The Paper Kites – Track By Track
The Paper Kites are set to release their new album, On The Corner Where You Live, later this month. We asked them to talk us through the record, track-by-track:
A GATHERING ON 57TH
This is an instrumental track that was originally the introduction to ‘Give Me Your Fire, Give Me Your Rain’ but we decided to split them up and make this its own track. I remember the band was staying in a hotel on 57th Street in Manhattan and we’d come home from wherever we’d been and our window view was straight to the apartment building across the street – and you could see all these windows lighting up and people getting home from their nights out – and we just sat there and watched them all – there’s something fascinating about watching other people live. So this track is that moment, all these different sorts of people coming home, gathering to this one place, that’s where the album starts.
GIVE ME YOUR FIRE, GIVE ME YOUR RAIN
When I was writing I had a hard time nailing down a ‘sound’, I definitely knew the feeling but hadn’t worked out the sound yet. This was the first song that I finished and thought that I had something pretty okay at the time. It felt like the right song to open the album. We had a bit of a hard time with it in the studio because it’s one of those songs I push a bit harder than I usually would vocally, we tried a bunch of different microphones and I wanted to make sure it sounded right, I was almost at a point where I wanted to re-do the whole thing because I thought it wasn’t feeling right, but I think the guys and Peter (Katis) discouraged it because they liked the performance. We messed around with some delays and reverbs and guitars, particularly when we got that drum groove happening and the bass and synths it started sounding really beautiful – it’s got this epic hopefulness and longing about it that I think is really endearing. it’s one of our favourite songs now.
DEEP BURN BLUE
This was a song I’d actually started on the road but finished it back in Melbourne. The idea behind this record is that each song is sort of meant to represent a character in this fictional apartment where they all live – just trying to capture late night moments and feelings and people. Deep Burn Blue a song about a girl who doesn’t like to leave her apartment, but she does walk around at night because ‘we’re the same in the dark’ – and the idea of Deep Burn Blue is feeling so blue, feeling it so deeply that it burns and it’s debilitating. So it’s sung from the perspective of someone trying to coax her out. It almost didn’t make the album, it was really the song we were thinking about ditching because I didn’t like how the ‘burning right through you’ harmonies were sitting. It was a three-part that Dave, Christina and I were singing and I think my part at the time was sticking through the most but it didn’t have the punch that I wanted. I think Dave suggested that he sung my harmony instead – he has this beautiful raspy voice which you can actually hear all over the record – anyway it really did change the whole thing and made it really stick out in the way I wanted it to. After that it just worked. I should mention his guitar sound and playing on this song is really great too.
MESS WE MADE
Christina and I wrote this song together and she sung it – we had a bit of moment making the last record (twelvefour) where we had actually planned for her to sing lead on a few songs on the album and we tried them in the studio and they weren’t quite working, and Phil (Ek) just ended up saying that it sounded like she was just singing songs that I wrote (which was true) and she wasn’t making them her own. It was a bit brutal at the time because she has a beautiful voice but he was right at the time and we decided that if she was ever going to sing lead on a song in the future then it needed to be a song that she’d written and that she felt emotionally connected to. So her and I were really intentional about trying to write together this time and she came in with this song, with these really raw and really intense lyrics, and we ended up turning it in to this song. I think initially from our team there was some questions about whether it was too random to include just one song that Christina was singing lead on, but our view is that the best songs should be on the record regardless of who is singing them – and it was one of the best songs out of all of them. It was great because we were living and recording in this huge 120 year old house in Connecticut, it was really a mansion for lack of a better word with so many rooms, three stories, and it was great for Christina because she got to work on this song at her own pace in a studio we’d made downstairs, we’d be recording vocals upstairs and she’d be singing downstairs just her and Sam (Rasmussen) working on getting this song to a place that she was happy with it. I’m so glad it’s on there, it’s a really arresting song and she sings it with such honesty.
FLASHES
We almost put flashes on ‘On The Train Ride Home’ but decided to save it for this album, but we recorded it with Tom Iansek in Melbourne and it’s one of two songs on the album that we’d recorded with Tom but decided to put it on this album. It’s just a nice breath in the record, you need to have them.
