Steve speaking to gigwise.com about the songs that were streamed on their website.
'Monday Morning':
"We've always had a vision for how the song should feel and when it was suggested we release it as the B-side for 'Under The Stars' we were a little apprehensive. We always felt the song and the sentiment behind it were strong and that it would have a place on the record.It was great to take this song in with David Kosten and open it up for discussion, we recorded our parts completely individually which is unusual for us."
"This was the most experimental recording process we undertook, we had a vision of the end goal but no plan as to how we'd get there. We recorded the song in one day working almost backwards starting with nothing but a vocal and a guitar rather than the typical drums and bass first. We wanted to capture the feeling of being in and out of consciousness, half dreaming, half awake, 6.59am, rain against the window kinda stuff. If you listen carefully in the choruses and outro you'll hear the 16th note cymbal rushes which seemed to be the icing on the cake to get the sweeping sensation we wanted for the choruses."
"David had the incredible ability not only to get to the root of a song and bring out the best in it but to understand our vision for this song and the album as a whole, we all feel the new recording has captured what we'd always intended for 'Monday Morning' and we're delighted that it has made the record."
'Blue Winter':
"This was one of the last songs we wrote for the record but one of the very first songs we recorded with David Kosten. Our only aim was the capture the icy, isolated mood of the song and to try and keep some of the rehearsal room rawness that we'd captured in the early demo's we had made. Everyone has the capacity to overthink, or over analyse and ‘Blue Winter’ is about isolation; being alone with a subconscious like a hoover, without a filter to divide the bad from the good.
"We recorded it over the course of a few days across two different studios and it was probably a big turning point in discovering how we wanted our recordings to sound. As we remember, most of the ‘Blue Winter’ recording sessions were spent with countless amounts of guitar pedals and jack leads running in and out of a myriad of vintage synthesizers none of which we really knew how to control, with Ben twiddling knobs and the rest of us scrambling around to press the record button whenever anything interesting was happening. There was also a phantom microphone which died half way through the session, luckily after we got the drum takes, it was responsible for the gritty drum sound which shaped our approach to recording this song."
'Carousel':
“Carousel has been meticulously worked and poked at over the course of a year and we were absolutely brutal in recording it, we decided to strip it back from its live roots and work from the ground up trying to add a little as possible. We really wanted to focus on making the song feel how it should. It's about those times you find yourself wandering aimlessly, the hours of the night that blur into a series of flashbacks, in and out of awareness and the places our minds go or long to be to during those experiences"
“We wanted it to be haunting, disorientating and euphoric all at the same time whilst making sure we didn't go overboard and find ourselves unable to re-create it live. We stuck to what we know but experimented with a lot of different sounds, textures and even structures until it felt right - short, intense and a soundscape you could get lost in.”
'Running Down The Aisle':
''Running down the aisle was the very last song we wrote for the record, we always record our rehearsals and this song came from a 9 and a half minute jam where for some reason I was playing the piano, it was mostly nonsense but it had the skeleton of a melody and a couple of decent lyrics.We recorded it over a couple of days with the piano, bass, drums and vocal going down at RAK studios and all the ambient stuff and synths going down at the pool. We wanted to keep plenty of space in the arrangement whilst still being able to convey the sense of silent panic that the song's foundations were built upon.''
''For us it was the serendipitous discovery of the album, a unity within the group and with David too. We'd been learning about making a record on the job, and Running down the aisle felt like a flag in the ground for us and was full of the kind of sonics we wanted to add to the record.''
''I won't say too much of what the song is about, but we're all capable of finding ourselves feeling unsure and vulnerable. I hope that this is a song where people will take what they want from it.''
'Speechless':
"I've never really been into writing 'love' songs, it's a subject that I feel has been covered incredibly well thousands of times in thousands of different ways, and I've never really felt that I had anything to say that hadn't already been said."We wrote 'Speechless' about a year ago, Ben was playing the piano motif and the top line for the verses rolled over it very easily - I think I sung the first verse straight out pretty much fully formed, then the chorus and lyric followed soon after and it was introduced straight into our live and acoustic sets. As I remember, we recorded it twice at differenttempos eventually opting for the faster of the two, the melody felt better against the groove which we felt was key to the track's overall feel."
"The thing with Speechless is that it is a love song, it's a break up song and one I was a little unsure about 'putting out there'. It's an amazing thing to love and be loved, but it comes with a great weight and a sense of dependency. 'Speechless' is about responsibility and power, but most importantly compassion and respect."
