New Season in depth | Part 5: Patience
Every Monday (it kind of all went wrong) for the next six weeks I’m going to be posting an in-depth blog about a song from New Season. Here’s the fifth one.
Part 5: Patience
I am (or at least I used to be) a pretty impatient person. I’m also a bit of a control freak and I like stuff to be done my way. So in 2011 I chose a word to focus on for the year, something to work on in my character, and that was ‘patience,’ hence this song of the same name.
If I’m being honest, this is probably my least favourite song on the album. It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just that I never felt completely satisfied with how it ended up sounding. I love the chorus and think it has a great melody, which is why I kept the song on the album, and I love the sentiment of the song, but I always worried that it was a bit too basic and pop, and I was never sold on the middle eight (except the killer Beach Boys-esque ‘ba ba ba’ bits from 4:29 onwards!)
That said, the string section on the outro is one of my favourite moments on the album (from 4:55 onwards) and I feel like the song works in the context of the album, in terms of providing a different mood and feel. A few people have since told me that it’s their favourite song on New Season, so it can’t be all bad!
Anyway, I hope it inspires people to be a little more patient and to slow down a bit.
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Listen to / buy ‘New Season’ at lukeleighfield.com/newseason.
Watch ‘Seasons’, the feature-length documentary about the making of the album, at lukeleighfield.com/seasons.
New Season in depth | Part 4: Whispering
Every Monday (this one is late!) for the next seven weeks I’m going to be posting an in-depth blog about a song from New Season. Here’s the fourth one.
Part 4: Whispering
In spring 2010 I was invited to go on a songwriting retreat for a couple of days by BBC 6 DJ, Tom Robinson. Around ten of us went to a cottage in Kent to just be quiet and write songs for a couple of days, and share them with each other.
In that day and a half I managed to write more songs than I’d written in the previous year (!) and ’Whispering’ was one of them. The song came about from the quietness and peace of the surroundings, and it’s about taking time to be quiet, still and present. There’s not really a huge amount to say about it - it’s all in the lyrics!
When it came to recording the song, it’s pretty exposed lyrically and musically and I wanted to keep that bare intimacy, but we did some cool stuff with the ending to make it a little more exciting. The big sound that comes in at the middle eight, aside from the drums, is a Rhodes piano going through numerous pedals, delays and guitar cabs. Pete geeked out and managed to create an insane sound that I’m sure we’d never be able to replicate again.
The vocal sound at the ending was made by layering loads of parts with me singing super quietly, and the echo part is a choir of my friends that we recorded at a church in Southampton.
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Listen to / buy ‘New Season’ at lukeleighfield.com/newseason.
Watch ‘Seasons’, the feature-length documentary about the making of the album, at lukeleighfield.com/seasons.
New Season in depth | Part 3: It’s You
Every Monday for the next eight weeks I’m going to be posting an in-depth blog about a song from New Season. Here’s the third one.
Part 3: It’s You
‘It’s You’ is in the same key as ‘Have You Got Heart?’, and isn’t a million miles away in terms of tempo and feel, so I had to do something to make sure that it didn’t end up sounding too similar on the record. Whereas ‘Have You Got Heart?’ sounds quite bright and cheery thanks to the high guitar line, we went for some slightly dirge-y Weezer-esque guitars on ‘It’s You’ (listen to the start of ‘Buddy Holly’ or the chorus of ‘The Sweater Song’) to give it a bit of rock weight.
I’ve always felt that the verses are a good car-driving tempo and one of my favourite bits of the song is at 2:06 when the high guitar line comes in. To me, it sounds really American and like you’re driving on a long, open road, probably in a Cadillac through a desert or something. There’s also a killer shaker part at 1:46, which really gels the verse together. Never underestimate the role of a shaker.
My main concern with the chorus was worrying whether the hook was too basic (“It’s youuu, youuu, youuu, you are the one I love” was never going to win any awards for lyric writing). Whist it’s good because it’s super catchy and you can sing it after hearing it once, the danger with those kinds of choruses is that you’re sick of them after hearing them three times (mind, this chorus never gets old). Anyway, I tried to develop the chorus a bit and make it more interesting, but it felt complete as it was and I decided to risk putting an über-pop chorus on the album. Plus, I was super into the Gm7 chord in the chorus (2:40, for example) and there was no way that wasn’t making the album.
Other things I’m into on this track are the thick three-part harmonies at the end of each chorus (2:46 - the low part kills me), the way the drums play through the breaks before the choruses (0:20), the build-up at 3:31, and basically everything from 4:17 onwards (if I ever get to play a stadium show, this bit will be great). Although I do worry that we recorded the whole song too slow and that I didn’t sing the high bits very well. But look, I never claimed to be Freddie Mercury.
