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Oh, Foals. I do commend them for circling back to their funk inspirations that pursued them in their Total Life Forever phase from 2009 - 2011. But this is too much.
Get ready for my quick comprehensive review of Foals's latest single - Wake Me Up.
A quick disclaimer before I get into talking about Wake Me Up:
With that out of the way - let's get into it.
Yannis said this about the song in Foals's latest Instagram post: "With 'Wake Me Up', I just wanted to write a song about transporting yourself to a better, idyllic situation. I think we all had that feeling of the last eighteen months being like a weird fever dream that felt surreal but very affecting. I think we all wished we could have woken up somewhere else at various points."
With this context, we can see it is another damn lockdown song.
Having engaged with this theme for my upcoming music through university, it does pain me to see artists react to the same themes I've been writing about at the mere surface level, backed with the money of a deal with a literal multinational conglomerate - Warner Music. To me, it creates this very lifeless response to the theme that just feels like an appropriation to suit a need to turn over revenue, therefore creating a piece tailor-made to appeal to the most people and not necessarily break the boundaries or evoke the wonder of the past ventures by Foals. I guess I expect too much artistic venture from a group bound to a contract. Sorry, that thought probably doesn't make that much sense and feels like I'm talking out of my ass in retrospect, but I reckon I'll develop that thought in the coming weeks. I want to quickly mention that the way the song is mixed makes it sound so fake. It feels like every instrument has been purified to its more potential part, and everything has been stripped of any other colour. Now, I do like this effect in kinds of pop and certain songs - a quick mindless example is the vocals on the Pink Pantheress mixtape that Alex has got me onto, but even then that collection of songs still feels so lively. However, that kind of sound just doesn't work for me with this song. Foals songs were all about raw energy and life to me, and that kind of charisma really carried them through their evolving sound and their live sets. But that's just not present here. I've seriously just listened to some earlier tracks of Foals for comparisons and I swear the higher frequencies have purposely been elevated for Wake Me Up - it's so shrill. Even in their previous album I'm listening to In Degrees - the song that's most like Wake Me Up - and it's mixed so cleanly and with much more character.
Quickly compare:
A quick listen to the song shows this new sound direction for Foals. The drums, usually the liveliest part of Foals's arrangements - exudes no life to me. I just remember hearing about how parts of the drums on Antidotes were recorded in the alleyways and how the general recording process was so unorthodox. It meant that the album exuded some life and character. Immediately upon hearing the first drum fill (of like, two) I can immediately tell that the drum was cleanly recorded and sounds as bland as can be, and safely distilled to evoke the strongest “drum†sounding parts.
Also, Jack Bevan is really taking it easy in this song. Where I can see boundless potential for semiquaver hits, some snareplay or even a single hihat slurp during the main beat, fills are reserved for the end of phrases. So boring. The overall structure of the song is very standard for a single. Intro, verse, chorus, verse (with subtle arrangement changes), chorus, bridge, extended chorus. The sections are not overly thrilling to me, and I find myself enjoying specific parts of the section rather than the section as a whole, The one section of this song I do really enjoy is the instrumental chorus, where Yannis plays this tinny guitar lick before everyone screams “Wake Me Up!â€. It's cute, and it reminds me of past Foals songs that I do enjoy. I just regret that it's not in more parts of the song, and instead were treated to Yannis's lyrical flow. 
Yannis is singing for the majority of the song, which I find weird. Back in previous albums you had parts of songs where the arrangement and instrumentation took centre stage and helped build this grandiose feeling, even if there were a lot of lyrics in the piece. I wanna bring focus to Foals's fourth album - What Went Down, which has a runtime of forty-eight and a half minutes, split between TEN songs. On average each song has to be about four minutes and forty-nine seconds.
What Went Down may not be my favourite album but it was really good at building this great spectacle of each song, like each was an epic journey to listen to, and I feel that's because of the space that each song provided. You didn't get rushed arrangements that wanted to be finished as quickly as possible. You got songs that took their time to develop and really allowed you to live in the sonic space they created before finishing each song satisfyingly. The biggest culprit of this is A Knife in the Ocean, with a duration of six minutes fifty-one seconds, with the first chorus finishing at two minutes and nineteen seconds. Most early Beatles songs finish after about two and a half minutes, and the majority of their songs are two-thirds of the way done by that point. Why am I dwelling on this? Well it feels like there's no time to appreciate the mix or the arrangement because the lyrics are so incessant. There's only really peace at the beginning of the song and that section I spoke about earlier. That wouldn't be a problem if I felt a connection to the lyrics and the lyrics themselves transported me out of my body. But they don't. The lyrics are just so… nothing. They mean nothing to me. I have no emotional connection with what Yannis is saying, and he's not really singing it in an engaging way either. Maybe I'm just tired of hearing Yannis sing about how he's a man. Maybe we all are. I don't know if these are the correct lyrics, and frankly I don't really care, but see for yourself.
I’m walking through a dream
I’m walking through the finest place I’ve ever seen. Hey man won’t you wake me up? Hey man won’t you wake me up? I’m walking through the fire defiant on the wire, burning up my desire Hey man won’t you come, come give me a gun? help me blow the lights right out of the sun so won’t you tell me if I’m dreaming? I need to know just where I stand. it turns out my hands are useless but maybe I’m a better man. Wake Me Up! I said Wake Me Up! I’m dancing on the screens I’m dancing in the mountains where I’ve always been. Hey man won’t you wake me up? Hey man won’t you wake me up? I’m kicking down the doors I’m climbing up the walls of the house that’s yours Hey man won’t you come, come give me a gun? help me blow the lights right out of the sun so won’t you tell me if I’m dreaming? I need to know just where I stand. it turns out my hands are useless but maybe I’m a better man? Wake Me Up! Wake Me Up! I said Wake Me Up! I’m dancing on the serpents, I’m dancing on the coals, you deny your own expression, you deny the things you know. I’m living through the ages, I’m dancing on the tiles, won’t commit to any handshake, or believe a Duchenne smile. I’m burning all my bridges, I’m pulling up the ropes, deleting all the codes, no! I’m not that man you know. you walk into a trap then you walk into your youth, yr living all that life in a pair of dusty boots. so won’t you tell me if I’m dreaming? I need to know just where i stand. it turns out my hands are useless but maybe I’m a better man? Wake Me Up!
It's interesting to see in a live performance that Yannis ditches singing one of the last choruses and just improvises a counterpoint melody to Jimmy's part. I would’ve loved to hear that in this song! But no, we got another chorus. Cool.
I am not a fan of the gang vocals for the lyric “Wake Me Up!†because it is indicative to me of the direction Foals is going, but for the song? It stylistically works. It makes me wince because it doesn't work with the mix too well in some parts but hey, dissonance is cool am I right!!
The bass just before the first verse at 0:33 is freaking weird. It's REALLY in your face. It's playing higher up on the fretboard. I don't really know any other Foals song that's ever done this. I don't know what you think, but I think it just sounds plain bad. Why is it still in the song? I wonder who played it?
Overall the bassline in Wake Me Up is at its best when it's not sustaining, as that doesn't suit the style of the song very well. The bassline is pretty good in the verse though, when it's doing this walking thing, before Jimmy doubles the part on his guitar. This part is quite captivating for me, far more than the Total Life Forever/Uptown Funk-style guitar chords. And that brings me to the one person I do still love a lot in Foals, and that's Jimmy Smith. Even in the songs that I loathe the existence of, and in the face of this shift in genre, production and songwriting style, his parts and arrangement is a standout. The guitar parts that he's playing in the video is pretty great (when it's not that annoying Uptown Funk thing) because they're focused on fast melodies and evokes that great tone Foals is known for. What I don't understand is Foals's new obsession with auxiliary percussion. They must really be into world music right now. I'll also briefly skim over this but the keyboard arpeggiation part that plays throughout the whole song feels very uninspired. When it was in Exits, it was pretty cool. When it was In Degrees, it was a characteristic of that song and worked well. But here it's just sparkly and gimmicky and clashing with the mix a lot. I miss Edwin already, he would have added so much to this to fix it up. The saddest part of me is I can immediately hear how this song would fit in the next FIFA game. Exactly the same way I could tell The Runner was going to feature in FIFA just from the first listen, or how Black Bull would fit in an ad for Jeep. But also - no shade to Foals for this, they have a comprehensive crew working with them for their live show, for their recording process and for their music videos. They all gotta get paid too.
I guess I should speak about the music video that launched with this song. It's alright. I guess the setup is they're playing in an empty venue because of the pandemic and they're briskly covering lyrics and themes from the song in scene settings. The least boring element to me is that red room of cellophane and balloons, and Yannis just kinda walks in and immediately out of the room like “wtf is thisâ€. That was kinda interesting. Everything else is just so normal and clean cut and lame to me. Besides the band, everyone's in jumpsuits. Okay.
I'm getting tired of talking about this song but to sum up, not really a fan. I don't feel any need to listen to this regularly because I'm not getting anything new out of this. I do kinda like Jimmy's parts in certain bits, but that doesn't save the song for me. This feels like an uninspired funk single from a band that should focus more on rock and indie elements, in my opinion. Sadly, Wake Me Up has made its way into my head as an earworm and I'll probably hum it until I get stuck into learning parts for Arbes or working on new Orange material. I am a complete cuck for Foals and I probably will listen to this song again and probably enjoy it more, but I look down upon my future self for doing so. 4/10.
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Remember two weeks ago when I said that I was a little busy during this current lockdown period but that I'd try to have something written up for this time next week. Well... turns out things got really busy. Things got really busy and really crazy in my life and I had to miss last week's post. Slight apologies for that one. We're back on track for this week however so here's something exciting: a new song. I wrote this song called Future Role. I have my dear friend Stella Farnan singing on it. I wrote the song back in lockdown #2 in August last year. It's all about wanting to shake off your passive role in society and wanting to actively create a difference that will make a better future. I wrote this song when I was anxious and existential about my own future and pondering what I was going to be like in 5 years. Hopefully I'll be a force of good! Anyway, I thought it would be a wonderful idea to film Stella and I performing the song in a car. Soren's car. While Soren was driving. And Sydney recording and filming. So... what do you think? Do you like it? Do you not? I think Stella sang incredibly well that day - this performance in particular. I found myself struggling to get the chords consistent and correct in this performance and I HATE what I was wearing. But let's let bygones be bygones, shall we?
I'm incredibly excited to formally announce that Future Role is coming out on Thursday July 8th. I can give you a presave link here so that it appears in your playlists or something here: https://ditto.fm/future-role However I do think you should follow me on Spotify or Apple Music or whatever you consume music on and it should pop up on July 8th. Maybe mark it in your calendars. That'll help. Anyway, love you all! Look out for each other please. - R
Hi!
You've heard the top 10, but now you'll have to prepare for the B-Sides! The Foals B-Sides are hidden gems awaiting those who want to find them, in my opinion. Such instantaneous classics. So wonderful. So different to their album tracks. So unique. I could almost classify all of them into their own compilation. Heck, Warner Music will probably do that and I'll definitely fork over $200 or whatever exorbarent amount they charge me to grab it on vinyl, or cassette. Anyway, I'll just briefly state my thoughts on each track and move on. I left of Hummer and Mathletics because they're more singles than B-Sides, and I also left off Try This On Your Piano and Look at my Furrows of Worry because they're a whole can of worms that I don't even want to touch today. Without further ado - here we go!
Gold Gold Gold
I feel a great sadness with this song and it's most likely through association with sad moments in my life. Despite this, I still love this song to death. Jack's unpredictable four-on-the-floor dance beat is a standout, and I do believe I've asked Harry to rip it off for some Plaza-Trg songs back in the day. The flams and fills Jack does have this strange, modular unpredictability that seem to be a pattern that I can never play along to. I like that. It's hard for me to say what melodic parts are synthesizers and what parts are samples, but I can hear the guitar line and it's quite calm for a Foals song. It's possibly the earliest use of Foals playing chords, which I find quite interesting. That being said I can't really find a bassline in the mix until around 2 minutes, which is ALSO VERY INTERESTING. I love how nerdy and cringe the lyrics can be on these B-Sides. In this song, it's the stuff like "I am the voice inside your heart" and "I know your mouth". Iyick. That being said, I do love how potent and powerful the lyrics can be as well, and I enjoy the use of repetition quite a lot. "I am a rocket, I am a rocket, you are an anchor, you are an anchor down" is a clear standout of both a lyric and a motif. The greatest part of Gold Gold Gold has to be at that 2:46 mark when the bridge section with the riff enters, before the drum beat changes and all other melodic parts copy it in unison & octave unison. My god, it is so good. It's so incredibly suave. It's a shame that it doesn't go for longer, but maybe it's good for my health that it's short. All good things in moderation. I will say the outro is okay but unnecessarily long. Maybe they were imagining quite a large live buildup for this song. Who knows. I guess it could be unfinished seeing as it's a B-Side. All in all, one of the better B-Sides!
