We have been asked a few times now to provide some notes regarding the making of our album, I'm not sure who will find this that interesting but I found myself with an hour spare so here goes...
The album took a little under a year to complete and span from July '06 to June '07. Generally I would send Sarah one or two ideas, nothing more than sketches of a track really. Sarah would then write lyrics and vocal melodies to these fairly raw ideas and come down to Leicester from Sheffield perhaps once every six weeks. I would then spent time after that completing the track and arrangement, often the vocals would take the tracks of into a completely new direction and the final version would sound very different to the initial idea.
The way I tend to work is that I create a palette of sounds and work on riffs and beats that I feel sit together quite well. The musical ideas from these sessions often never amount to anything but I call the arrangement a name that indicates a style for the sounds, for example the sound set used on "Thoughts of You" was called "A bit like Kraftwerk.". I literally have hundreds of these sound sets saved in this way and I tend to revisit these when I want to work on actual tunes. For me this makes the writing process much quicker.
There are a few tracks that changed quite a bit from the original sketches and I will provide links to those version below corresponding to the detail for each track.
Intro - On & On
This track first originated in Feb '07 and the initial idea came together in a matter of minutes. This is one of the only songs that hasn't really changed from the first idea. We recorded the vocals for this in April '07, the song was pretty much finished but I shelved it for a few weeks so that I could come back with fresh ears. On returning I changed the middle lead line and tweaked some of the sounds, I also added the intro piece for the album which uses elements from the track. I think this is one of the strongest tracks on the album and really answers the type of feel I was hoping to acheive. The demo version is pretty close to the final version so I haven't posted it here, I have however added a link to a remix of the track I did soon after completing the track.
This is our own remix of this track.
Step Back
This was the first track we recorded, I was pretty nervous about hearing what Sarah had done with the vocals for the first time, I guess if I hadn't of liked it we wouldn't be here today. The final version definitely kept all the elements from the demo. In the final mixing stages during May this year there was very little I needed to change from the version we had, the vocals had been recorded remarkably well, we had always intended to re-record them but after hearing the mix we decided they were fine. Someone asked if it was my voice being vocoded on this track, in-fact it isn't it's all Sarah, I re-pitched one of her takes and fed that into the vocoder.
Demo version
Millionaire
Lots of people say this has a definite Yazoo feel, I honestly don't see that at all. The initial idea came from hearing a song by Matinee Club (The Modern) called "Sometimes", I was really just messing around and came up with the initial bass sound. The next part to come was the high pad sound, this is the only preset sound used on the album and came from the Korg Legacy Cell, it's a patch called Sunrise. I became a little bored of the first recorded version and changed the bassline along with sound changes for the final album version. We re-recorded the vocals for this in the final stages of mixes.
Thoughts of You
The very first version is completely different and was written over Christmas '06. During the last few months of 2006 we had been getting our then six tracks ready for playing live, it felt like I hadn't written anything new for a while and to be honest I started to panic about that fact. It really did take me ages to get back into writing again and this wasn't helped by the vast stocks of booze we had received over Christmas. The demo version posted here is totally different apart from the main hook. When you listen to this version you will hear that Sarah's vocals fit. Something just didn't feel right about that version and this became quite a difficult track to complete.
Original version
Outer Circle / Home
Again this started out as a completely different version and was the second song we recorded. The vocals for me didn't sit well with the original and so I deleted the backing track and started again from scratch. I always felt it started a little abrubtely so I added in the "Outer Circle" intro. In the back of my mind I was inspired by the music from the film Solaris (new version) by Cliff Martinez. I love that sound track and the film although it reminds of a pretty dark time, hey ho.
The demo version posted here as you will hear is totally different to the final song, this often happens. It actually reminds more like a Depeche track, there is also a line in the verse parts that came from listening to a track by Hard Corps (a great forgotten 80's band)
Original version
Seen The Light
I wish I had spent a bit more time on this, it was probably one of the early songs we did but it got a little neglected towards the end of the album, the guy that mastering for us (Chris) had to add quite a bit of bottom end to this so it shows that I didn't particularly mix it very well. This did start out quite different, the demo posted below shows what I mean about pallettes of sound as the sounds in the demo are all the same but a different tune. A couple of obvious elements to this track, the "Just Can't Get Enough" sound at the start, and also a sound and line that was influenced by the start of the The Thompson Twins "Love on your side". I met Tom Bailey once, he was short and very ginger.
Sound palette
Sometimes...
It's got a Pet Shop Boys type bassline, I think from a track called "In the night" which was the theme from the Clothes Show. Not much more to say about this.
Loser
Partly influenced by Gary Numan & Kajagoogoo. Quite an odd combination I guess but I was listening to another song by Matinee Club called Tokyo Girls and thought this really reminds me of something, it took me ages to find it as it was quite an obscure Gary Numan track called "We Take Mystery (To Bed)". I think they actually sampled the track in an early version of their song but obviously changed it for the final release version on the Planet Clique album "Robopop". I really liked Kajagoogoo and felt it was a real shame that they kicked Limahl out, I had the pleasure of meeting Limahl (Chris Hamill) we recorded at his studio in the early nineties. I also helped him with programming on his album called "Love is Blind". Anyway... for me this feels very different to the rest of the album.
You Belong
This started out in a completely different way to all the other songs and was the last song written. I had gone to Sheffield to record Sarahs vocals for "The Other Side", she had talked about a few songs that she had written and decided to sing one for me. I added click track so that I could write something around her vocals later. I think this worked out quite well and hopefully an approach we will take with future tracks. The claps are actually me and Sarah, one of only two sampled sounds on the album. I really wanted to record this with a choir in the middle 8 but our budget which probably didn't include the bus fare couldn't warrant such extravagance. Maybe when we appear on "later with Jools" we'll hire one in :-)
The Other Side
This was fairly similar to the original demo, I had a txt late one night from Sarah saying I have written some new lyrics, they are a bit like the theme from Ghost Busters, hence the "New York" sample at the start as I thought it would be reminiscent of that song. In fact the lyrics have nothing to do with anything ghost like but I quite like the sample so it stayed.
Demo version
Other tracks & demos that never made it.
Please
This started out as an original song called "Keith" that came from Sarahs previous band Minithin in 2001, we decided to change the name really because "Keith" is a stupid name for song. It has a rip-off synth line from Yazoo's track called "Two Peices" and it also has a sound running through it that was inspired by "Hear Comes The Rain" by Eurythmics. This track was actually finished before any other, I had the original vocal recording so I just re-wrote the new backing, I guess I was looking for a direction hence why is has so many obvious rip-off bits. This was part of our live set but we felt it wasn't suitable for the album. The first version of this track I did is also included below, it was the first piece of music I had done in years so I was quite please with it at the time but it sounds very dated now.
Please Northern Kind version
Keith Minithin version
These are just random ideas that never really took our fancy, Generally they are a little harder sounding that the tracks we ended up with however IDEA_04 is very Vince Clarke and in particular Upstairs at Erics period.
IDEA_01
IDEA_02
IDEA_03
IDEA_04
And now to the nerdy part. Obviously and very evidently I'm into synths, at some point or other I have owned pretty much every commercial analogue synth. However this album was constructed entirely in Logic 7.2 using various software synths and I don't actually own a proper synth anymore. To help the final mixed sound I purchased the SSL Duende which is a fantastic bit of kit and I helped me to add some warmth back into the overall sound.
Matt