' Scott, to talk us through the album. Sometimes you write a song and you immediately want to send it to everyone you know, and that’s an example. ‘Die’ could have gone overblown, full string section, lots of bells and whistles. “He’s amazing at letting a song breathe and be what it should be instead of forcing it into another territory. “He was extremely good at pulling us away from the tricks and habits and tropes I’d perhaps been using,” Hutchison says. I recorded the guitar on a cheap mic, and Aaron was like, ‘How did you do that?’ I’m like, well, I laid it on a table, and I played?” he laughs.ĭessner laid that less-is-more approach everywhere. “The lead vocal and almost everything else is a demo. “I found something more touching about it then,” he says. A year later, he found himself in Big Bear Lake north of L.A., on one of those isolated-cabin writing retreats you don’t think actually ever happen, came across the weird original and decided it was worth a second go. Hutchison actually recorded the stark sendoff first as a dance track - “it was weird, the production was weird,” he says. It almost sounds like a demo, because it is. Dessner was especially instrumental on closing track “Die Like a Rich Boy,” the other half of the album’s death bookends and a moment of restraint. “Those obstacles became something that defined the record.”Īlso new was producer Aaron Dessner of the National, a band that knows a thing or two about lush sadness. There were a few instances where what might have sounded blunt in conversation came across much better over email,” he says. Your opinions could be more thought out, processed over time. “In a weird way, it was easier than sitting in a room and staring at each other. Getting songs where my input had been removed entirely really helped us move forward.” The distance, he says, helped the collaborative process. “We said, ‘Let’s not go down the path we’ve traveled quite often over the past 10 years. The group would assemble songs remotely, sending parts and sketches into each other’s inboxes, something the band had never really done before. Which is great - I didn’t have to do anything,” he laughed. There were songs that came fully formed, and I just threw lyrics on at the end. “I don’t want to say it was a case of ‘Oh the teacher’s away so you can do whatever you want,’” Hutchison says, “but I think they found a liberty too. Back in Glasgow, the band was writing independently for the first time. Hutchison, in the California sun, used the relative isolation to learn Pro Tools, sketching songs not just on piano and guitar but with drum pads and his laptop.
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