‘Little By Little’, a bunch of shows and a global pandemic
Hideaway released, UK tour completed and feeling half dead, we had booked to record our follow up early November 2019. Little By Little began as a song that Alex wrote during a weird time in his life. One of my favourite things about him as a writer is the picture he paints with his lyrics. The opening line of this track is one of my favourite examples of that - “Storm broke so we grew up in the rain. Short walk, til the pavement spells our names”. The song told the age old story of a person making the sad decision to move on from a relationship but it told it in a way that was hopeful and earnest amidst this gloomy landscape. I always visualised the scenery in this track to be crisp, cold grey and with rain. Musically, it was upbeat and we all really got into the chorus.
We spent a couple of weeks in pre-production, dissecting the track and making a demo in my home studio before heading back to 123 Studios to work on it with Brett. Arran & Callum are a really on-point rhythm section and they managed to get great takes really quickly. Arran had spent a lot of time getting his drum sound and things moved fast. This gave us loads of space to build the track sonically. Around this time, we felt that we kept getting added to British indie style gigs and playlists and we never felt that was us at all. With “Little By Little” we wanted to create a different world within the song, something that could take the listener into that space to experience the story as we did. We finished the recording in a couple days and spent another day on mixing. Bretts studio is full of really cool vintage gear for music geeks like me - Eventide H3000, Pultecs, 80s Junos, tape machines and loads more. These definitely influenced the sound and it was great to play about with all this weird and wonderful stuff that I can’t afford just yet.
Whilst we were recording, I had started looking into finding a mastering engineer so I chose a few albums that I liked the sound of. My main sonic references were Arcade Fire’s “Everything Now”, Frightened Rabbit’s “A Painting of a Panic Attack” & The War on Drugs’ “Lost in the Dream”. I checked them out and they were all mixed by the same guy, Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound in New York. It seemed like fate and Greg mastered the track giving it the exact vibe we were after. I was actually in NYC when we got the final version back and managed to listen to it whilst looking at this sunset from a spot in Williamsburg. A cool moment.
After a couple of gigs in December, we broke for Christmas before getting into the photography studio with Jamie Tilley and his partner Evan. We went with this idea that we had to built a set around a vintage Japanese reel to reel tape recorder I had bought in a junk shop in Glasgow back when I was 21. We soon put together a set using tables that were designed by my number one style guru Marte Brauter and a big plant that I had bought when I first arrived in London.
Little By Little was released on March 5th 2020 but it might as well have been released in a different universe in comparison to where we’re at now. We were 3 shows into our UK run with plans to do some EU dates early summer before Coronavirus kicked in. The party was over and our plans were fucked. We’ve managed to do loads of work over the year and I hope we’ll have some exciting things to show for it in 2021. For this year though, you’ll find our next single, ‘Meridian Lines’ on all the major streaming services from Friday November 27th. I hope that you like it and if you do, please share it, add it to playlists and all of that stuff - it keeps this thing alive.
If you made it this far in my little story of the band so far - thank you! I’ve enjoyed mapping out the journey, like some sort of weird therapy in front of all your friends and people who listen to the band.
Take care of yourselves and thanks again - I appreciate you.
Danny
