Chris Wood (16:28)
Well, I mean, songs kind of come from different directions and grow organically. I mean, it might be some lyrics or some music that Oliver starts. It might be lyrics and music that I start. It might be even just a musical idea that Jono comes up with, whether it's on the keyboard or the drums. Sometimes the lyrics are disembodied for a while. They live just on the page without music. And then a piece of music comes along, like a voice memo, for example, maybe a sound check groove that we just spontaneously play together. And suddenly whoever wrote the lyrics is like, oh, that's. This actually is the perfect kind of music for these lyrics. Some music is good at generating lyrics, you know, like, it might be a very generic piece of music that's. For some reason, it inspires you to. To write a story or create imagery. But then once that's done, you might realize, like, well, this. If I. If I keep this music, it's not going to be very interesting. So let's. Now that I have the lyrics, let's throw away the music, find a different piece of music. Let's find a new home for these words. And some really interesting things can happen that way, you know, so you can take a very generic country waltz or blues form, and it's kind of great for generating phrases of words, you know, but in the end, you're like, well, okay, this. That was great, but musically, let's do something more interesting. Let's do something different. So there's always that, you know, there's. There's always that process of creating and throwing away. Creating and throwing away. And by the end of hundreds of choices, you end up with something that's uniquely yours. It's. It's quite a variety of ways that the songs get written, the recording process. And this one was interesting, you know, only because we went fully to tape. We didn't use a computer, so a lot of people recorded tape. But we decided that we weren't even going to turn on a screen for the recording process. What we didn't realize is how profound that is. And I think most people you talk to in this modern world don't go a single day without turning on a screen of some kind of. And I think we've forgotten what it's like to live without them. We get all our information through screens now and with all this information and data that comes through the screens, we are able to agonize over all these choices that we make in our lives. Whether it's the weather or the stock market or the news or the traffic or all these things that before the screens existed, you just pay attention to your present moment and your environment immediately around you and make split second decisions based off what you see and hear and feel. Very obvious what I'm saying. But we take it so for granted now that all this data is streaming through these screens that you kind of have to take a minute to really remember what that was like. So making this record, it felt like going back to that little bit. We never turn on a screen when you don't use a computer. I think we have to remind people that the way most records are made these days with computers, anything you record, you can be manipulated in just endless amount of ways, right? So it changes the whole mindset. Like whatever the performance, whatever happened in the performance can be manipulated or fixed. You know, as people say, like, well that, that wasn't a perfect take, but we can fix it with a computer. We'll change, you know, we'll mute this part or edit this part or I'll rerecord this one little part or when you go on the tape, that option is not there, at least not as simply. It's. It's quite a risky task to try to redo a little part of a song, right? Because you could destroy the entire take by erasing too much of the song, you know. So the result is it completely changes your decision process when you listen back. If you go we go in and we track a song, we go into the control room to listen back to it. Instead of having the mindset of like, well, this may not be perfect, but we can fix changes to does this feel good or does it not feel good? And if it feels good enough that you can forgive any imperfections, then you go with it. But if it doesn't feel good enough, then you just perform it again is not the option to fix. So, you know, everyone closes their eyes, you play the tape, and it's purely listening. When you have a screen and you're listening back to a take, you see the waveforms on the screen. So you're not purely listening. You're watching the music and you can see before a sound happens, you can see it on the screen. So, oh, here comes the vocal, here comes the drum track. And it's not. That's not the way we experience music when we're just a listener, appreciator, or a fan. So it's all these things, again, so obvious. But it really does change the way you perceive and experience the music. And therefore, as the creator, it changes the way you make decisions about, you know, what is good and what is not good enough. Does that make sense?