[分享] Tim`s Strangeland Track-By-Track (Part 1)
1.YOU ARE YOUNG
This is quite a philosophical song. I think more than anything it's a message
to myself to try and stay young at heart. It definitely feels like a message to
my daughter too, in places. And also from the beginning it always made me think
of standing in a crowd at a festival, a huge mass of people united by a feeling
of bliss and freedom, which are things that are most easily associated with
being young - as you get older it gets harder to find that feeling, and I love
the idea that music can lift us out of ourselves, make us forget our everyday
troubles, make us feel young. I also think the line "You've got to bring some
good into this world" pretty much sums up my view of being a human being - I
kind of feel that bringing some good into the world is about the best thing you
can hope to do in life. I'd say it's the reason we make music.
I think we all remember very clearly a moment when we were rehearsing this song
together. We had spent many hours chopping and changing the structure of the
song, trying to make it snappier and less ponderous, and when we eventually
felt we had something worth listening to we went into the control room to
listen to what we had done. When it got to the 'outro' section after the
breakdown there was a real feeling of energy and excitement in the room, of
knowing we had created something a little bit magical. Those are the moments
you live for as a band.
2.SILENCED BY THE NIGHT
Towards the end of 2009 I started to feel that I really wasn't writing enough
songs. The touring for Perfect Symmetry made it hard to find time to write, and
between trying to finish Night Train and write a few songs for Mt Desolation I
realised that I wasn't making any progress on the new Keane album. I had read
an interview with the band Doves where they mentioned a book called The
Frustrated Songwriter's Handbook, which basically suggests sitting down at an
appointed time with some friends and trying to write 20 songs (each) in 12
hours. So Jesse and I tried this a few times over the next couple of years - I
wrote about 70 songs that way and a lot of the songs for Strangeland came out
of that process. Silenced By The Night was one of them.
I had been watching Peter Bogdanovich's fantastically inspiring documentary
about Tom Petty, and I was interested in the way he often uses the same chord
sequence over and over again, changing the melody over the top to make
different sections (U2 do this a lot too!). Anyway, when you're doing this
intensive writing thing you have to grab at inspirations quickly so I thought I
would try the repeating chord thing, and that became the hypnotic piano riff in
Silenced By The Night. I think the pace of it instinctively made it feel like a
'driving' song, and I've always loved driving at night, so the verse lyrics
came from that. I couldn't find a phrase for the chorus and was running out of
time, so I looked over the back of the piano and say a copy of Patrick
Humphries' biography of Nick Drake. I remembered a passage in it about how when
people get very depressed things can seem utterly hopeless in the middle of the
night, but then when the morning comes life seems a little more manageable
again. So the idea of trying to make it through the night to the dawn became
the chorus of the song.
3. DISCONNECTED
I wrote this when I was driving up the west coast of America. I suspect it may
have had its origins in some argument or other with my wife, but I can't
remember! But since that no doubt passed very quickly, I think the song has
quite a jaunty feel to it, not too weighed down by its lyrical content! I think
it's quite Beatles-y in that respect - sad words with a very 'happy' melody. I
like the imagery of a relationship being like a decrepit house, especially the
line about boarding up the windows.
I think I only finished the song because I stumbled across the rough sketch in
the studio one day and thought I'd have a quick listen - just at that moment
Jesse came in and said "What's that? I love it!
4. WATCH HOW YOU GO
This was a bit of a breakthrough song for me, in that it's a break-up song that
isn't about anger or even regret, but more about acceptance and trying to
handle loss with a bit of grace and understanding. I don't think I've managed
to articulate that before. I love the fact that we've kept it very simple and
sparse and resisted the urge to 'go to town' with the recording of it.
5.SOVEREIGN LIGHT CAFE
This was the first song I wrote for the album, and for a long time it was the
only song I felt was a definite contender for the next Keane album. I had a
sketch of the melody on a cassette and was listening to it on a flight into
Mexico in 2009. I couldn't come up with any words, but then I was sitting in a
bus on the way from Sao Paulo airport to our hotel and suddenly the name of the
old cafe on Bexhill seafront came into my head. I had actually always wanted to
write a song with that title - when I was about 16 I remember being on holiday
with Richard and having a song that went "Sovereign Light Cafe, down by the
sea, go there with me" or something….it was a crap song! Anyway after a gap of
many years the phrase popped back into my head and unlocked this idea of
looking back to the beginning and trying to work out what had happened to me,
and to us, over the last 15 years or so.
I remember doing a demo of the song on the tourbus, and because I wanted to
sing the vocal without disturbing anyone I sat in the back of the bus with a
duvet over my head to muffle the sound. The glamour!
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