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Our new album, song by song
The second Swimmer One album, Dead Orchestras, will be released in May 2010. It’s quite different from The Regional Variations - more musically ambitious, with more live instruments (by our friend Ben Seal, among others), some beautiful string arrangements by Pete Harvey, and richer harmonies (by Laura, me and Hamish, often multitracked so we sound almost like a choir). It’s more varied too - there are songs on it that sound like Girls Aloud, others that sound like Mogwai. Heaven knows what anyone will make of it. Here’s a track-by-track guide, with sneak previews of a few tracks…
(NB: If you don’t like knowing what song lyrics are about, and would prefer to invent meanings for yourself, don’t read this because I’ll probably spoil the songs for you.)
1. Dead Orchestras
The first words you hear on this album are ‘One day love, all this will be yours, I just hope it’s enough,’ which is a decent summary of the lyrical theme that runs through a lot of these songs - the things we leave behind us when we’re gone, as artists, or parents, as lovers, or, more broadly, as a species. The song Dead Orchestras is, on one level, about parenthood - something that isn’t written about much in pop music and, when it is, tends to be done simplistically and mawkishly. The lyric is deliberately ambiguous, though, so if you’re not interested in songs about parenting (it’s not very rock n roll, let’s face it), it could equally be a song about creativity, or just love. Or whatever you like.
The title Dead Orchestras comes from a slight misunderstanding. I read somewhere that the word karaoke translates into English as ‘dead orchestras’ - which I thought was a lovely, evocative image. I discovered later that the literal translation is more like ‘orchestra in a box’ but the phrase stuck and ended up shaping most of the lyrics I wrote for this album. It seemed appropriate for us - we write classical sounding string parts using a computer (although they ended up being played live on this album, in the end) but it suggests all kinds of other meanings too.
Musically this is, I believe, a ‘shufflecore’ song - like Largs Hum from our first album, or Strict Machine by Goldfrapp. Hamish plays a fantastic, Robert Fripp-inspired guitar part. Listen out for some very nice ebow guitar in the final section.
2. This club is for everybody, even you
This Club Is For Everybody, Even You by Biphonic Records
We’ve played this one live a few times and recorded it a Radio One session too. It’s a song about songwriting - about the way that, once a song is out in the world it doesn’t belong to you anymore, and people will read whatever meaning they want into it. Hence all the contradictory lines - ‘Now I’ve got high for the first time, now I’ve conquered my addiction.’ A favourite piece of music can soundtrack all kinds of significant moments in your life, and the people who make the music in question don’t - and shouldn’t - have any say in whether it’s an appropriate choice for that moment or not. Which is a bit of a self-indulgent thing to write a lyric about, but it’s been on my mind since The Regional Variations was released, and people started telling me what they thought our songs were about, and were usually completely wrong, but so nice about it that I didn’t want to put them right. The chorus - ‘I have waited all of my life’ - is deliberately meaninglesss. It is, I suppose, me accepting the idea that it’s not up to me what this song means. Which also means that, if you want the song to be about something completely different - ie: not about songwriting at all - that’s up to you. And that’s fine. That was a bit long-winded, sorry.
People frequently sing along to this song at gigs, despite never having heard it before, which we’re taking as an encouraging sign. It has some very good harmonies by Laura.
3. The Erskine Bridge
This began as a piano demo, with a very basic string arrangement, but gradually became something quite epic. Musically, I think it’s one of the best things we’ve ever done. Lyrically, it’s about depression and suicide. Cheery stuff. It’s quite uplifting though, honest. Listen out for Pete Harvey’s strings, which are lovely, and some live drums coming in at the end.
4. Psychogeography
Psychogeography by Biphonic Records
This began life as a thumping electropop instrumental. I keep fretting that I’ve sabotaged a potentially euphoric dancefloor hit by writing another gloomy end-of-the-world lyric with references to Daniel Defoe instead of, say, something that might make people feel happy. Then again, that kind of thing seems to work for the Pet Shop Boys, so maybe it’ll be ok (the title is very Pet Shop Boys too). Another great string part by Pete Harvey on this one, and some lovely, understated harmonies from Laura.
