A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING - even if that place is "c:/Lucid Liars demo drive"
After 'Happy to Be Here.' we played a lot of live shows, pinning down all the new songs and arrangements. We ended up writing a lot around this time, just jamming out rhythms, riffs, melodies, etc, and scrippling them down on note files on our phones. Eventually, we ended up with a collection of around 50 half finished songs and the conversation begun on how to tackle things - Do we dive straight in to another album or work on something else?
We ended up just... recording. By this point we had well established our home recording set up and had a good idea of how to get music sounding like it did in our head. Experimenting with different sounds, synthesizers and pedals gave us a lot of room to breathe. Some songs came together very quickly. I remember sitting down and writing 'Null Nimhe' in a day. Everything was very free flowing and relaxed on it, so it was just a case of getting in a room and finishing it. We had I think 3 different recording sessions for all the songs we did for 'A Place for Everything' and a lot of it was just about feeling out how the songs were going to sound. I remember very vividly speaking to Jack while recording 'BEP', we were having a difficult time nailing down the feel and wondered about comping together a drum and bass take for it - eventually we realised that "we've just got to feel it out", and insisted on getting everything down in one take where we could then begin layering the other instruments on top.
There's another version of 'Daydreaming' from 'Happy to Be Here.' on the EP. I remember initially singing this song in 5/4 and liking the rhythm but when we came to put it on the album we opted for a more textural quality which didn't lend itself to the 5/4 particularly well. Hearing it in this little snippet as it initially sounded in my head is a nice little moment for me. We ended up using an archived drum loop from 2014 on '...and You're Wrong' which was sped up a bit to fit in with the new song. We're pretty resourceful when we want to be!
Lots of songs released around this time were initially just for the sake of recording and getting material out. There wasn't really a plan at this time but we managed to get 7 new songs out and also our Halloween cover in 'In the House in a Heartbeat' which is always a good time when we play it live.
HAPPY TO BE HERE.
- no, really.
We had the idea to put an album out for Summer 2020. It would give us something to promote live and following on from Two Ghosts and Headlights it seemed obvious to consolidate our material, but the pandemic put things in a different perspective. From a song writing point of view, all the songs in 'Happy to Be Here.' were more or less finished and written about past experiences and it didn't seem right to release a cynical and sarcastic album during cynical times, so the album was shelved in favour of releasing Pretty Little Things (which was planned for a separate release anyway) while we researched home recording. It looked like the pandemic was coming to an end in early 2021, so we set in motion the final mixing and mastering for 'Happy to Be Here.'.
The songs on 'Happy to Be Here.' stretch a period of around 11 years, with 'Two Ghosts' and 'All My Time' having been demoed with acoustic guitar in 2010 or so, recorded on a Boss MicroBR (which I later lost to battery rot). 'All My Time' was a very late addition to the album, with strings being added just a few weeks before the album was mastered. It felt important to end on a happy note, the story of 'Happy to Be Here.' works out for everyone involved and 'All My Time' felt like the perfect ending for it.
Mixing and mastering the album felt like a huge undertaking, not helped by the 3 of us not being in the same room for it. Files were sent back and forth for weeks, small tweaks here and there to get it sounding the best it could.
There's several narrative threads on 'Happy to Be Here', told through leitmotifs, vocal styles and perspectives. It tells the story of the destruction of a relationship. The honeymoon period ('Two Ghosts'), complacency ('Happy to Be Here'), anger and depression ('3am'), regret ('Untitled #1', 'Daydreaming', 'Sad to Be Gone'), bargaining ('Rabbit in Your Headlights'), misplaced blame ('Cold as Snow') self destruction ('Claymore', 'White Lady'), and subsequent reconciliation ('All My Time').
The album's main theme (heard on 'Two Ghosts', 'Happy to Be Here' and 'Rabbit in Your Headlights', and inverted elsewhere on the album) is a 4 bar riff that builds from the root note to the octave continuously through repetition, which reminds the protagonist that no matter how much they try to move forward by following the path laid out for them, they always end up back where they start. It's only with self destruction and the mental fortitude to rebuild ('Cold as Snow', 'Claymore' and 'All My Time') that the negative thought spiral is broken and we move in another direction.
