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 review of the Leighfield/Vanders Split EP

Thanks to Hififi & Sterereo for a kind review of mine and Jose’s split EP. You can read the review here and buy the EP here if you haven’t done so yet.

The review is in German but Google Translate sorted it out for me:

“Short and sweet, four-song, two pieces from each other gecovert, then Luke Leighfieldand Jose Vanders present with their EP ”Split”. That it is both a man and a woman is - Jose Vanders thus by no means is a Catalan bard - that we know either, because thegood has gathered on her MySpace page already hosts virtual fans around, or else, youcan the views of the beautifully designed cover and sees wander - drawn cute, sittingnext to Luke at the piano and the arms in the air reckend (yielding to a burglar?) MissJose. Because Leighfield and Vanders are two young singer-songwriter from the UnitedKingdom.

And deliver the subtle and dreamy pop with piano accompaniment, delicate guitarplucking and occasional intrusions of a cello. Leigh Fields voice comes in an otherwisevery harmonious opener “Metal Detector” is a little thin over, so I‘m curious how Vandersproposes the following piece. In short, good. Charismatic, not too sweet, cuddlysounding voice but which, when heard the refrain ”I’ll try to make everyday count,” a littlesound like Kate Nash. The third song, I can only guess, is probably to the very greatdocumentary “Man on Wire” named. Or not, at least this was now a good opportunity to point out in passing …
Here are two sensitive, melodic love souls come together, to make himself and his audience something comfortable in the cool autumn days ahead. If they succeeded!”

Blindsided remix competition: update

Myself and remix connoisseur Jose Vanders have started creating a shortlist of remixes for our parents to judge. Sorry for the delay but there were 70+ entries (which is a lot to listen to, like seven albums of music)!

Read more about the competition: lukeandjose.com/remix

Listen to the entries on SoundCloud: bit.ly/blindsideddropbox