5. Here’s your train, safe home
Here’s Your Train, Safe Home by Biphonic Records
One of the loveliest pieces of music we’ve ever made - a slow, acoustic love song for guitar, piano and live strings, and unlike anything else we’ve made. Lyrically it was very much shaped by the music - I thought the guitar part sounded like a train for some reason, especially with the harmonica (I imagined a railway station scene during the Second World War, with lovers saying tearful goodbyes and a soldier playing a mournful little tune on a mouth organ). The moment when it changes time signature half way through feels to me like a train moving on to a different track, or leaving the station, and the lyric reflects that. There are (fairly subtle) railway station noises on this one too. I’ve wanted to do a song with railway station noises ever since I heard King’s Cross by the Pet Shop Boys.
6. Lorelei and Dorothy
Another euphoric electropop track, possibly sabotaged by another gloomy, end of the world lyric. I wanted to call it Lorelei and Dorothy In Lifeboat Scotland, but we eventually decided that wasn’t very radio-friendly. The song offers an answer to a question that is surely on everyone’s lips right now: how would Lorelei and Dorothy from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes survive in a world ravaged by economic disaster and global heating? This song took ages to get right - it was very 1980s high-NRG at one stage (we would refer to it as our ‘gay disco song’ during rehearsals), then became more 1970s in feel. Listen out for a piano part by me that shamelessly rips off Roxy Music, a great guitar riff by Hamish, some lovely backing vocals by Laura and one of the best middle eights we’ve ever written done. We’ve played this one live a few times, although mostly in its gay disco incarnation. It has improved a lot since then.
7. You have fallen way short of our expectations
You Have Fallen Way Short Of Our Expectations by Biphonic Records
This was intended for the first album, but we couldn’t get it right. Now we have, with help from some real bass and drums which took the song in a different direction. It’s about the closest we’ve ever come to something that could be played completely live by a traditional guitar/bass/drums/organs rock line-up. Probably a one-off, but it was fun to do. I’m very pleased with the final section, which sounds a bit like Prefab Sprout.
8. The fakester resurrection
This is, by some distance, the most over the top thing we’ve ever done - a 12-minute pop symphony in three parts, which starts off with a short spoken word section to music that sounds a bit like a Michael Nyman film soundtrack, before suddenly mutating into an Underworld-style electro wigout, with a choir (or rather me, Laura and Hamish multi-tracked) and a live string section, before finishing with a poignant instrumental reprise of the first section. Musically, it was inspired by Jane Siberry’s The Bird in the Gravel, Kate Bush’s The Ninth Wave (the series of thematically connected songs on the second side of her Hounds of Love album) and Lou Reed’s Berlin. It began as a very rough piano demo, then grew and grew, becoming more ambitious as we went along. The result is like nothing else on the album, and nothing else we’ve ever made.
Lyrically, this is a sequel to The Fakester Genocide, from our first album. The first song was about meeting someone while using a fake identity on the internet, falling in love with them, and then being unable to find them when their ‘fakester’ identity got deleted. This song/symphony/whatever is about a person (possibly the same person, possibly not) retreating entirely into a virtual world as the real one collapses around them. In the spirit of Hollywood sequels, it was more expensive to make, has far more characters, and is longer. We’re hoping we’ve made The Empire Strikes Back and not The Matrix Reloaded.
9. Ghosts in the hotel
Ghosts In The Hotel by Biphonic Records
We originally wrote this song for the first album, then decided that 1. there were too many slow songs on there already and 2. this one would sound much better with live drums and strings, which we didn’t have either the time or money to sort out at the time. It now has live drums and strings, and sounds great. Hamish describes this song, semi-seriously, as ‘our pension’, which is another way of saying we were trying to write something as unashamedly populist and anthemic as Run by Snow Patrol, or Yellow by Coldplay. Except that, being us, it has an oblique, vaguely depressing lyric about ghosts and hotels. We played this live once, years ago, quite badly. One day we will play it again, triumphantly, at Wembley, or Glastonbury, or our local pub.
10. All the hits
Another very old one, which we played live a couple of times way back in 2005, as part of We Just Make Music For Ourselves, our theatre show with Laura’s company Highway Diner. It’s a song of solace, and very simple - just voice, guitar, and one slightly Brian Eno-like synth part. ‘Everything will be ok, just not in the way you expected,’ it goes, which seemed to be a nice way to end the album.
Andrew