Production for 'Happy to Be Here.' involves a lot of guitar/drum sampling, vocal manipulation, guest musicians, and production tricks. We all learned a lot from putting the album together, skills that would be important in our future.
YOU CAN’T LOSE/I CAN’T WIN
- sometimes the cards just aren't in your favour.
The origins of this track have been documented through interviews. During the pandemic, we had to look through archived material in order to repurpose recordings into Lucid Liars material. YCL/ICW was originally an overtly cynical yet upbeat part of our old bands set, even if we never did get it sounding great live.
I began diving in to an old hard drive looking for something that was useable. We were deep in to the pandemic at this point and it wasn't looking like recording studios were going to be up and running any time soon. We had 2 options - repurpose something from the past, or spend a lot of time and money investing in recording equipment. We kind of did both.
The music for this track was recorded back in 2014 or so, at Unity Recording Studio. Most of the stems were fine but the vocal track and 2 of the guitar tracks were missing. Thankfully the drums and synthesizer were present, so we deemed this an experiment and decided to polish it up for release. The drum track was not very Lucid Liars, so we instead tried to push past this and embrace the difference. The guitars are very loud, there's a synthesizer melody, heavy vocal layering... all stuff we haven't really embraced as Lucid Liars but used to be our go-to items in our previous project. It's a nice curio all in. I hope we can revisit this song and give it a more Lucid Liars sound for a future release.
The vocals have a very 'Scottish' twang to them and I'm still not sure why. I think I had been hanging around a new person at work and his Glasgow accent rubbed off on me for a few weeks and I just didn't notice. Some friends pointed it out and it sort of clicked that I was singing this way. Weird.
SAD TO BE GONE
- happy to be here.
By the time 'Sad to Be Gone' came around, we hadn't played together in 4 months. We were rusty, we couldn't get to where we wanted to be. When we started to write again, we weren't even allowed to be in the same room due to the COVID19 pandemic, so jamming this out felt almost cathartic.
The song was written in about 2 days, and recorded over another week or so. I laid down the bass track first, throwing the bass through a Fender Mustang V mk2 amp head directly in to the recording interface to not annoy the neighbours. Then came the guitars, I had to dig out my Jazzmaster and rattle down the Proco RAT to a slight crunch to get the tone I wanted. And then came the roughest demo vocal you've ever heard. I was working a lot of consecutive 10 hr shifts at this time and any time I had to record was precious, so it had to do. I felt sorry for Jack having to record drums for this, knowing the demo vocal was so bad. He persevered though, what a lad.
And that's a whole other story. Drum recording for us was this big expensive thing that had to be booked about a month in advance. All of a sudden I was (socially distanced) dropping off a recording interface to Jack, and we were bouncing ideas back and forth over the internet, slightly tweaking mic placement to get the drums how we wanted them. We were back in action!
The rest of the song came together quickly, a series of better vocals were recorded, some organ was added, a few guitar overdubs, and a few production tweaks. We released the song first on Bandcamp as a test, and have been investing in the platform since by adding our EPs and other singles.
PRETTY LITTLE THINGS
- refinement
We had just started writing a new batch of songs. 'Pretty Little Things' and 4 other songs, we went to the studio to record 3 tracks. We had finished 'Pretty Little Things' and a future track, then we got our first taste of something we'd know too well in recent times - Coronavirus. I remember the early days quite well, all the jokes were coming out. "Why'd they name it after a mexican beer?", stuff like that. It basically stopped us from being a band for a while.
We decided to release the only finished song we had left, 'Pretty Little Things'. The original plan was an announcement video on social media, a small Scottish tour, leading to the announcement of an album when the tour finished in June. It wasn't to be, though.
The song came together very quickly, we had Dan back on bass, and we had played it live twice by the time it came to record it, so we were pretty confident about it. The song was one of our first "hits" on online spaces, it worked it's way in to Spotify playlists and newsletters. Recording was very quick, the keys and guitars came together quickly. Around this time I was running different distortion pedals in to one another trying to get a more aggressive sound to my guitar tone. I was also experimenting with an octaver and overdubbing with the guitar tracks, giving the guitars a really thicc sound. The organ has a lot of saturation on it, which gives it this gritty growling sound.
I really look forward to playing this song live again.