Titan Arum
This is also one of the better B-Sides, though it might be my own personal preference. The beat for this one is so good. I dunno, Jack Bevan has a way of making these strange beats sounding so full, and bursting at the seams with life and energy. This one is full of weird flams and fills but it suits the style of the song a lot. The first section of this song is the weaker part of the song, lead mostly by the dynamic beat and synth bleeps and boops here and there. I start to space out when Foals lean into ambient guitar noise for the melody and avoid using their tasty guitar tones but there is something to be said in the eclectic array of sounds in this section. The lyrics are not particularly amazing, sounding just like passing thoughts in a diary, but I do enjoy the final line "The terror we must avoid and behold." The next section is a wonderful buildup with vocal "Ooohs" and a subtle change in drumming EQ that makes a lot of difference. There's a Foals B-side listener mix that forgoes the intro and just starts here, and I think that's a perfectly acceptable creative choice. It starts to pick up when the guitar plays the main riff in the second half of this section. The main part of this song is the faster paced section, with some wonderful syncopated keys matched with this wicked riff initially played on a guitar or a bass, and then eventually doubled with this filthy dark-sounding synth line. I really, really enjoy this section, it seems to devolve into dark-house music guitars and bass. What a strange thing to eventually change to from the opening section. It would be so incredibly cool to see this performed live, or see something like it performed live. Know anything like this? Shoot me a dm and we can discuss :^) The ending here is just so good. It sounds like it's looping but it isn't matched 100% perfectly, and I am just so keen on that. I also may have totally ripped off the ending of this song for Monket.
The Chronic
This song is just the most energetic song. Polyphony gone MAD. Again, Jack Bevan doesn't disappoint, and I think he's chosen quite an appropriate and interesting beat considering the backing arrangement. I really enjoy how incessant the beat is, it's quite maximal and wonderful. "I spark up all day" as the only lyrics is also great. It somehow reduces its identity to me but it's okay it's still pretty iconic. Harry and I were quite disappointed that he wasn't saying "I smoke pot all day" but this is just as fine of an alternative. While it may feel like an overenergetic mess sometimes, it does ebb and flow quite well. I really enjoy when this song opens up quite wildly around 2:25. There's the essence of the opening beat in The French Open in the later part in some drum parts and the arrangement, but the beat is bloody wild, doing that 3/4 thing for a bit. I'd like to think Edwin was quite in love with that beat looping pedal because it makes quite a feature in this piece. Or his hands are quite fast.
Unthink This
Unthink This is a much calmer song compared to the other songs I've reviewed so far, because it avoids excessive syncopation, and is overall quite simple, just repeating this 10 bar phrase over and over for the length of song. Jack Bevan keeps killing it with the beats. They're all so different from each other in their pattern or use or context. This one is notably restrained however I appreciate how he hallmarks sections with the style of drumming he chooses. I also especially enjoy the splashiness of the ride or crash. In terms of the lyrics I do think that the abstract imagery spoken in the lyrics does make the lyrics work. However the delivery is quite basic and there isn't that much exceptional about it, bar the yelling at the end of the song. This song isn't as weird as the other B-sides and it doesn't feel as remarkable because of that, unfortunately. It is still pretty catchy. I dunno, I'm split on this song.
Brazil is Here!
This song is quite unique. The beat that Jack Bevan plays is so unique, and I haven't heard any other song try it before. The fact that I haven't heard the main beat of this song used before is weird to me because it's not too abnormal of a beat, as it has a slight syncopation with the hihat. The backing arrangement is calm for a B-side, and has some very catchy interplay between Yannis and Jimmy that's complimented very well with Edwin's looping synth bit. I do think Walter is being a bit safe with the bass here and just staying on the one note for the majority of the song with a quaver rhythm. It may just be a placeholder, however some interesting basslines do pop up here and there towards the end of the song. This is a much better vocal performance that a lot of the B-sides but the lyrics are a bit goofy if you ask me. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHH VOLCANO. I dunno I just think it doesn't create the right atmosphere with the backing arrangement. I do love the way that this song ends though. A huge section that's so texturally thick, and a nice call back to the beginning of the song. It's SICK.
Dearth
Actually, undisputably, an amazing song. Probably the best B-Side. This is where the vocal melody is at its best, full of leaps and dynamic movement that allows some variation here and there. I don't know what Yannis is sing about besides breaking our legs and cutting the phone lines on Saturday, but that doesn't matter because the melody and rhythm of the vocal carries it, letting me buy into this imagery and metaphor that Yannis offers. I also love the way the lyrics are sung, especially the first line in the song: "I could cut my hands off now", I'm not sure why. I think it's the way Yannis says "now". Dearth has the best arrangement for a B-Side, it's so catchy. Walter's bassline is at its best in this song. It's so dynamic and willing to play all over the fretboard, playing many octaves up in that first verse. I love it a lot, it makes the chorus so much more impactful when Walter jumps back in low. The interplay between the other 3 melodic instruments are quite impactful as well and further energise the song through the polyrhythmic rhythmic style compared to the 4/4 beat. I especially enjoy this towards the end of the second chorus around 1:53, where the guitar or keyboard adds this slow arpeggiation on top of the section. I don't know how they recorded Jack Bevan's drums for this song but I want to learn how because it sounds so full of life. The snare drum is a particular standout for me, especially in that section just before the second verse around 1:21 where the snare works in tandem with the kick and really drives the piece among the monotony of the beep boops and the math-rock guitars. All in all, not much bad to say about this song. It's tight, punchy and all you'd want in a Foals release.
Astronauts and All
I love this nerdy-ass song... sometimes. This very much defines the 'math-pop' genre and that's probably why it ended up as a B-side and nothing more. This song is quite good but I do find I have to be in the mood for it. Jack Bevan, what more do I have to say. He's delivered before, and here he nails it. I don't know how many more times can I say that the drumming is just so eclectic. It's always doing something with energy that's creative for the situation. Maybe I'm just a sucker for energetic beats over syncopation. Dance music things. My favourite beat is the one just before the final verse (the last "MAKE IT HAPPEN BOYS AND GIRLS) I do think this arrangement is a bit... forgettable, like I don't enjoy what the guitars are playing in the verse as much. I can't really explain it beyond the melodic choices aren't my favourite. The lyrics don't really enhance it and just make it a bit goofier than I would like, I guess. This is probably why I have to be in the mood for the song. I don't really have that much to say about this one... it's not my fave. It stil ain't bad though.
Big Big Love (Fig. 1)
The original Big Big Love. I actually strongly dislike this song. I always have. It's all fine until around 0:37, when that awful snare comes in. The chorus then employs this dance beat and I just cannot stand it. It takes away everything I like about the B-sides, like their creativity and their weirdness, and tries super hard to ham-fist this pop-song styling into the arrangement. I personally cannot stand it, it only works between 3:30 and 4:22. I'm so glad they remade this song and absolutely fixed the beat, and approached the production completely differently. I bet you this was their turning point in finding out what style the band wanted to be.
A Song For You
This is a big departure in tone from the previous B-sides. It opens with backing vocals. That's kind of crazy considering old-school Foals. I really enjoy this song as an album track. It's a slow pace math rock song with choral vocals and strings in it. I dunno that seems pretty cool for me. The guitar does this cool looping sound and it works. The vocals are used sparingly and only when necessary, and it's so great. This does feel like a precursor for Total Life Forever, and I really enjoy it as such. Jack uses quite a refined slow drumbeat for this song and it works amazingly well. There's not much more to say for me overall other than the sounds they make are quite calming and pretty, and I do enjoy it a lot.
A Sketch for ESG
This song is quite basic and is one of the purely instrumental full-length Foals songs. I think it pulls it off quite well, and would be a great song to play for a road trip or a trip in general. However, the song does end kind of strangely, and it is a bit drawn out. However, that may be for its favour when it is played live. Jack Bevan I swear is just having fun with it now. The beat keeps changing between iconic beats, I can't even choose where to begin. One of the beats did heavily inspire the chorus for the first section of MONKET. I do really enjoy that The French Open harkens back to the beat switch in this song for a phrase. It's that exciting and, dare I say it again, ICONIC. Edwin has a standout role in this piece and I wonder how much he wrote. My favourite thing about A Sketch for ESG is that the only footage that they have of Foals playing a show in someone's bedroom was playing A Sketch for ESG, and it's astounding that everyone fits in the room.
Glaciers
Glaciers is pretty epic. I'm struggling to describe it really is just an epic journey. As an epic journey, it mostly nails it however does fall short from being as epic as it can be, and is only epic in the noun sense, and not the adjective. Because it is a ballad-style song with that Foals B-side drone sound pallette it does strike me as unremarkable at some parts. There's not much to say about the opening section really, Jack is playing a slower beat quite energetically and I don't know if it works with the song. It does sound really great, and it is a really cool beat, I just don't know if it suits the section. The second section is very unique and the superior section in my opinion. I love the use of space and echo for the opening section, and I love the incredibly unconvention drumming programmed by Jack, mixed with the bass. The low end and low-mids do sound incredibly muffled at points in this song but I don't know, the vibe feels right for most of the section. Yannis's vocals and its delivery is strangely very good and evocative of powerful imagery, most likely about his father. I dunno it's quite simple but it's very effective. The repeating ending is also quite cool. Glaciers is pretty epic. I'm struggling to describe it really is just an epic journey. As an epic journey, it mostly nails it however does fall short from being as epic as it can be, and is only epic in the noun sense, and not the adjective. Because it is a ballad-style song with that Foals B-side drone sound pallette it does strike me as unremarkable at some parts. There's not much to say about the opening section really, Jack is playing a slower beat quite energetically and I don't know if it works with the song. It does sound really great, and it is a really cool beat, I just don't know if it suits the section. The second section is very unique and the superior section in my opinion. I love the use of space and echo for the opening section, and I love the incredibly unconvention drumming programmed by Jack, mixed with the bass. The low end and low-mids do sound incredibly muffled at points in this song but I don't know, the vibe feels right for most of the section. Yannis's vocals and its delivery is strangely very good and evocative of powerful imagery, most likely about his father. I dunno it's quite simple but it's very effective. The repeating ending is also quite cool.
The Forked Road
Now we're in TLF territory.... The Forked Road is one of the best Foals songs ever. This song nails that AB section that many Foals B-sides have attempted before it. The vocals in this song match the opening section, and the lyrics are there too. This song opens with just a guitar line and it seamlessly evaporates as more instrument fall into place. This song is so good with parts fading in and out seamlessly, you wouldn't even notice them disappearing. That allows it to do some very interesting stuff, like change pulse. I can't really explain how but it gradually changes from the introduced 6/8 to 4/4 as the drums come in, and it's so convincing. The second half of this song is incredible. It merges the old math-rock edge of Foals with the new funkier, calmer style of TLF. The guitar and bass lines working together just make this section for me. It's irresistible when the bassline changes note from E to C and all the energy is on the off beat. I dunno it feels so great. Jack is incredibly restrained in this song, barely even playing the kick drum for the second section, only showing shades of insanity with the fills that he does. Those fills are incredible. Yannis also plays this wonderful melody on his guitar in this section. It's quite slow for a Foals melody but it's just epic, and in the adjective sense. Overall, this song is just Glaciers done incredibly well. 10/10 a masterpiece.
