Are You Out Of Your Mind? (Get Back In)

Are You Out Of Your Mind? (Get Back In)

It's our June single.

I started the year with an idea to release a song every month. Being the lazy, sunny  starting month of January, it took until I'm a Good Hater to come out.
March was when "This Is The Deadest Place I've Ever Died In" happened.
Then April came with "I Been Trendy" and May brought us "Drifting Donna Reed". We were in Europe playing and both of those were in the pipeline.

I've been enjoying the discipline of coming up with a  track each month. It's got me thinking and writing with a different kind of focus. Mostly its been all played by myself and Clare Moore. I get ideas quick and jump on them, getting obsessive over sounds and arrangements. I'm not the neatest and Clare usually comes in to tighten, edit , arrange and offer somne textural suggestions.

I've always thought of albums and over arching themes and sounds. This way I'm freed up from that and just hone in on one track and whatever it needs.

I'm A Good Hater was a guitar track I'd recorded for the Fearful Wiggings sessions and never used. We wanted to put some synthy bass with teh driving guitar. That was the musical impetus.

This Is The Deadest Place came from a  mad compression effect that happened when I put on a drum track. It nade the cymbals "whoosh" and "pump". I thought it'd be great to accentuate this and got Clare to drape a string of pearls on her crash cymbal. To softly lay it on the metal and then lift it off. I recorded it and boosted it to get a maddening, clattering and swishing sound over and above the compressed drums. The fuzz bass sat nicely.

I Been Trendy came from an older  drum track that I found. I'd been playing the bass line at soundcheckss for the NDE for a year or so, always meaning to do something with it. I got the groove happening and put down some licks with my vintage Maton ALVER guitar.

This instrument has sat in a corner for decades as more of an ornament than anything but I got the machine heads fixed last year (they were all stuck and bent out of shape) by the guys at Maton and I've found it records beautifully. Not an instrument to be ever taken out of the house, though. The lyric? I was thinking of the bright lights and the wandering gaze of the mob and how it was like, you know, being at a party, in  a tanning salon...

Drifting Donna Reed came froma  rhythm track from 2007. The original song was I Like To Be Haunted. 70s reggae producers always used the same backing track for multiple releases with different vocals over them, we always wanted to try that. I cut and edited the rhythm and added some more guitar licks, a different vocal and some b/vs from Clare Moore. The lyric was riffing on ephemeral pop culture.

Which bring us to Are You Out Of Your Mind? (Get Back In)



Hey it came out on the day that the UK voted to BREXIT- weird huh?

I was asking a friend what people at the ABC did when music was sent to them. He said they were obsessed by the 3 minute length of songs - anything over was not even considered. This song is 2:59.

I started with the drum track and built some chords to it. I was thinking vaguely of a  post punk kind of up tightness with vamping , dampened chords driving the groove. Stuttering and stopping and starting. This happened over a period of a  few hours I guess. I put some bass down and Clare did the organ. I had a luyric which I thiought harked to ssome old Sonny Boy Williamson  blues type thing . "You talk too much" was my line. A bit like his "don't you start me talkin" or Bo Diddleys "shut your mouth!". I love that kind of rude stuff. My music I'd cooked up here was sweeter though and drew the words into different meanings.
The music drove other lines into focus and I ended up with a  song about social media and how people directly plug their brains into "the cloud". "Are you out of your mind?" was the question. People were spilling their minds out into their computers and phones. The age of surveillence and big data. We are vulnerable and needy. GET BACK IN!



Will Hindmarsh and Emily Jarrett from Go Go Sapien came in to the studio and put down some stellar WEST COAST harmonies in one take.  BAM! Sounded too good.

There's a page on our website with all the singles so far on it . 

I'm working on the July release now. It's sounding hot!