I wanted to tell you all about the EP I've just released, while it's still fresh, sparkling new and before it gets too long and this becomes 'hey, remember that awesome EP I did that one time?'
Ben Dies At The End is, I guess, the follow-up to 2010's Too Much Like A Person. Rare as this is among young musicians, I'm still totally happy with everything that everyone involved achieved with that album. Of course, there are things that, if I were to record it now, I'd tweak, molest and generally bring in line with how I've changed as a person - that's how it's always going to be though. The nice thing is that songs kind of don't stop wanting to be written, so rather than get all anal about what I've done in the past, I can bring out arrangent, production and sound ideas (that I now mentally add to the last album) in fresh, new musical pastures.
These new pastures turned out to be Ben Dies At The End. What was originally going to be one song, recorded as a kind of one-off, rapidly swelled to being two new full-band tracks (one of the blessings/curses of having several musical friends and a fairly good idea of the talent they possess), an acoustic song written as an afterthought and a new version of a song from Too Much Like A Person.
The first track, You're A Taboo, was the song I was originally going to release on its own, as a very basic acoustic song. Now, I'm a terrible sucker for imaginary drums - whatever the song is, whoever I'm writing it for, I mentally add at least a little groove, if not a full-on percussive masterpiece. Unfortunately, I can't play drums for shit (I really cannot); fortunately, I know a man who can. I've played with Frank Rawle in bands a few years back, as well as on various different smaller projects since then and the dude can make a song work just by being involved in it.With him and my brother, Joe, we shuffled the arrangement of the original song around and made it work even better as a 'bigger' track. We also switched a couple of lyrics around to try and properly get across what the song's about.
I had the thought that you can see a lot of people - some of whom are friends, family, whatever - completely change who they are where sex is involved and we never normally see this other side of people that we might know inside-out otherwise. You're A Taboo is kind of about not seeing the characters that people you know play when they're in that sort of situation; whether it be when a dude finds out that a girl he's known for a long time poses nude, or when we find ourselves in situations where the boundaries of who we normally are break down.
Down In The Inbetween came together from a few smaller musical ideas that I'd had floating around for a while. The break, in particular, was going to be the basis of a completely separate song until I found myself playing it here, where it fit perfectly. Another song that Joe, Frank and I kicked around a bit from its acoustic origins (before Luke Bond and I kicked it some more in the studio), it's arranged with drums and bass in mind, but still holds on to a slightly more simple, stripped-back feel, which I'm really digging at the moment.
I realised that this song and You're A Taboo feature people's names directly. This wasn't a completely conscious effort, it just seemed to work - in You're A Taboo, I think it emphasises that we're talking about actual people that we actually know; Down In The Inbetween isn't about a personal experience of mine and it felt too vague in the first lyric drafts to keep referring to 'him' and 'he'.
What the song is about is a relationship coming to an end with the guy feeling upset, but actually getting over it and coming out positively on the other side. In the song, I think John kind of gets fed up with people expecting him to be broken in two, when he feels like he's dealt with everything pretty healthily.
Once it became clear that, because of how much studio time we needed to record the first two tracks (and how it worked out across the days), we were going to have time to flesh out the EP with a couple of acoustic tracks, I sat down with Joe and we wrote most of this in about an hour. For reasons obvious to people who know us, we often work almost telepathically when we write music together. We don't normally get a lot of time to actually write in the same room when we're putting together songs for other projects (mainly because Joe kind of has other awesome things going on), so we usually come to each other with pretty well-formed ideas. My favourite songs that we've written together, though, have been the ones where we've worked together from the word go; What Did I Say Then is no exception.
We wrote the lyrics as a sort of apology to anyone who's had to endure talking to us when we've switched off halfway through the conversation: it's not at all because we're not interested, or can't be bothered (which is why we kick ourselves when we realise it's been happening) - we just start thinking of other things and rapidly drift away. We're sorry, please don't take it personally.
The last song on Ben Dies At The End is called My Head Hurts - despite the EP's artwork, above. The song first appeared on Too Much Like A Person and was originally written as an 'interesting' track to break up the album; it turned out to gather quite a cult following and even to me, became one of my favourite songs. After playing it live a few times, the acoustic version I was playing started to take on a life of its own - it's a bit shorter, finishing a bit more naturally than if I'd have forced in the (awesome) ending from the original and the chord changes are shifted around slightly. I also restrained myself from recording all of the lyrics from the version Joe and I drunkenly created (including a lot more references to teeth), but one change did get through to the final version.
My Head Hurts is an only partly fictitious internal monolgue, composited from the wreck of a lot of different trains of thought colliding while I was writing it. I'm not quite sure what it is about this song that I like so much (or that have made other, very kind, people say the same), but I really do.
So that's kind of it - I hope the new blog has served its purpose by giving a little more insight into the background of the new EP. I know I like hearing a bit about where music I like came from, so I'm hoping that there are some of you out there who do, too. I'm also hoping that most of my future posts will be a little bit shorter, but what are you going to do? You can listen to Ben Dies At The End in the player at the top of the page, or here.
- Ben