Wear and Tear
I have an incredible soft spot for this song. This was in my busking repertoire throughout the later stages in high school. I do think this is up there with the best Foals songs. I think the vocals and lyrics are just so powerful and show maturity from Antidotes. I also love the persistence of backing vocals in this song, it's just such a potent throughline. It certainly was one of my favourite Foals songs for quite some time, however I do think it has fallen from grace a little bit now. The verse is incredibly refined and nothing is an accident, or out of place, or unfinished. It's so cool. Jack Bevan is so good here. That's incredibly hard to dispute. The beat at the chorus sounds simple but is incredibly nuanced, I'm not sure if it would've carried over in a live context. It does remind me so much of Soren's "The Glare" and I do think this may have influenced this song for Soren. My soft spot for any song in Bb major probably came from this song. The riff for this song is incredibly catchy and a wonderful use of syncopation in a song. The section after the second chorus before the ending is also pretty cool on the first or second listen, however you do get bored after hearing the song so many times like I have. There's not a lot to uncover here, and it's probably why I don't love this song as much as I used to. Oh well. It's still great.
Bluebird
Foals stopped mass-producing B-Sides at this point and likely saved potential B-Sides to work on for future albums, which is fair enough. All we have for Holy Fires are some CCTV sessions and this song. Bluebird. The B-Side for Holy Fire. This takes a leaf out of Moon and tries making it more like Alabaster. I'll be honest, I can probably count how many times I've listened to this song, it's never really grabbed me. It's quite forgettable. This is a newer era of Foals, and therefore a new era of Foals B-sides, where it's not about the rhythm or arrangement as much as it is about the songwriting. This is probably why I don't care as much for this song. The looping guitar part is pretty nice to listen to. This song just feels like if Foals attempted to be more like Radiohead. Don't do that. I think there's a bassoon or a flute in this song, it might just be the keys. Neat. I don't know, it's just really hard for me to connect with this song because it's just two verses, over a looping guitar part and a snare sound that makes me SNORE.
Rain
THE CITY CAN WAIT. This song is very incredibly different to many of the songs on What Went Down, and I am so glad it isn't anything like the many forgettable songs on that LP. I do think it would be a cool ending to WWD if it was after A Knife in the Ocean, but hey, it's okay that everything happened the way it did. I won't die a sadder man. The arrangement is very simple and wonderful, just a synth pad, synth keys, what I want to assume is an orchestral bass drum, some bass, and some big vocals. This is obviously Yannis's best vocal performance. The lyrics are mostly very good as well. What a combo. It should be noted that Sunday does use a similar opening synth sound, I don't know if it is the same. Apparently Sunday was a song cut off of What Went Down, so I wouldn't be surprised if this song was a result of Sunday or vice versa.
That's my list! You can probably tell I'm a bit of a shill for the earlier B-Sides, because I do appreciate an energetic arrangement over anything else from Foals. But hey, everyone has their different tastes! Some people unironically enjoy The Runner! That's okay!
That'll be it from me for now. I'm a little busy during this current lockdown period (thank goodness) but I'll try and have something written up for this time next week. I also want to say that it's exactly a month until my next Orange Orange song is out - you can presave it here! https://ditto.fm/future-role Exciting times! - R Hey! Just before I get into this week's blog post I wanted to showcase this performance of Oh How You Bend, live from Sandro's Alley. Bend is one of the subtler songs and has an awesome arrangement live (HUGE thanks to Johnsen, Alex, Dylan, Sydney and Sunny for that) so I really recommend you watch the video before reading the rest of the post. I do think it is one of the stronger lyrics I have written. Also, huge props to both Dylan Jepsen and Johnsen Cummings for working so tirelessly on these videos, Dylan with editing and Johnsen with the audio. Remember to click that bell! Anyway, in this blog post I will be continuing to shed further light on the zine I spent way too many hours writing in 2018. I am a little bit (very) embarrassed at the length I go at talking about One Piece here, but what can I say I was very passionate about One Piece at the time. It has such a good narrative! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Gigant: The project name for this track was “Arbes Samples” as it uses two samples from a talented three-piece band that went to my high school, called Arbes. The two tracks sampled are “Fortunes” and “Flutaar”. Flutaar’s sample is a subtle repitching, but I directly sampled the opening guitar melody from their song ‘Fortunes’ for the A-sections of Gigant. If you are not familiar with any of Arbes’s material do yourself a favour and wash some dishes whilst listening to either one of their EP’s. You will instantly feel better. My favourite track is ‘Beach Side’, from their first EP, Swimmer. Gigant is a German word meaning “giant”. Like “shame”, it was a word that got stuck in my head for many months. Of course, its relevance in my life was because the word is a part of attack names within the manga/anime One Piece. The lead protagonist’s (Luffy’s) special power is that his body is composed entirely of rubber, so he utilises this ability to inflate bones in specific parts of his body (usually his hands or feet) to incredible sizes before attacking the opponent. As Luffy attacks he yells out a standard attack name but slots in the word “Gigant” before the name of the attack. For instance, “Pistol” is when Luffy throws a punch and his arm hyper-extends forward and stretches out, vastly increasing its range. “Gigant Pistol” is this same style of attack but with an enlarged fist due to the bone in his hand having been inflated like a balloon, increasing its power but reducing Luffy’s mobility. For a fantasy pirate manga, One Piece uses a lot of real-life physics in its battle sequences. I’m not sure why but the word “Gigant” and the concept of “Gigant” always stuck with me, and because it’s stuck with me so long I take it as part of my personality and felt that I must express it through my art. I chose the word “Gigant” to be with this song because my obsession with the word was quite personal to me as One Piece isn't really trending or normalised as much as other pop culture in Melbourne. I’ve always really, really enjoy this song so naming it Gigant always felt right to me. The meaning of the word is also vaguely relevant to the lyrics of the song, fortunately. Hilariously enough, One Piece has had a surprising amount of influence on my songwriting all my life. One song that takes a lot of inspiration is a song from my other band Plaza-Trg, called ‘Harpy’. To avoid talking any more about One Piece for this zine (I hope): this was the second song I composed for the album but the fifth or sixth that I finished writing lyrics for. I wrote the composition for Gigant on a Friday morning in the Summer and it stuck itself in my head while I was making pizzas for the whole weekend. Writing lyrics for it was much trickier, however. This song is about being a part of something new and great that's entered your life. You're initially so glad that this new thing is here before you start doubting yourself because of your own fixation on this thing and feeling out of place with this new thing. It's a small-scale anxiety that I think subtly hints at what the rest of the album is going to be about. This song is also about a desire to belong somewhere. I personified this desire as a congenial partner that l yearned for. You want to be at this place so badly. You’re glad you’re away from where you were, but you’re always doubting yourself. You believe that you’re being judged at your new place, and that you’re not good enough for the place so you convince yourself that it’s not worth it. But in the end you see the absurdity of it all, and laugh it off. You're truly happy to be wherever you are, no matter where it is, while still longing for the place where you feel safe. I wrote the lyrics when my life felt to be in a period of transition. I was still adjusting to my first year of university, and being in intimate classes with very talented people who were recognised for their talents was really scary for me to adjust to. I was also at the age where people begin to think about life beyond their families and move out to live on their own, which is a lot to ponder for someone who takes their sheltered cosy life for granted. I wrote the lyrics for the sparser sounding section in one go, but the “drum and bass” section took many months before I was content with it. It was only really when I thought of the line “I can’t wait to walk through the final gate” that everything made sense to me. In the later sections of the song I talk about this “siren” that pops up in my life. A siren is a creature in Greek mythology who lure sailors with their beautiful singing voices and enchanting music to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island. I was inspired to research sirens from a songwriting tutoring session with Harry James Angus from The Cat Empire, which I was very lucky to be a part of. A piece of advice he gave that really stuck with me was to take heavy influence from old mythology, because myths and stories hold their relevance because the core ideas and beliefs of such stories are taken from the core of human nature, which has not changed throughout history. I used the tale of the siren and compared it to entities in my own life that would woo me and lead me to my demise. In the song even though the siren is leading me away from my course I am completely aware that they will be the one to lead me to my demise in the end (“I know you’ll be the one to cast me onto the rocks”), and thus the line “I can’t wait to walk through the final gate” shows total acceptance and even eagerness towards my own death in this manner, as if it would free me from the burdens that I were carrying. I find that super interesting and, somewhat, empowering. I think I have the closest connection with this song. It’s written in Bb Ionian, which is a mode that a lot of my favourite music is written in, and was just a general joy to work on. I was refining this song and adding electric bass and guitar to it in my own time long before I had even conceptualised the album, so I feel as if this song is the one I care for most. I also recently realised that this song, while very much a song about wanting to belong somewhere, is also a love song, and probably one of the few optimistic love songs I’ve written (more on optimistic love songs with Dermo-Creme). This is especially apparent when viewed holistically, with the first few stanza setting the scene, then the complication comes in, then I dwell on everything that could go wrong, then I accept that what will happen will happen, concluding with the butteriest ending I’ve ever written. I’ll let you see why. Originally, I wanted Ruby-Sofia to sing this song, but after a recording rehearsal at my house I realised that her voice did not suit the style of lyric writing, as the way the melody leapt around for her voice reminded me of a country dance song. My final resolve was to use my own voice for the song, as I strangely put a lot of effort into the demo vocal for Ruby and Isaac, and as with each day that passed I enjoyed my voice on it more and more. I think I made the right choice in the end. I asked Alex to make the artwork of a young boy with some stereotypical child traits, like a bowl cut and a big grin with missing baby teeth, because a lot of this song evokes younger childhood memories and purer feelings for me. I chose orange as the background colour for the artwork as this song always reminded me of the colour orange, a colour which I always associated with nostalgia, and this feeling is especially apparent in the verses that convey a sense of relief. I really enjoyed using the word ‘lion’ as an adjective, and I hope to do it more often. Influences: Courtship Dating - Crystal Castles: I listened to a lot of Crystal Castles when I was younger, and I really enjoy their first album. Their first album has some very intense, high octane songs that I enjoy very much, and some moderately-paced songs that I didn't enjoy as much when I was younger and more of a punk. ‘Courtship Dating’ is the only moderately-paced song on that album that I always enjoyed. I remember when I made the opening section of ‘Gigant’ and instantly felt the need for a drum and bass section to follow it, starting on the submediant. I’ve only realised this now, but this is because the beat in the opening section of ‘Gigant’ is very similar to the beat in the opening section of ‘Courtship Dating’, through the hi-hat timbre and the infrequent kick drum rhythm. Following this section the song brings in a sine bass (I’m pretty sure it’s a sine bass (it is not a sine bass)) and uses a more dance-y beat as vocals come in. I guess the similarity between ‘Courtship Dating’ and ‘Gigant’ is what inspired me to subconsciously make my song so similar. I’ve also never really noticed