HEADLIGHTS
- direction forward
'Headlights' was originally going to be a 5 track EP, with 'Cold as Snow', 'Rabbit in Your Headlights' and 3 other original songs. We also decided to focus more heavily on our live set around this time, and began to look at covers. We were jamming a few things at practice and Edwyn Collins 'A Girl Like You' was mentioned, we decided to record a version of it for practice and it turned out so well we looked in to obtaining cover rights for the song and released it. Capping off the EP is the oddity 'Low Light', which is one of these mood pieces I record whenever I borrow Craig's Kurzweil, they usually sit on a hard drive for years...much like 'Low Light'. It's built on loops and old guitar recordings, I tried not to record anything new for it and just rearranged loops and stems, adjusting pitches on the fly.
'Cold as Snow' is another older song that was revitalised when the drum beat was locked in. Jack was late in arriving to our practice spot and I was sitting at the kit, looking for ways to make more subtle melodic elements with the toms, and started to play around with rim shots and ghost notes. I'm a very poor drummer, which Jack and Craig can attest to whenever I get behind the cans, but I know enough to get an idea across to Jack. Eventually he arrived and we worked out the rhythm, recorded a quick video to memorise it, and moved on. The piano was worked on for a long time, eventually ending up carrying the song. The decision to make the song louder at the end seemed like a natural conclusion but we actually took a long time in getting there. I wanted the song to have an even longer intro but the opportunity to record it didn't come up until recently.
'Rabbit in Your Headlights' is where Lucid Liars became Lucid Liars for me. This song was sitting forgotten, half finished on a hard drive for ages. It was originally 25BPM faster, basically punk rock. Everything changed with a simple suggestion from Jack - "Why don't we slow it down?". Everything about this song is what I wanted from a creative outlet. The lyrics are heart-on-your-sleeve honest, the guitars and drums are playing off each other, the organ is shredding and carrying the melodies, and the middle section lets us gel together as a band, enjoying the vibe. We can extend this bit to be as long as we want when playing live, playing off each other. We recorded 3 full takes of the song, 3 takes full of overdubs, and then mixed the best elements of them together to create something we're really proud of. The song was recently revisited for a future project and I look forward to sharing it.
TWO GHOSTS
- a blueprint for a band
We started to work on 'Two Ghosts' while Lucid Liars had no name and no direction. We (Rikki and Jack) were just two guys jamming in a portacabin, occasionally Craig would join us, which is where things got more interesting.
The first songs considered and recorded for the project were '3am' and 'Two Ghosts', with these two tracks setting out to give listeners both ends of the spectrum. A loud, aggressive piece built around a hypnotic drum loop in 'Two Ghosts' and a more considered moody composition in '3am'. Alongside these tracks, we were experimenting with guitar/piano looping and our drum production, which we put to use in 'The Water Under the Bridge'. Closing off the EP was 'Killing Time', a short instrumental track set to the background chatter of us discussing how we'd take the project forward, and working out how we could maximise our sound with just the 3 of us.
'Two Ghosts' was written in 2008, and revisited in 2016 for our previous project, although it is barely recognisable from that point. I actually came across a very early demo with horrible MIDI piano and a detuned bass recently (maybe it'll work it's way in to a rarities collection one day), back then I used to record demos to an early handheld 4 track. The drum intro and subsequent beat were written to evoke the anticipation of Hogmanay and the fireworks celebrations. In a demo mix, the snare was doubled and mixed heavily on the right channel, so the "fireworks" would last the full 4 minutes of the song, or so. The brass section was recorded by a good friend of ours in 2018, and the song didn't really come together until we got this back. The original idea for 'Two Ghosts' was for every loop of the progression to add more and more layers until cutting out completely...the realisation that a New Year was beginning.
'3am' was chosen to be the first track released under Lucid Liars, and it was recorded in early 2018, slowly changing as we found our sound. Early on the song had more intricate guitar parts, until we decided to strip everything back and let the synths and piano carry the song. The drum beat was designed to mimic the thumping of your heartbeat during heart palpitations, giving the song a very tense beginning until the second verse where the tension is released as the song transitions to Fmajor. As it stands, every Lucid Liars song stemmed from our approach to '3am' - the drums must be the lifeblood of the song.
The cover art is a quickly snapped photo of the streetlights where I grew up.