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Listen to / buy ‘New Season’ at lukeleighfield.com/newseason.
Watch ‘Seasons’, the feature-length documentary about the making of the album, at lukeleighfield.com/seasons.
New Season in depth | Part 2: New Season
Every Monday for the next nine weeks I’m going to be posting an in-depth blog about a song from New Season. Here’s the second one.
Part 2: New Season
I love Aaron’s (drums) shout at the start of this song. I think he was shouting because he’d done a fair few takes of this one, or maybe he was just super into it, but either way I decided that keeping the shout would be a good thing. I love songs where you can hear something odd in the recording, like how you can hear a phone go off in the studio at 2:56 in ‘Steven’s Last Night in Town’ by Ben Folds Five, followed by someone laughing in the live room. Those weird things make a record more fun, in my opinion. And on this song, it helps to lift things after the album opener ‘Slow Down’, which I said last week was possibly a bad choice of album opener.
Anyway, ‘New Season’ is obviously the title track, and in some ways encompasses what the whole of the album is about: hope, triumph over adversity, being positive, etc. It’s the oldest song on the album because I released an earlier version of the song, which I recorded for a charity single, back in 2010 (listen here). The original had a bit of a dirty pop-punk vibe and was a bit ropey in parts, although was blessed with some lovely backing vocals from Jose Vanders and Sam Little. For the album version we basically took out the nagging pop-punk guitars, added some rippin’ Hammond organ, introduced a tasty drum beat in the second verse, and made the whole thing a bit more of a rounded, considered, pop-rock anthem.
We also changed the pre-chorus bits so that rather than breaking the momentum of the song, they now added more energy and led into the chorus (check out the killer drum fill at 2:10). The ending was perked up with some rich brass, and my favourite bit of the song is probably the backing vocals in the middle eight. From 2:38 onwards we layered up lots of parts with me singing in a nice girly falsetto, and also added some extra tasty falsetto parts over the “this is a new season” bits (see 2:44). There’s a nice choir moment at 3:20, which I love, and we made poor Ben play his guitar solo over and over until it oozed pure awesome, whereas on the original version I think Ben was still learning it, so it didn’t ROCK quite so much.
The writing of the song itself happened really quickly, which seems to be the case with most of my favourite songs, and I love it because it’s nice and summery, and provides a burst of pop-rock adrenaline to the album.
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Listen to / buy ‘New Season’ at lukeleighfield.com/newseason.
Watch ‘Seasons’, the feature-length documentary about the making of the album, at lukeleighfield.com/seasons.
New Season in depth | Part 1: Slow Down
Every Monday for the next ten weeks I’m going to be posting an in-depth blog about a song from New Season. Here’s the first one.
Part 1: Slow Down
‘Slow Down’ is the first song on New Season, which quite a few people thought was a stupid idea. Maybe it was. The song starts really quietly with an organ, and there’s no singing until 1:07 (the chorus doesn’t happen until the two minute mark), which isn’t really textbook pop writing, and probably isn’t the way that you’re supposed to open an album. However, I like the idea that the song forces you to slow down, as the title suggests, and I love how it grows over the six minutes.
The drum roll at 4:29 was Matt Reynolds’ (guitar/bass/assistant producer) idea (I had more of a military thing in my head) and I’m so glad we did it. From that point on I always get goosebumps. I love the sense of impending rock at 4:40, the way that the guitar feeds back at 4:51, and the huge release at 5:09 when the brass, choir and Hundred Reasons-y guitar line comes in. The drum sound on this song is probably my favourite on the whole album. The snare just sounds delicious.
Lyrically, it’s one of my favourite songs that I’ve ever written. It’s not complex or clever (this review said that the lyrics in ‘Slow Down’ were “embarrassing pre-teen attempts at poetry”) but the message of the song is something that’s been important to me over the past couple of years. It’s so hard to find time to be quiet or slow in this age of being constantly connected, with our phones buzzing all day long with tweets and texts and emails, but I think it’s more important than ever to make time to not be around gadgets, and have time to simply stop, think and breathe. Not that I’m very good at it!
If the message of ‘Slow Down’ is something that appeals to you then I would highly recommend Zen Habits, a great blog that I read every week (and which isn’t as new age-y and hippyish as the title suggests) or Less is More, a new book by Brian Draper.
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Listen to / buy ‘New Season’ at lukeleighfield.com/newseason.
Watch ‘Seasons’, the feature-length documentary about the making of the album, at lukeleighfield.com/seasons.