this but the way the dancey section of ‘Gigant’ plays out is similar to some EDM where the beat feels like it is at half speed (usually through placement of the snare). I listened to a fair amount of EDM growing up (mainly Daft Punk, with Deadmau5 and Knife Party phases as well) so I’m glad that some of the tropes in those genres are finally showing in the songs I write. Night of the Long Knives - Everything Everything: I’m not sure why but it seems my favourite music seems to in Bb major or any of its correlating modes. Night Of The Long Knives is one of my favourite songs, period. There are so many interesting musical details present in this song alone that I borrow in my music. The polyrhythmic guitar towards the latter half of the song strongly influenced the final crescendo of Outside from my first EP. You’re going to notice that Night Of The Long Knives is the leading inspirational drive of this album, partly because of the strength of the word “Shame” in that song. This song takes inspiration from the IV - I chord movement in the chorus for the A section, and the B section’s syncopated melody on the guitar and bass accompanying a consistent drum beat. A Different Feeling - The Avalanches: My favourite Avalanches song, the way this song can leap between upbeat and lulling but still maintain that dancing energy definitely influenced this song. The beat also was a large influence. Late Night - Foals: A haunting song. The drum beat that Jack Bevan plays from about 0:53 to 2:20 always sounded so crisp to me, even through its simplicity. I really enjoy how the hihat is so repetitive but sounds so great and carries the beat so effectively. I listened to Two Steps Twice, arguably their greatest song, for the first time in a while and the hi-hat has the same effect there. Maybe that’s the “Foals sound” my friends always say I convey. Lyrics: So you stirred up the quiet ocean. Turned the tides in a lion way. And it’s clear when it comes from nothing at all. All my life, where have you been? But with this autonomy, am I glad? You could be the one to guide me under the knife. I can’t wait to walk through the final gate. And I love that they’re coming closer. But do they come with a loaded question? For I’m stuck in the fissure of stigma. I’m a slave to the me before me. And I hope that it’s almost over. And my heart knows it feels bereft. But it’s so damn hard to keep you away. And there’s hardly room to breathe. Don't. Can’t deny the need to feel ahead of the pack. It’s not like I let the world hold me back. I’m out where the giants roam. Footsteps and all. I can’t wait to give up, alright? These burdens are doubling. But what’s that coming up? A siren for me to chase out to sea? And where you aimlessly wander, I’ll shamelessly follow. And I know you’ll be the one to cast me onto the rocks. I can’t wait to walk through the final gate. And I know that you’re coming closer. And I don’t care that there are bigger fish. So please, just pick me up and take me away. For I’m warm in your gooey heat. Artist Influence - Everything Everything: Everything Everything is definitely the largest influence on me and this album. While their newer material boasts tight songwriting and incredible lyrics, the arrangements of some of their earlier songs are so wild and should not be discredited. There are so many of their songs that inspired individual tracks of this album that it wouldn't be a stretch to say that every song off this album is heavily influenced by an Everything Everything song. As I have already discussed, their track ‘Night Of The Long Knives’ influenced the name and artistic direction of the album as well as the style of many songs on the album. I got turned onto listening to Everything Everything at the beginning of 2016 by close friend Harry, the drummer of my other band, Plaza-Trg, and they have been a large part of my life ever since. I strongly connect with the views and beliefs that Jonathan Higgs conveys through his lyric writing, and it is a chief influence on my own songwriting. I was listening to their latest album ‘A Fever Dream’ almost compulsively when I was creating Shame, and both the lyric writing and song arrangements rub off onto this record. You Threw Me Away: To put it simply, ‘You Threw Me Away’ is about a relationship that declined. It’s written in this kind of acquiesced anger that rationally accepts what has happened over time but is very annoyed that it happened. I think a large section of my shame is taken up with misguided blame and the moral consequences that would follow. There is power in validation of your perceived truth, and whether that truth is right or wrong is irrelevant if knowledge you gathered is valid, even if misguided. The lyrics of this song are very much influenced by this philosophy, with You Threw Me Away containing the most viscerally written lyrics on the album. I wanted this song to be as empowering as possible for myself and listeners. I tried writing as succinctly and simply by overusing personal pronouns to create an overt sense of self (“I was ____, You ____, I thought ____…”), to allow listeners an easier avenue to empathise. The result of this is that I’m accusing throughout a large portion of the song, which is something I don’t usually enjoy doing, but as its purpose is to set myself at ease I’m fine with it in the short term. I feel that this is a very irrational pleasure to have. In retrospect, there were a lot of things that I could have done to amend the situation so that I could at least feel better about myself, but I can also justify why I was wired to act in such a passive and meek manner. The chorus concisely summarises my initial emotive reaction to the whole situation. Part of the reason I felt so worried during this partnership was that I felt like I couldn’t offer anything to my partner. I was a young, poor, skilless teenager who couldn’t drive or afford to go out, and didn't have much going on compared to friends my age. From a very superficial standpoint it was clear that I had very little to give at the time, so there was always a fear in me that I would be discarded for such reasons. Of course, I wouldn’t think anyone would be that shallow as to judge me for my things over my personality. However it is apparent to me now that this fear was really enveloping who I was to this partner, and that shifted my personality to not be at my full potential, and thus, ultimately lead to being discarded for these reasons. The chorus details how dumbfounded I was as I’d convinced myself that someone would actually dislike me for what I could not provide, and how I assure myself that people who act that way simply are not good enough for me (“Look at you / You mucked up / You threw me away”). One of my favourite lines is “Still I’ll go / I’ll grow up / I’ll drive a car / I’ll move out”. It describes my fixation to attain some kind of independence during the Summer after high school. The situation that I was in definitely drove a desire to be more independent but even after the situation ended those feelings were still there, if dormant. I also love the line “Look at me look at you!” because it’s demanding acknowledgement for my emotive response, and that conveys so much insecurity. I had so much trouble naming this track. The impulsive project name for this track was “June July & August”, quite possibly because the timbre of the arpeggiated chords remind me of something frigid and cold, like winter. The day I decided on the final title was when my friend was telling me about the importance of a chorus, many months after I had started writing this song, and how it should summarise what the contention of the song is in a few words or sentences. The example he gave was the song ‘Crazy’ by Gnarls Barkley. I told him that while the chorus of the song should summarise the contention of the song, the title should convey the meaning in just a word or a few words, and we all agreed. From that moment (whenever that moment was) that idea lingered in my mind, and when I realised I needed a title for this song I stressed out because I didn't really have an idea. I looked into the lyrics and tried to find something that summarised the song in just a word, or a phrase, and “You Threw Me Away” did just that. The only scrapped title worth noting was “Bending”, but with the existence of ‘Crashing’ I decided against another “-ing” suffix in a title. I'll probably use that title for another Orange Orange track. This was the third song I composed for the album, but the second last that I finished lyrics for. I wrote the lyrics for the chorus around the same time I initially created the song, but because I was trying to relate to feelings that I had long dispatched, I had much trouble writing the verses. I asked Alex to draw a bird's nest for me because you could liken the subject that I am singing about to a bird that has left their nest, while I sit in the nest and wait. Influences: Kemosabe - Everything Everything: ‘You Threw Me Away’ borrows heavily from ‘Kemosabe’, which is one of my favourite Everything Everything songs for its potent lyricism and progressions. While they both the second full song on their respective albums and both have four choruses, the arpeggiated chords used in the verses of ‘Kemosabe’ influenced this song the most. The line “My neurons, they slow me” was directly influenced by “Do you feel like your brain’s stopped delivering?” in the first verse of Kemo. Olympic Airways - Foals: The section beginning around 2:17 in Olympic Airways directly influenced the verses of this song. The chord arpeggiation on the piano directly imitates two guitars tremolo picking harmonies, and the dance beat influences the similar, wonkier dance beat used for this song. Night of the Long Knives - Everything Everything: The beat of this song is super similar to the beat of Night of The Long Knives. I was mainly inspired by the dancey hi-hats and the kick drum rhythm, and how the beat is present throughout the whole song. My Number - Foals: One of Foals’s bigger tracks, this song just sounds good. The way the vocal is constructed in this song (with a lower octave harmony) always pleased me so I tried emulating that for my verses. Also, I mimicked the iconic hi-hat fill present throughout ‘My Number’ with a similar but cheesier crash cymbal. I love it. Spring / Sun / Winter / Dread - Everything Everything: This is an instant Everything Everything classic. The ending section is the lyrics “You are a thief and a murderer too / Stole the face that you wear from a craven baboon / ‘Cos you did it to her and you did it to him / And you did it before and you’ll do it again” sung at a rapid pace over an outro crescendo likened to the main chorus. When I saw Everything Everything live this ending section was the one part of the set that really had people dancing and crashing into each other, and it made me think that the mindless blaming in the lyrics were instilling belief and strength into the audience. This really inspired me to write lyrics that avoid rationality and just try to express everything I had built up within me, especially for a dance-y song like this one. Lyrics: I was floating and restless. Swiping down the stream. You charmed me out when I sensed no vitriol bursting at the seams. In the succession of moments we lived through, I thought it was a dream. But, my neurons, they slow me, I’m running out of steam. Now, you tell me to wait for the moment. Throw my sword into the sea. So I succumb to play with my thumbs. It’s what I wanna be. In the past, I told me, “It’s all in my head, don’t worry.” But now I’m so… so dumbfounded. Not worth my time. Still I go, “I’ll grow up. I’ll drive a car, I’ll move out.” But look at you. You mucked up. You threw me away. And there you go, shaped by the world. Life is but a race. And here I am, fanging for you, clinging to my faith. “Why won’t you stay home and soothe my bare bones?” Is what I’d rather say. But you work so hard, and straight-forward. Push me out the way. In the past, I told me, “It’s all in my head, don’t worry.” But now I’m so… so dumbfounded. Not worth my time. Still I go, “I’ll grow up. I’ll drive a car, I’ll move out.” But look at you. You mucked up. You threw me away. I always thought that you went so much deeper, you petty little skunk. And I thought our ribs could coexist. I’m grieving like a monk. But, I get it, you human. So young and hungry. You want to reap from the world for your being. It’s what you wanna be. In the past, I told me, “It’s all in my head, don’t worry.” But now I’m so… so dumbfounded. Not worth my time. Still I go, “I’ll grow up. I’ll drive a car, I’ll move out.” But look at me look at you! You mucked up. You threw me away. In the past, I told me, “It’s all in my head, don’t worry.” But now I’m so… so dumbfounded. Not worth my time. Still I go, “I’ll grow up. I’ll drive a car, I’ll move out.” But look at you. You mucked up. You threw me away. Artist - April Whitmore: The first stanza of lyrics I wrote for You Threw Me Away was the chorus, as melody for the chorus came to me very quickly. The only issue was that I could not comfortably sing this melody. This is where the lovely April Whitmore comes into the mix. I first saw April as she was performing in the now-defunct Eat Pant, and I instantly loved her voice and how she projected herself, so she seemed like a perfect fit. She was very professional about everything and I am very happy with the way the chorus came out in the end. Her current band 'Janada' is superb, I thoroughly suggest you check them out. CYA next week.
