It's official. Our album is finished. The masters have been signed off, the B-sides have been mixed. It's on. Now we're doing the artwork, and, well, waiting. There is always a waiting period of a couple of months after you finish an album while the people who have the proper jobs, which they're really good at, do their work.
And that means we have ample opportunity to think back over the past year of writing and think about everything. And worry that in that year we didn't do enough to make the best album we possibly could have. Here are some of the key moments from that writing period that I want to share.
1. Last summer when we were playing festivals and getting back to London at about 4am, as the sun was coming up. We were pretty much only listening to 'Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix', and we just wanted to write songs that were made up of cool little bits of music, rather than one-long-fully-composed-in-one-session-track. I don't think any of those songs made it onto the album.
2. The time we thought we had the best song. Not even the best song we'd ever written, the best song anyone, ever, in the entire world, had written. But then no one else liked it. This happened about five times.
3. When Jeremy started listening to Toots & The Maytals loads and, possibly related, I wanted to put steel drums on a song. Didn't make the album.
4. The time I decided programmed drums were the worst thing in the world and that Stewart Copeland was the best drummer in the whole world and what was the point of anything if we weren't going to be as good as Stewart Copeland.
5. When I announced, "I just can't write songs on acoustic guitar because I don't like singer songwriters, so I can't hear if it's good". That was a SUPER productive week/day/month.
6. When I couldn't sing a harmony Jeremy had come up with and pushed over the mic and sobbed in a corner for ten minutes.
7. The period where Jeremy decided that every song needed a searing guitar solo. Sorry, neighbours.
8. When we thought everything we had written was rubbish, so we decided to plan an entire 10 track album from start to finish. And we were going to write two songs for it a week, and it didn't matter if those songs were good or bad, that was going to be our album. We intricately planned each song, down to lyrical themes, intro, outro, length, arrangement, and instrumentation. Two of the songs from that batch made it onto the album.
9. When we went to see the original 'Wizard Of Oz' at the BFI and the next day were having trouble writing a song. So my friend joked, "Write one about the 'Wizard Of Oz'" so we did. And it's on the album.
10. When I made a moodboard.
11. When we were going to call up all our friends and get them to tell us their most meaningful memories from 2012 and turn that into our album. We called one friend. Their memory was "The Olympics".
12. The (abandoned) spoken word intro that makes me cringe from my hair all the way down to my toes.
13. The many, many songs we wrote about touring.
14. When we tried to be political.
15. When I couldn't get a harmony (again) and ripped up my notebook page by page, only to sellotape it all back together in the afternoon. I will do ANYTHING to get out of singing.
16. When Jeremy had a tantrum because our songs "aren't interesting enough" and tried to put horrible squiggly synths on everything. None of these songs are on the album.
17. And the inevitable last month where we wrote the three best songs on the album, after we had officially "stopped writing".
Miss it already. x