- R I just wanted to go over where I'm at with my music and how it's all going, because it's been over 6 months since my last release and I'm itching to put something more out soon. I have some tracks that are pretty close to being released into the world, but I also have some that are waiting in the hangars to be deployed. I'm not sure what format it will all come out as eventually, but these ones I will talk about will eventually come out soon. 2020 was strangely one of my most productive years as an artist, and I’ve created a whole bunch of songs across a whole array of styles (and artists!). I think being able to block out the business of the society I am in helps a LOT. I could just focus on recording and being productive in that manner. My most productive period was from the middle of March 2020 to the end of May 2020, I wrote about 5 projects for uni (most of which I’m repurposing for Orange Orange), two or three Orange songs and a whole EP of Plaza-Trg songs with Harry. It was so wonderful! I need a productive time like that again soon. Anway, here are the tracks, in order of when I made them! Singapore a Distance I wrote this at the end of 2019. This track is quite a departure from the style I’ve developed, as it’s quite bubblegum-pop-esque. It’s quite a standard song structure but I think it works well. I’ve recreated a sound that sounds a lot like a sound from the Warioware DIY sound palette, which is cool! I don’t have lyrics for it yet. I do have quite a soft spot for this song and I hope I end up using it in the future. The World Gets Quiet I had this idea for a song about enjoying the quiet moments in life at the start of 2020 but I couldn't really progress any further than that. Once lockdown hit... I got quite a lot of inspiration as the whole world actually went quiet. I spoke about this song in one of my past blog posts but I’ll say it again. It started life as this upbeat indie song – planned to have this weirdly intricate beat that would be played on a drum kit. The energy that the drum beat brough was so strange and did not match what I was envisioning, so I thoroughly tweaked it to be more unique, more electronic and more open texturally. I felt that a lot of music I had been working on had been texturally thick and could be too much to handle, so I thought to arrange something simpler. I really like this song a lot. I recently re-tracked the vocals with my good friend so hopefully it can come out sooner than later. Friends in 2D I focused my university folio in the first lockdown about living in lockdown and the different interpretations and emotions people had. For Friends in 2D, I was responding to my friend’s artwork that she’d made about a series of pubs by writing about longing to be in a social setting like a pub. I was going through a little guitar phase, and this song was something I made on a guitar tuned down a half-step. I’m writing about interacting with all my friends on ZOOM and Discord and not being able to see them physically directly, only being able to see them in 2D, hence the title. It’s pretty calm but I haven’t really worked on production too much. This song needs a bit of work. You Only Do So Much I wrote this during “the great era of Orange Orange songwriting” during that first lockdown. It was totally unattached to any uni work I was doing though and was just this fun jingle I created. I was really getting back into my indie guitar roots with Born Ruffians and wanted to do this very upbeat, guitar focused song in 6/8. I used to write so much guitar music in 6/8. I miss those days. So far the production is quite lo-fi but I’m secretly quite attached to how unique it sounds. I probably won’t “upgrade” it too much. I’m still trying to figure out lyrics for this song but I think I might talk about lust and how it affects people, both greed and the sexual kind. I really enjoy this song. Waiting For Medium This was originally a doodle I did when I was waiting preparing for the livestream with Medium in April. Charles from Medium was intermittently in contact with me regarding if the streaming software was working so whilst I was waiting, I recorded this Foals-style guitar interplay along with some vocal chanting and stuff. I left it for quite a long time but I’ve come back to it recently, added a funky beat and I’m trying to make it work for a release. The arrangement is pretty different to everything I’ve done before so I’d be curious to see if it works! Saviour of the World I wrote this at the start of May 2020 taking the perspective of someone who couldn’t stand being in lockdown (you and I both knew quite a few people), talking about how bad things were not and the things to be grateful to still be there. It is very much an arrangement based on Foals-style guitar interplay but I think it is pretty cool on its own. I still think the production needs to be tweaked thoroughly, and possibly the beat production as well. I do think this is the best vocals I’ve ever written for myself which is good because on the whole I think I’ve been improving. I’ve played this song with my band at the last EP launch. CYA on MARZ This was the first song I wrote in the second lockdown and it’s quite Kid A of me. I had this really sparse drum machine phrase that was 5-bars long, and I based the whole song around that. I actually wrote the majority of the song on a piano, which is weird for me because everything either starts with production or guitar. Lyrically it’s about human bigotry and how it will probably be something that never goes away and it’s a little fantasy about the world ending because of this bigotry. I’ve had this music video in my head that’s this made-up fanfic of WALL-E, where one of the humans goes through the archive to see how they ended up on the ship, and becomes so disgusted that they get on an escape pod and leave the rest of humanity. After they leave, a comet hits the ship or aliens destroy the ship, whatever, what matters is that the last person alive is this person who has escaped. Maybe I should make a video for this song. This is currently my favourite song I’ve made and I can't wait to put it out. I also wonder how I will do this song live. Future Role I wrote this song with my inspiration being Sydney Miller’s ‘Out From the Inside’ so I tried doing something in 6/8. I made this cool synth patch in Ableton and played around with this simple chord change and eventually I made this song. It’s HUGE. I wrote it wondering what my future would turn out to be, especially what impact I’d want to make as a person, and what other people’s impacts would be. I realised this song would be great with Stella Farnan singing on it, so I asked her to sing on it and she did. I’m going to release this song pretty soon so I’ll go into more detail about it then. Granny Lands I wrote the beat of this song after listening to Everything Everything’s ‘Lord of the Trapdoor’ a lot, because Mike (the drummer) uses the 5/4 time signature to make his drum beat so interesting but simple. I put it in 6/4 and tried playing with space a bit more, and I also played around with this synth patch I made based on the bendy monophonic sound that’s used in Donkey Kong Country and the arrangement is my fave because of it. I got Sydney Miller to sing on it because my low voice just didn’t work for the whole song and it’s sometimes my favourite song too. Again, I’ll put this out soon too so I’ll go into more detail about it when it does. Diamante 2 This song has conceptually been in my head for quite some time – but it just doesn’t exist yet. I have a demo of sections that exists on my computer but I haven’t recorded anything substantial just yet. The lyrics are still coming together too but I think I will be writing about friendships. I do have high hopes for this song though! Breath This song is more akin to my past guitar-focused songs like Bigger Picture and Sickness Illness, which I haven’t done in a while. I made some pretty cool sounds through granularising a guitar part I made, and I elaborated on that. I then wanted to make the song slowly transition to this Huntly-esque doof music with demonic vocals. I’m excited to go a bit further with this one. I originally want to write a song about news anchors but over time I’ve decided not to do that, so who knows what I’ll write about. Longdeath Milk I was playing around with some synth-pad sounds and I combined that with this incredibly energetic drum beat and I made this song. I recently got fascinated with FM-synthesis patches and I successfully implemented this FM patch for the chorus and it sounds pretty darn good. The lyrics are about honesty but I’m retrying writing vocals because the first draft was a bit uninspired but I think it might become good. I really hope it does. The ending section of this song SLAPS so hard. Until next week,
- R
My dear friend Stella Farnan released her third single on last Thursday - Boxes. I'm so glad this joyous tune is out in the world finally.
If you've never heard of Stella Farnan before, quickly rectify that. She is one of the leading talents in my life, having written many beautiful songs that probably will live in my head forever. I really mean that too, because her songs are so memorable, so iconic, so tightly packed, so nuanced. It's so respectable, I really aspire to songwrite like her more. Her strong talents have not gone unnoticed, being shortlist as an artist to watch in 2020 by the AU review, and winning the Darebin Songwriters Award for my personal favourite song of hers 'Act Like a Party'. Stella and I are at a cafe eating a brownie and some chips - talking about Stella's (then) upcoming release "Boxes". Here's how it went.
Have some Chips! I will have some chips, but then again, I'm having a little chocolate in between having some chips. Is this wrong? No no no... not at all. So this is the all-encompassing Stella Farnan experience... review... hang out... chat. Great! *Stella takes a sip of her large latte* Oh this tastes like... Carrot? ...more than just a coffee. Old shoe? Ooh. That's a good one. Alright, interview starts now. What do you think would be a better flavour - Old Shoe, or New Shoe? I mean... Old Shoe has the branding. New Shoe has no recognition. If you're eating something you wanna eat something that you could like boast to your friends about. What?! No no no, I'd wanna eat something that tastes really delicious! ...Sorry, I'm asking you the questions. I understand where you're coming from but that perception influences your taste as well, right? If you eating a $50 pasta and a $10 pasta and they taste the same, you're obliged to like the $50 pasta more because you made a bigger endeavour for it. ...Wait, that doesn't make sense. It doesn't prove my point at all! That's actually right because... I would enjoy the $10 pasta more because I'm only coughing $10 for a pasta that's as good as a $50 pasta. Bye bye $50 pasta... is there pasta that even costs that much?! I don't know, probably. Next question - did you stock up on lots of pasta when we went into lockdown? No... but I think accidentally there was one time where two people in the house both bought the same pasta. I think that's it. We had a toilet paper subscription though. Ohhh good! Although I think it was running out in the peak of the first lockdown. We were getting a lot of emails about stocks of toilet paper running out. It didn't affect our subscription though. Was that Who Gives a Crap? Yes. Oh I've heard they're great. Do you want some of my brownie? Oh man. I feel like you should eat it if you're enjoying it. Are you not enjoying it? But like, what if I was? Would you not eat it? Well, I have like a vague interest, but not a burning desire. But I feel that if you're enjoying it, I'm enjoying these chips. I feel that you'd enjoy it TOO. I could get myself one later! Eat it! Maybe I will then. It's just that the chocolate's a little dark, and the walnuts... I assume they're walnuts they might be macadamias, they taste like they've been in a plastic bag for a long time. Ah. Anyway, I just wanted to (finally) start this by complimenting you a lot. I wanted to talk about this performance you did in our first year of uni. You did a performance of Act Like a Party with Gab and Soren, and it had this free-form intro where Gab was vocoding your voice, and Soren was playing this drone-y synth noise. Yeah! Soren was playing bass. Was he? Yeah, like some kind of synth bass. I don't know, I didn't know what it was. Yeah, well that performance changed my life. That was the first performance where my jaw dropped. It might've been because I'd never seen you perform before but I knew you'd had written songs. I just remember at the end of that I was just like "guh!". Someone in our class filmed the whole thing and I just watch it a lot. That's so nice!!! I haven't seen it in a while though. I remember the mic kept falling down. Do you remember that? Very vaguely. That was so much fun. Yeah that's when I realised "Stella's good. Stella's gonna be big." When would that have been? Like mid-year 2018? I think end of year, like October I think. 2018 though! That was almost 3 years ago. Yeah wow, I played my first ever gig in September that year. No way! Was it a solo show? Yeah, I was opening for Rya Park at the Gasometer Upstairs. How was that? It was so fun, I had no idea what I was doing. I actually wrote half of my set for that gig. Oh man, I feel that. Do you play a lot of those songs now, still? Yeah I've had the same set for the past 3 years. Half of them were like songs I wrote as a teenager. I guess I was a teenager then too so all of them are teenager songs, and Act Like a Party was one of the ones I wrote. I had the verses for that song for such a long time though. Like when you were young? Yeah, the guitar part was something I made when I was "fyuckin ayround on a lyopp pyedal" - said with a weird voice to make fun of myself. Is that gonna be written out on the blog? Don't worry I'll find a way to put that in. I like, looped the guitar part, did a little vocal thing and then wrote the verses. Then I came back years later and just did it all, in one go. The lyrics all happened in one go too. Anyway, I digress. Thank you so much for remembering that performance. It was just so powerful! It was just like, Gab and Soren are the best and we went to Gab's studio that afternoon and he got it set up and got Soren on the synth bass. It's great, I really had to do was sing and play guitar. We got the performance good and then went and performed it. Well you did perform it good. I just wanted to get that out of the way because I really really enjoyed it. And frankly, it did make me think about want I wanted to do with live performance, and the different ways you could approach performing songs, even if it is the same song. That was the task. The ideas was that we were doing two imaginings of the same song, with the vocoder free-time thing and then we played with the band arrangement for the second half of the song... I think? I'm pretty sure that's what we did? Do it again! It's so good! Maybe we should! When we first started recording it we made this weird version that sounds pretty bad with vocoder-y stuff... We were just trying to do two things at once. I would love to release that version one day. Really! I would love to hear it. 
Stella performing at the launch of her first single 'Love Spill'
Here's where I awkwardly segway to the next question. How long have you been writing music for? Like I know you've been writing songs for a long time, and I know Boxes has been around for a bit (we'll get to that later) and I assume you had a lot of other songs you've played and knocked around in high school. You've also showed me footage of you playing music in a band when you were in high school and younger. Does it go even further than that?
Yeah it does. I've always been writing song because I grew up in this house where there were instruments everywhere, and my parents were working in arts. I remember that I would always bash on the piano and always be making stuff up. You know when you were a kid and you can't really hold a guitar so it's just laying in your lap and you're just knocking it around? Yeah, I do. There was a lot of that. But it was like, I was writing stuff, I have a few old tapes and cassettes of songs we were writing together in the car. I had like a "band" with my dad and my sister when I was a child, like four to seven. We would just... apparently, I don't really remember the logistics of how it started but we would be eating some dinner and I would just be like "I NEED TO RECORD" so we'd go to my dad's little studio space out the back of the house, and we would just improvise on some old drums and guitars with my sister with the help of my dad, making everything stick together, setting up microphones and telling us not to scream too close into the microphone. We would just improvise, and it was just hilarious. Then he'd print them onto CD's and we'd get to decorate them. It was the best. That's amazing. Do you listen to those songs now at all? They're not really songs. It wasn't really me writing lyrics when I was five, like there's one song where I'm giggling amd doing fake burps. There's another one called 'Ants in my Pants' where I'm just saying "I've got ants in my pants." It's some infant shit. I feel like after a couple of years I had been listening to my sister's Kasey Chambers and Missy Higgins CD's and there's this one printed CD that I have that has two tracks. One of them is called 'Help' and one of them is called 'Need Some Help', and it's just me singing with this weird, twangey... thing that I must've taken from Kasey Chambers, and yeah, they're not real songs... what was the question you asked me again. I don't even remember. But I did have a similar thing when I was younger. There's a recording of me when I was four singing Poison Ivy with my dad. But because I'm four I'm not singing it, I'm tonedeaf and yelling and laughing along. I feel like that'd be the same experience as you had. Oh, 100%. There's nothing better than a four year-old kid just like, singing, and making sound, and learning about how their bodies make noises and exploring that. Yeah!!! So from there, where was the transition from baby wailing to where you were when I met you, the music literate, loveable- I decided when I was five or six that I was like "It's time I start learning an instrument" because that was what my big sister had done. But I feel very lucky because my parents never made me learn an instrument, like I felt it was time to begin. That's when I started doing piano, I considered saxophone. I guess around the same time I was slowly starting to muck around on the guitar. My dad plays the guitar and taught me a couple of chords. I don't really remember learning or practising guitar though, I never really had lessons. It was like a chord a year, really. And then... I was writing songs through high school... kind of all doing the singer/songwriter thing. I learnt percussion in high school too. But to be honest, I was a little unsure if I should study music after school, but I realised that I couldn't imagine myself not doing music. Once I started studying music I was relieved, because all my friends were doing Science and Arts... They were just really exhausted all the time. Yeah! And I was just having heaps of fun, learning so much. And like, I'd messed around in Garageband but I'd only downloaded Logic when I started uni, and it was really my first time properly thinking about production. I did the songwriting thing for ages and my brain kind of exploded when I found it. I think I went down the same path as you. But you were doing recordings in high school, right? Yeah, yeah I did. I talked to Soren about this actually. When we made those recordings I had a basic understanding of how it worked but I couldn't make it sound the way I wanted it to. When I entered that same course I was in the mindset of a singer/songwriter, like you. I feel like that stage of music making, like what you were doing in high school is the most exciting thing, where you have no idea what you're doing, you're just making some sounds. You not weighed down with what's right or what's wrong. Yeah you're not thinking about the EQ and what would sound good, you're just thinking about energy and what feels good. How sweet. And that's what it's like when you're four! And you're screaming into the microphone! That's like before you know what it sounds like, it just feeeeeeels good. Damn, that is fundamentally how we make songs. It's like "this feels good". Yeah, like I'm saying that as if something has changed. But nothing has. It's all just screaming notes. Yeah. Yeah... what was the point of this question? I don't know. I don't know either, let's take stock. Wailing baby... making sounds... making curated sound... songwriting. What was the first ever song you wrote? Oh damn... I don't really know. My house would a place where you'd be wondering around singing or humming something and people would join in with harmonies without you asking. The first shot at a kind of serious song was when I was eight, and I was playing a black Fender Stratt, which wasn't mine obviously. I had been listening to Avril Lavigne and I thought she was the coolest person ever, and I knew E minor and then I was just making up chords. What I was playing was like a minor 7 shape but just with my four fingers and I let the other open strings ring out. It's funny because I'm just playing the same chords now as I was back then. But I wrote this song name Blue Lorikeets, and I was talking about a bunch of cliches I heard from pop music but writing about opposites instead. But still to this day that song has one of the best hooks that I've ever written, and it's kind of sad. Did I already hit my peak? ...When you were eight? I still don't know how to spell Lorikeet now. I don't know how to spell that either... What does the hook go like? Uhhhhh! Something like *Ooohohohoo OOOOhoh. Ooohohoahaoho, oooOOOooh* Are you gonna use that in the future? I should! I like it. I wish I'd improved past then, when I was eight. I think you've improved with the stuff you've put out at least! Thank you Ryan! Thank you! I feel like I'm giving you long answers. Yeah, but that's okay! I'm really enjoying this. I was gonna ask you next about how do you go about making songs. I feel like for the two songs that I have out and the one that's going to come out... they were strokes of luck. They kind of just happened. I don't know if it was the perfect recipe in my brain and the weather, and if the light was right, and if I was wearing comfy clothes, but it all came out pretty quickly. Usually I would start writing on guitar, or... no most of the time I would start on guitar. Which is interesting to me because you started learning music on the piano first. Yeah! I dunno. Sometimes I'm playing on piano but my default is guitar, and messing around. Usually when I start writing, melody and harmony comes at once when I strum a chord and sing something. It just kind of happens. Every now then I have a melodic idea when I'm out and about and I try and voice memo melody and chords at once. I'm sure you've got many memos of like terrible, really windy recordings where you're trying to sing 5 notes at a time. I do that with drum beats sometimes. I'd go back to them and it'd just be like "DUHDUDUDUHDUDU" and I think "this is awful, but this must've sounded good at the time, why else would I have recorded it?" Absolutely. But yeah, I would usually write two sections of a song and then leave it for a couple of weeks, not out of trying to create space for the song but mostly out of necessity, like "I've run out time right now, gotta run". But then I'd come back to the song with a fresh mind and continue on. But in the last few years I've had much more fun producing stuff and finding a new song to mess around with and editing audio, finding whatever textures I can. Sectionally! That's interesting! I usually would come up with a section and ask like "Is this a verse? Is this a chorus?", just like a section with lyric with a vague idea or a theme as a part of that section. I don't think I've ever written a song where all the lyrics came last, but I definitely have a vague idea and then sit down with some pen and paper and work it out. Yeah that definitely makes sense. I like to come up with the lyrics or a partucular theme, or maybe a word or a particular sound, and I'd let that dictate where I should go, like what chord should be next? What vowel sound should come next? Damn... that's so thoughtful. ...So much for short and non-specific answers. I was actually gonna ask you next about playing with George Alice, and playing at the Yours and Owls Festival because I don't really know anyone who's been able to do that recently. It was so much fun! There was a rotating stage because of the restrictions, they had to spend an extra million dollars to implement it and they'd split the audience into four different zones. But yeah, the spage stun... the stage spun, the sound went in two ways. That's crazy. It was so much fun though! George is amazing, she's one of those freaks who sounds the exact same live as she when she sings on the record, it's so wild. And Dan, who plays drums, they're amazing, they're the best. Yeah that's...0 I was gonna ask if you thought that Wollongong was cool? Um... yeah, we were in a place called Thirroul, I think that's how you say it. We didn't really see Wollongong but we were in this wild BnB, and we were right by the beach but I didn't have time to go and check it out. But there was this hectic mountain-like rock face that was just right there and it was just totally beautiful. Yeah, it was... it was beautiful. We went to one cafe and it was great. Oh good! Regarding the festival... I know there's this one performance of the Beatles where they're playing inside like a boxing ring or something, in this collosseum-like setup, and after a song or two these roadies would rotate all the gear they were playing with to face another direction. I kinda imagine it was like that? It was like that but with a motor. It would do one rotation in one direction for a song and then it went the other way for the next song. Right, right. It was wobbly though, and it's already on this riser on wheels so it's already pretty wobbly as it was. There was this one song where I had start with my foot on a volume pedal, so I was balancing on one leg and then it STARTED. It jolted and that was scary, I definitely nearly lost my balance but I did not, which is good. That's crazy Stella. I'm glad you did not fall. Thanks. I've never met George and I don't really know anything about George... She's the best. She's so good, such a good writer, such a nice person. Very FUNNY. I like Stuck in a Bubble a lot. Yeah me too. 
Stella and me :)
Okay, it's time to talk about BOXES.
Yes it is! I feel like I'm one of the few people in the world who've heard the original ukulele version of Boxes that was up on JJJ unearthed. From like, 2017, I was in high school. I had a version of Love Spill on there too. Yeah, I think your dad was playing on it. Uhh, I don't think he played on it. He did help record it, and he programmed the MIDI drums. Oh that's MIDI drums on the record? No way! Yeah, there are. This is not the actual version by the way, the actual version has REAL DRUMS. That was just a demo. It does show that those songs have been around for quite some time. I was listening to Boxes today for the first time in a while, I've told you this a thousand times already but it's really good and it sounds really good. Yes, thanks. I think this released version is a little different to the version you may have heard. I think the first verse is a bit different. Yes, yes. Well I'm excited to hear this final version when it comes out! Is this one of your more whimsical songs? Would you agree with that? Yeah! Yeah! I get a lot of optimism and positive vibes from this song, do you feel that? Yeah, yeah totally! I wrote this when I was 16, and I wasn't really a very moody 16 year old. I was really quite an optimistic kid, and I wanted everyone to have a good time. I was writing with the energy of being a little kid but wanting to take that outlook into the future. I was thinking of the song as like... your old teddy bear, it's like a comfort thing having that perspective. So it's working out as you're growing up, what level of optimism is useful and what level of optimism is diluded. I guess it was a reflection of where I was at during that time, or at least of me wanting to that holding onto that wide-eyed youthful excitement, even though it always was like that. That makes sense. The lyrics do reflect that. I would think that one of my favourite lyrics: "you showed me imagination / now i can't keep safe at night" reflects that. It's a great lyric, it's really thoughtful. Thanks! Yeah, it is just being a child, I guess, but in a warm-hearted way. And I was thinking of imagination in a positive way, I guess. Yeah I think of it as giddiness keeping you up at night. You keep getting ideas and you wanna build on those ideas and keep making things and it keeps you up. Optimism! It's good to be optimistic! Sometimes! Realistically optimistic! Yeah, some optimism is inappropriate but at that time it was the vibe. I get that. So then you wrote it. I guess you dwelled on it for a bit. Well, the story is that I woke up, and I hadn't got out of bed yet but there was an instrument within reach so I decided to play laying down, and I wrote the verse and the chorus and the anti-chorus and the lyrics all at once. I sat on that for a week and then I wrote the second half of the song which was the same structure, but I guess the first section of the song was about the past, and I was just feeling a bit nostalgic and wanting everything to be okay. I was kind of singing to my child self. Yeah, and the second verse does sing about those coming of age scenarios, like "what do we do with these boxes"? I dunno, I think it does! It's a little cringe... I felt like I was writing to my parents and my friends in the first part of the song, I had this friend who was going through this really shit time, and I was just sending out this plea to the people I care about, "promise me you won't forget to call". And in the second verse I was thinking about the people I hadn't met yet and I wanted them to know that I would care for them as well. Aw that's amazing! You were thinking about me before you mET ME! Yes! Please call me anytime! Anyway, yes. There we go. That's really funny, because you didn't really answer my question at all. Oh wow. Damn. So what did you ask? So you wrote the song. It's only coming out now, were you waiting for the right time to put it all together? Well, I was 16 and I didn't really know how to release music. Then when I was at uni I met our wonderful friend Soren, and he was like "Hey, let's record some songs!" Quick aside, do you want some brownie? Heck yeah. *Has brownie* See what I mean about the dryness? Mmmm... not the textures I was expecting, not bad though. Anyway, you met Soren? Yeah so, he was doing some work with the Teskey Brothers, and we went to their studio in Warrandyte. We recorded some drums over a couple of days, Boxes was one of the songs we recorded. And then we were just generally producing a bunch of songs, recorded them over what ended up being a couple of years, like on and off. It was just like, in little bursts, like a few days in a row of working all day until really late, and then we wouldn't touch them for ages. We just had heaps of fun, and I was learning what I was doing, and Soren was doing the same but he's just like a pro and totally incredible and really great at knowing what's next and motivating us to create. We just had the best time, and we've had so many cups of tea. There wasn't really a specific reason that we were waiting to put it out, it just happened that way. And then obviously last year we couldn't put the songs out because everything went on hold for us. But now it just happens to be when I'm putting it out. I'm finally putting out this song that's so old to me, but I guess because it was about a nostalgic feeling, that's kind of appropriate isn't it? That's a character arc I wasn't expecting. Amazing. Do you have anything else coming in the future? In that time I describe when I was recording with Soren that started in the middle of 2018, and that went on to each of our home studios and a bunch of other places... well we recorded an EP. It's produced by Soren, I have a few friends visiting to feature on some instruments, like Elena and Gab. It's mixed by Callum Barter who has worked on some of my favourite records ever, and mastered by Joe Carra who's just such a pro, so that's good! And then after that EP there's more music! Which I have heard some, just from the virtue of being at uni with you. It's so great and I really look forward to it! I'd say ditto! You showed a lot of amazing stuff too! *stella proceeds to continue to compliment me but i am too embarassed to type it out so i will pretend it never happened* Anyway... do you have any... other... side... things... coming? ...Can I say it? ...pshhhaw... I was lucky enough to sing on one of my favourite songs made by a lovely friend of mine recently, and I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say anything about it. It's this guy. Ehehehehe yes. I am excited for that. You sent through like the first or second take of what you sang and it was perfect! Did I? I just remember you saying "I'm more than happy to redo this later!" and then we never redid it. It was really good. And mix by Mike made you straight up POP. It's amazing. I'll send you the master when I can. I think I have it! Soren must've give it to me. It's coming out soon! I'm so excited! ME TOO! ~~~~~~~~~~~ Okay, now it's time for Quick Fire Song Time. You'll have to tell me what song you'd listen to for various kinds of scenarios. Oh fuck, this sucks, can I get my phone ready? Of course, of course. So first up, if you're in a car with your best friend and you're best friend's driving, what would be the first song you put on? First song? Yeah, and now you have to choose your best friend. I have many incredible friends. I am thinking immediately of Soren because we were just talking about him, and he drives me a lot of places and we always listen to music really loudly in the car. That's fair enough. Ohh... how many of these will I answer Charli XCX too... Maybe... I have so many songs, I'm queuing a heap of music in my head. I want the first one. I guess it does depend on mood... I think it's probably gonna be a Charli song... and it's probably gonna be off the new album, although Soren and I used to drive around to 'White Mercedes' a lot. I think it will be... nah, maybe it's 'Vroom Vroom', an older one. Maybe it's 'claws'... Nah. It's visions. Can I give you 5 songs as an answer? No. Then it's detonate. 'detonate' by Charli XCX. Alright great.
If you're getting an Uber home, and you're at the leisure to put your earphones in while the driver is driving. What do you listen to?
Tooootally depends. Am I coming home from a party? If you're coming home from a party I assume you're coming home with friends, and you're not coming home alone. Maybe you're coming home from Fitzroy or something, I dunno. Oh my god, I was on Brunswick Street last Saturday and I saw G Flip and Troye Sivan. Oh were they together? Yeah we walked past them. Oh that's so funny because we saw Troye Sivan riding an electric scooter the other day. It was one of those awkward moments where Gab was like "turn around!" and I repeated "turn around" and I turned around and he said "it's Troye Sivan on an electric scooter!" And just, someone was filming something and then Gab said that and the camera went up to Troye Sivan on the scooter and... yeah... anyway. I would just put on what I've been listening to recently, which would be the new Genesis Owusu album. I can't stop listening to the song 'The Other Black Dog'. I just love that album so much, the production is so cool. I will listen to that immediately.
Just quickly before we move on I just wanted to mention how much G Flip didn't want public attention from us so I just did a quick little salute and moved on, I thought that was something of note.
Yeah I had something similar once before too, I was in a kebab shop at 3am on Smith Street, and Nai Palm from Hiatus Kaiyote was there, and y'know, the situation was that it was 3am at a kebab shop. It was kinda pumping though, and I felt the need to express my love for her music but I didn't want to start a conversation and be annoying, so I just saluted her across the room. And at first she was like "Are you looking at me?" and then she got what was happening and she saluted me back! I was ecstactic. Oh that's so good!! That must've been so good. Anyway, what's next... When you're angry! When you're feeling mad. What do you listen to to let it out. I want to listen to something really loud in my headphones, or dance around to 'Hurry on Home' by Sleater-Kinney. Maybe something with some big drums though.
Okay! I like this one a lot. You're babysitting, and the three-year-old wants to listen to a song. What do you put on?
Okay so this is funny and I was recently thinking about this. I think Boxes sounds like a children's song, it's like made for kids isn't it? No swearing, it has a bouncy tempo. One time when I was babysitting I did put on some Japanese Wallpaper and the kid was totally jumping around and into it. I think we were listening to Fooling Around? I was gonna say, Fooling Around would've been so good. So would you say Fooling Around or Boxes? Hmm, something else a bit more heartwarming. Ooh! Maybe some Merk. He makes Casio Pop and it's just fun. Okay. Okay.
What about your pre-date meditation song?
*scoffs* pRe-dAtE mEdItAtIoN?* Well y'know, some people need music to get them in the zone for their date or whatever. Are we thinking something meditative? Well, something to get you in the right mindset. Maybe I'd listen to some Angel Olsen. But like, something off All Mirrors. What's the one that's like "doomdoomdoomdoom". Oh wait, that's something else, not that. I'll just play from the start of All Mirrors. I'll put the whole album in.
Soren said the Aldous Harding album.
Oh that's so good! I'd put on Aldous Harding too. I'll put that up too.
But maybe... okay... pre-date meditation... meditation.
See, I would've said something like The Strokes. ...But that's not meditative! Yeah well it's like, it's not like meditation like "ohm" it's more like being in the right mindset for the date and trying to feel good about myself. It's not strictly meditation! Oh okay, trying to feel good about myself... Maybe 'A Palé' by ROSALÍA.
Yeah I meant it more like how sports people listen to music that pumps them up.
Oh then I'd definitely listen to something loud. Maybe I'd listen to 'XS' by Rina Sawayama. Or Jessie Ware. I always put on 'Pretty Please' by Dua Lipa. Off her recent album? Yeah.
Oh yeah, that's a lot of listening homework I gotta do now. What would you play at the start of an exercise routine?
Um, I don't know. Depends what I'm doing. I've got like a dancing playlist that I'd probably put on. Maybe a lot of pop music, there's a lot of Charli on there. Well I'll link your playlist. That's so stressful, I don't want everyone stalking me on Spotify! I thought you wanted followers! AH. I'd put on 'claws' by Charli XCX. Sorry for doing so much Charli XCX.
Alright alright it's fine. This one is actually my favourite one, it's the song that you'd play at the end of the party so that everyone leaves and goes home.
I would put on Aldous Harding but I would hope that people would get into. I would put on 'The Weight of the Planets' or something like that? Oh... actually I'd put on 'What If Birds Aren't Singing They're Screaming', isn't that such a good title? It's so good!
And now we come to the final question. What was the last song you were listening to?
Yeah, it'd be Sarah Come Home by Allie X.
Well, that completes the interview! Thank you Stella!
I'm so sorry it was so long!
You can listen to Stella Farnan's 'Boxes' on Spotify, Apple Music, JJJ Unearthed, Bandcamp, and probably more places too.
Stella is supporting Tulliah at the Workers Club in Melbourne this Friday - you can grab your tickets HERE. What's good! In this week's blog post I'll be responding to the Q&A question requests I posted on my Instagram last Tuesday. There ain't many! There isn't much more to say other than that new Orange Orange music is swiftly on its way and you'll be seeing it pretty soon. Be excited! Other than that, here we go! how do you start writing a song/album? Big question. Generally, I do prefer beginning by writing arrangements and compositions for pieces first. After I have the structure and sounds in the places I want them to be, I would add the vocals and any other lyrics afterwards, reflecting off the arrangements I'd written. I usually boot up my DAW and start writing compositions that way, sometimes starting with chords, a melody, a beat, a random sample, ANYTHING. I really enjoy making cool arrangements and I do prefer exploring where these compositions take me. This isn't saying that I am opposed to creating a story or feeling through lyrics and letting that inform my composition. I just love creating compositions. Sometimes, I do start with something I've written on guitar and translate that over to the DAW, which I did with Oh How You Bend, and some new songs. However, I'd much rather write songs on guitar for my other bands, which aren't production-focused but band-oriented. It's just more natural that way. In rare cases, I like to start with an overarching idea, or concept, that I want to explore, and then later match that to a composition I've previously created, molding each of them afterwards appropriately. For example, in Hive Mind I wanted to write about this collective hysteria on this newer platform of mass media, and especially the way it made me feel. I used that math-rock styled electronic damce composition and gradually turning it into a song strongly influenced by rock, which I felt suited the tone of Hive Mind more appropriately. I have a new song I've been working on since 2019, where I wanted to talk about how I like the moments in life that are quite quiet. I couldn't find a composition to match until we went into lockdown in early 2020 and I moulded this very upbeat, syncopated arrangement into this calmer, restrained song with a different sound palette and different dynamics. It was quite a successful transformation and I do think it is one of my stronger songs that is yet to be released. However, for much of the time I don't latch these overarching ideas to a piece of music, but sometimes they do influence the kinds of compositions I make, eventually. Does that make sense? In terms of making an album, I don't really have a set process to start writing an album. Usually I just have a bunch of songs that I've created and I want to put them out as a collection. What I do typically do with this collection of songs is search for a through-line between all of them. For the previous album, it was Shame. Once I have that through-line in place I use that to inform some pieces and I try editing pieces to further link them more closely. Everything informs everything that way. What are the best Star Cards for my Vader tank build I'll have to check when I get home. Probably something to buff Vader, something for long range (like the cannon on a tank) and something to deflect more easily. With that in mind: - FURIOUS RESILIENCE - THERE IS NO ESCAPE - DEFLECTION STAMINA What is your favourite frog? Now, THIS is a good question. I do enjoy a vast majority of frogs, so I'll have to list a few and figure out my favourite from there. - The Frog from Frogger? - I was watching a nature documentary on YouTube or Netflix once and I found that there is a frog that carries its partner's eggs in its mouth for 5 months before vomiting them up when it safe to do so. That's pretty cool. I can't seem to remember or find the species of frog that it was. I think it lives in South America? - Michigan J. Frog. He's the Looney Tunes frog that can sing and dance with a cane and top hat. But only at special times! He totally pranked that guy in "One Froggy Evening". - Kermit the Frog. Kermit is great. I actually do not watch the Muppets nor do I actually know a lot about Kermit but his voice is so malleable and frankly hilarious. - That frog from One Piece that does the sumo wrestling is pretty neat too. Its name is Yokozuna. It has a topknot. - Crazy Frog. I loved their work with their rendition of "We are the Champions by Queen. - Slippy Toad, though he is a toad. - Nicky Flippers, from Hoodwinked. I actually think he isn't that cool. - Pepe and Dat Boi, too, I guess - Rugor Nass from the Phantom Menace too, is he a frog? I think Michigan J. Frog is a clear winner. Are chickens birds? I believe chickens are birds. They have a lot of similarities to birds, at least. I mean, why wouldn't they be? They have talons, they have beaks. They have everything birds do! They lay eggs! Next Question >:( Does the cat go meow? The cat does go meow, thanks.  If you could choose one piece of furniture to use for the rest of your life what would it be Probably a fold-out sofa. You can sleep on it, and you can sit on it to watch things. Also, guests can casually use it when they visit and it's not weird, not like a bed. Actually, now that I think about it, a table would be pretty useful too. If it's big enough you could sleep on it, and you could sit on it to watch things as well. You can't use a fold-out sofa as a table however. That's wild. I change my answer to a large, long table thanks. Thanks for reading! Thanks for many question about animals, and thank you to the one question relevant to music, was nice to think about!
I'll be taking a break next week because I need a break. I'll see you in two weeks! - R Hey there! Today I'm gonna start something a bit out of nowhere and unexpected. I'm gonna start reviewing train stations. I really like trains. Call it the "Thomas the Tank Engine Effect" but I think that trains are pretty neat. Apparently, when I was a toddler my dad went well out of his way to drive across railway crossing in the event that a train would be crossing, because I would start cackling with joy like a maniac. I have been taking trains since I can remember. I've always like trains. Some notable train rides have been - Coming home from Wangaratta with my family. It was dark outside but I remember having a good time. I had to take a toilet break at Seymour and I thought you had to leave the train to use the toilet and I was scared that the train would leave without me. I don't really remember if I ever made it to the toilet but I didn't miss the train. - Riding the whole Frankston line for the first time. I was going somewhere on the Mornington Peninsuila but I could only get picked up in Mornington. Anyway, I rode the gauntlet that was "Stopping all stations to Frankston", including those between South Yarra and Caufield, all 27 of them. It was a lot. For some reason, I remember riding home far more clearly, probably because I was dreading the trip the entire time because I knew how frustrating it was. Anyway, I'm gonna review some random train stations I've recently been to. Coburg: The recently updated Coburg station? It's so nice. From the train, you might just see Coburg station as two platforms up in the sky, but it's so much more. I was at the station last Thursday when it was 15 degrees and bucketing rain, and I was so happy to see a waiting room that was heated and had seats for me to warm up in. They also had bathroom access from this waiting room, which I couldn't access when I visited. I imagine they were equally nice though. Each platform has two lifts to provide Wheelchair and other stair-resistant patrons access to the station, and I gotta say, two lifts per platform is very generous of them. The stairs are equally spacious. There's a perpendicular bunch of steps before splitting parallel in both directions to create space for peak time travelers, which is neat.  My favourite part, though, is the water basins available on the platforms. There's a small basin, about 15 - 20 cm diameter available on both platforms with a drinking fountain. This is so nice. Any means of water hydration is welcome, and it's super welcome when the water is this refreshing. My favourite part is that the basin is only a metre off the ground, meaning that young kids also have access to the basin. I love this.  I know the back entrance is still currently under construction, but if they finish it up and make it similar to the elevated stations after Caufield on the Dandenong line, I think we'll be in for a treat. Cheltenham: To my surprise, Cheltenham station is incredibly similar to Coburg station. This does make sense as both stations were massively overhauled by the Level Crossing Removal Project but it is a bit strange and a little sobering to see a "standardised" station across all of Melbourne. But hey, at least the standard treats the passenger pretty well. The rail line for Cheltenham is underground, and it harbours 3 platforms, two for direct travel and one for limited express. Like Coburg, there are four lifts, two for platforms 1 and 2 and two for platform 3. Logically I thought this made little sense as the distribution for the direct travel was less than the limited express but then I realised that during peak hour everyone would be scrambling for that limited express to get to the City. I still think it is cool that they have four lifts and not just two. I did not take the stairs but from what I saw it was a bit of a walkabout to get to the end of them, with the top of the stairs at the very back of the station. It might split into two stairs when heading to the platform just like in Coburg, but I was in a rush and I couldn't see. Someone tell me if it does. Sorry. I will say that the elevators are incredibly sound-proof. When I was in there the blaring train horn was a good 20db lower. That was nice if not interesting. Once you travel above ground things are very similar to Coburg. They have a waiting room as well, and while I didn't have time to sit in and feel its vibe it did look cosy, and a little larger than Coburg's, probably with toilet access there too. They did have designated Myki gates, which I thought was strange for a station so far away from the CBD, but I guess Cheltenham is a limited express stop. Outside the station you have some beautiful sites. You've got some outdoor seating next to bike racks to lock up your bike. Any bike racks at a station are welcome so I do wholeheartedly appreciate it. It does look like security is well monitored for these bike racks but if you're still cautious about losing your bike they do have devoted secure bike parking close nearby.
Like Coburg they're still finishing the works above ground but it's cool to imaging the outdoor space that will be available once it is finished. So all in all, a pretty good station. Very accessible and caters for its large volumes of commuters quite well. If you were still worried about the vibes not being quite right, do not worry because the cemetery is still nearby.  South Kensington: South Kensington is probably one of the worst stations I've ever been a part of. There's incredibly limited access to the platforms. On the Platform 1 side you have to exit right next to the BLARING train horn. There's a tonne of ways that this station ticks me off. You feel incredibly unsafe. The platform is so thin you could feel the wind blow you straight onto the tracks. The express Werribee trains passing through don't help either. Neither do the V-Lines or Sunbury trains expressing through at swift speeds. That's right, this station is so trash even the SUNBURY line gives you a miss. How embarassing. Westside Melbournians are so used to "Stopping all stations except South Kensington." I honestly don't know if this station has a future with the construction of the Metro Tunnel, as the tunnel has further limited access to the station. I know this station has been around for 130 years, but no one likes this station. While housing has popped up near this station pretty recently, this station still acts as if it was for labourers and worker, similar to General Motors and Paisley stations. Both General Motors and Paisley are now closed, even if Paisley has suburban areas around it now. If South Kensington is still open, why hasn't it been upgraded? It SORELY needs it.  This image I stole from Wikipedia is from 2005 and the station actually looks pretty nice here. There's a little brick building on Platform 2 and the trees do make the view more bearable. Alas, they are no longer there. As other stations around Melbourne have been upgraded, South Kensington has not. Will it stand the test of time? Will it stay mediocre? Until then, I will never mind skipping it. These are some train stations. If you want me to review any particular station in the future please let me know.
Until next week! - R
Hello! Today we continue my list of favourite Foals songs.
Again, I’m not sure if these are my favourites, or what I feel are their best pieces of work, or if these songs just have current merit to me, I just really want to talk about Foals to someone. Okay here we go!
#5: Spanish Sahara
Some may be surprised that this is only number 5. I originally had this song higher because it felt right to hold this song in high regard because it is so emotive and impactful compared to their other songs, plus the cultural impact of this song in other media. Releasing a song like Spanish Sahara as your first single after your high-octane debut indie-math-dance-rock album was gutsy as hell, and it paid off for Foals. There is no doubt that Spanish Sahara is one of their best songs. There isn’t really another song that really nails a four-minute build as well as this song. Youth by Daughter? Nah, Spanish Sahara. Everything sounds really perfect on this song. The guitar is superb, the bass is superb, Edwin’s part gets an S-Rank from me, and I have never been more on-board with a solo in my life. The drums are refined, which is a huge departure from the raucous sound of Antidotes, and it works incredibly well here. A small detail I especially love is the hushed “ahhhs” in the second chorus, mixed in so subtly that I did not notice it for years. Spanish Sahara live is a highlight of a Foals set, deviating from the intense energy to calmly and emotively build. They usually pair this song with Providence, which is nonstop action, and allow audiences to rest but emotively build for a solid 4-minutes before they are permitted to jump. But damn… after those 4 minutes are up, it gets really emotional. I can’t really explain it in words but it’s just so tight and it works so well. If you still haven’t listened to this song, just do it now, please, and it will all make sense. Spanish Sahara also has the best outro for a Foals song, it makes me feel things. It’s way better than the outros on ENSWBL Pt. 1, hated those. I feel the only reason that this song is not #2 is from fatigue from listening to it so much, and lack of an emotive throughline with the song. Spanish Sahara is just a really solid song, like the No Reptiles of Foals, and it is probably one of theirs best songs (or THE best song). But damn, I’d feel pretty bad to not include some other songs higher than it if I did put it up higher. One of my favourite pieces of trivia is that song was #98 in Triple J’s Hottest 100 for 2010. Wouldn’t it be so funny for people at Triple J parties just to kinda be hanging around in silence for like 4 minutes at the beginning of the party? I think that’s really funny, I dunno. There's a lot of good Spanish Sahara live performances, pretty much all of them are good. I do think the Reading 2010 one is pretty special though. The crowd loves it.
#4: Blue Blood
The opening track on Total Life Forever. I used to hate this song but then I matured. I will admit I got the lengthy intro and similarly lengthy outtro put me off this song when I first heard it when I was younger. I just wanted more immediately catchy music, and this wasn't immediately catchy!! But when I came to realise that these elements help set it apart from the other songs on the album I can to really love this song. There are so many elements in this song that are just so catchy. When the bassline comes in with the beat it’s just remarkable, and the guitars bounce off each other beautifully here. I should also mention the riff but that’s pretty self-explanatory for why it is great. Yannis also plays the hardest guitar part to play and sing simultaneously around 3:20. It’s kind of amazing and I think everyone should be amazed that he pulls it off live with remarkable success. I think this is Yannis’s best guitar part he has written, and Jimmy’s part is very thoughtful too, especially around 3:20. I do think the best part of the song is the structure and how it is not really anything conventional for an indie-pop single and just bookended by two sparcer sections. Another point that I really appreciate is that it’s unexpectedly very emotive and heartfelt, especially coming from Antidotes, and it’s definitely one of Yannis’s strongest songs lyrically. This song has a special place in my heart because it was one of my best busking songs when I was growing up, and I lend that to the great vocal melody, the arrangement and the lyrics. I used to play this and Late Night on every busking set that I did. I was also lucky enough to hear this song live when I sat outside Festival Hall (RIP) when I was 16 back in 2016. It was epic. This live video at Live de Semaine kills it, it's so emotive. Otherwise I also really enjoy it when they played at the Paradiso at around 7:30.
#3: Black Gold
Black Gold is that moment where Total Life Forever feels like it has stopped making its grand intro to reel you in and started injecting interesting longform song straight into you to create a longer lasting feeling, and it does. This song and the next song probably hit me the hardest. With a runtime of 6 and a half minutes it is one of their longer songs but it does not overstay its welcome at all. With songs that are split into two sections it is very tempting to just skip a section because it's not as interesting as the other section, but I've never found myself skipping anything here. Holistically it all works really well somehow, and I really wanna learn how to do that... This might just be because I really like them, but I feel that Foals are masters of getting away with lengthening sections of songs, stretching them to be far longer than they ought to be. A fine example of this is the lyricless section between the second chorus and "they buried their gold..." where it's just this low-energy guitar lick. I think it shapes the tone of this song compared to the previous song on the record, and a lot of their poppier tracks. This might also be a hot take but I feel this is one of their best songs lyrically. Tonally every lyric feels appropriate and it's all sung appropriately and beautifully, especially in the second half of the song where Yannis dips lower than usual for his vocal range. The arrangement is also beautifully weighted. I specifically love that moment between the two sections where it's just bass, rhythm guitar and drums and once Yannis’s tremolo guitar comes in, Jack starts opening the hihat slowly, and you can tell it's building to something. It's a lyricless section that has such a strong narrative, in my mind. The chorus in the first section is texturally thick whilst feeling thin, as the tremolo there feels dainty as a feather. Jimmy’s guitar part in this song is incredibly nuanced and a highlight for me, and helps allow the structure to work. It's slightly funky but also restrains itself to keep things from being a polyrhythmic mess. I am so glad that they played this live in Melbourne in July 2019. Up the front, I was definitely the only one that really got around this one and I don’t mind that. Unfortunately they ended the song pretty abruptly and didn't allow it to ring out at the end like they did for that amazing Live de Semaine performance. Jack's drumming efforts are so different! Oh well, we're in a new era of Foals now...
#2: Red Socks Pugie
I'm fairly sure Red Socks Pugie is my favourite song ever. There had been some contenders to overtake that recently from artists but I do think this song has stood the test of time and been consistently great to me overall. This is the song that got me interested in drumming, and an interest in drumming was probably the reason I got back into production as a teenager. Jack Bevan’s beat is so intelligent and it just makes me swoon hearing every beat he plays. I can’t really put it into words, he went above and beyond for this song. I really do appreciate having two snares for this beat, it makes all the difference. It REALLY irks me that he doesn't do this beat nowadays and elects for a less complicated beat but I guess that's what the live set calls for. :( My opinion thinks this is their most cathartic song, well beyond Sahara and Inhaler and WWD and Neptune. I personally love the bassline and how simple it is, yet the choice of notes adds this emotive layer that you may not feel until hearing it far too many times like I have. The part where the section changes from F to A minor always has me feeling distress, but as it comes back to that chorus in F it feels like everything is okay and always was. I think it's amazing that they're still playing this song at live shows, but I think it's a sense of pride to their ability to songwrite, because far and away I think this is their best “song” on Antidotes, and I think they think that too. In the live setting this is another song where Yannis does not sing the lyrics on the recording to a tee, and it works because the lyrics were already so visceral and introspective that saying similar stuff doesn't ruin the message. At first I thought this was stupid but now I'm pretty on board with it. There's many great live performances of this song but the best would have to be on Jools Holland back in 2007. There's so much raw energy. I would also recommend the one at Glastonbury 2008 because that builds quite well + Jack is quite cute and Glastonbury 2010 because Jimmy accidentally does some mad distortion for the second chorus and it strangely works. OH YEAH, Jimmy's chorus guitar line is godly and so good for filling out more texture. The guitar line overall is very good. Damn, Jimmy is the best member of the band. The REASON it's not #1 is because while it may be my favourite song, it is not Foals’s best song. It might be tonally consistent, it might be wonderfully simple, it may be deeply emotive, and it may be one of their best live songs, but it does not compare to the atmosphere and intrigue of song #1.
#1: Two Steps Twice
The ultimate Foals song, Two Steps Twice is also allegedly the first song they ever wrote. I'm unsure if this means with their current line-up or with Andrew Mears but whatever. The intro is something that reels you in with its complexity, with the density of polyphony in 6/8 working together with an energy that ebbs and flows. The climax of this section also made me question my life when I first heard it, as it mashes a straighter beat into 6/8. It made me realise that Jack Bevan was far better than he was leading onto. The following sections don't really need explanation, but are wholly the reason Two Steps Twice still closes 99/100 Foals sets. I've said before how lyric depth isn't important for Foals and this song, like Providence, nails the vibe. It's so great to learn on guitar. It's so great to learn on drums!! Hands down, it is their best live song, with my favourite performances of the song coming before 2013 when distortion sounds got WILD. If you're starting to grow a keen interest of early Foals try and find as many different performances of Two Steps Twice before 2009 as you can, because I feel they're all… different, and yet so wild. I have a soft spot for: - the 2008 Live de Semaine performance. It's hands down the best performance of the song. Starts at 15:56. - Live at La Route du Rock 2008. Jimmy dances pretty awfully and you can really see Jack screaming in the first section. Jack's ride also sounds very good. It's pretty cool. - Reading Festival 2010. They completely fluff the opening section and then recover AMAZINGLY for the second half. One of my favourite live performances ever. I also think this is the birth of "See ya Fuckin' Later!" - I've gotta mention Reading Festival 2016. Guy Lawrence from Disclosure joins Jack on the kit and makes the thrash bit actually sound like early Foals. It's wonderful. Everything else is a little cringe though, Yannis doesn't stop shouting about wanting to see "the pits". Start watching from 3:00 for Guy Lawrence. I don't know how much I can say about this song. It's just really good. It's just really Foals. ~~~~~~~~ What did you think of this list? Do you agree? Do you vehemently disagree? Do you hate me now? I think I may talk about more Foals at a later date, but for now we'll take a little Foals break. Until next week! - R |
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