RED LIGHT
This is one of my favourites, it has a really dreamy feel and again Dave’s guitar work is wild at the end. I was working my way through ‘Twin Peaks – The Return’ while I was writing this album and I absolutely loved the bang bang bar scenes at the end with the bands playing. I was imagining playing there and I wrote this song as the song that we’d play at The Roadhouse during the episode credits. It didn’t sound like this though in it’s demo form it was a little different, I remember coming to band practice and it was just the 4 of us boys because Christina was unwell, and we weren’t sure what to work on and we pulled out this song and pretty much re-wrote it in to what you hear now – I have a recording on my phone that’s almost exactly like the end result. The original title was actually ‘Slow Dance At The Roadhouse’ but we ended up changing it. But in terms of something that feels late night, that feels like slow dancing at some dive bar, this is the song. We recorded it to tape too that was cool.
ON THE CORNER WHERE YOU LIVE
This song took AGES to get it right – we just kept coming back to it, re-recording stuff, changing it, recording it again. I know Dave had a tough time getting the guitar sound that he wanted, it’s a hard sound to get right because the drums give it the illusion of being this big energy song, but it’s actually just this pretty mellow but fast-paced song. ‘Revelator Eyes’ on the last album was similar – these fast paced soft songs are tough to record. It’s funny playing them live too you can see people don’t quite know what to do with themselves. But getting the sounds right for this song so as it didn’t sound too garage rock was hard. We rehearsed in this really dingy warehouse in Melbourne that sounded awful and everything just bounced off the walls and sounded pretty loud – so songs like this sounded out of control (not in a good way) in there – so we never really got to work on the intricacies of this song until we got in the studio and I think realised we hadn’t quite been playing in the right way. It sounds like a simple song but it’s got a lot going on. We didn’t want to ditch it though because it was the title track of the album, so we kept trying to find that balance where it sounded soft and sweet but still had that energy. Peter Katis has this great suggestion of hammering these deep low piano bass notes in the chorus which lifted it a huge amount.
MIDTOWN WAITRESS
Midtown waitress is sung from the perspective of a girl making phone calls home to her mother, explaining that she’s leaving home and moving to the city with her boyfriend ‘Joey’. She gets a job as a waitress and you sort of get a few different snap shots of her going from young and naive and ‘don’t tell me what to do’ to trying to make ends meet and eventually just being honest and confessing that she’s struggling and missing home. I remember we were in New York playing a show a few days after Trump got in and it was a really strange mood in the city, a lot of angry people, big protests on the streets, and I thought at the time what an intense situation it was to come in to for an outsider. So there was that, and then I wanted to tie that in with her story and people in general just trying to make it on their own. Actually at the end of that song you can hear some street noise and a saxophone playing. The street noise we recorded out of our window from the hotel on 57th, and the saxophone melody is actually a piece called ‘The Encounter’ – about 4 years ago I was in London in a bar by myself, and this elderly French lady and her husband invited me over to have a drink, we got talking and I told her I was a musician and she told me she used to play piano for the london ballet. Before I left she told me she wanted to write something for me as a gift and scribbled this melody on a piece of paper and called it ‘The Encounter’ – I’d actually had it for 4 years and never heard what it sounded like. I found it when we were recording this album and gave it to Erik (Elligers) who played Sax on the album and asked him if he could play this – and what he played is what we ended up using at the end of Midtown Waitress.
WHEN IT HURTS YOU
This song is about a guy that’s been kicked out of his apartment for whatever reason, a lovers tiff, and he’s trying desperately to work out how to fix everything, so it’s that moment where something’s gone wrong, an argument, you’re trying to fix it, hoping that it’ll all be okay the next day but you know it probably won’t. I wouldn’t say our music is ‘soul’ music by any means but I do love soul music, I love that thematically there’s always this longing – something’s gone wrong but they’re not giving up, always trying to fix it – you can hear it in their voice. I try and carry that feeling in my own way. The song has this great vibe, the bass and drums have a really cool pulse, there’s this synth pad part in the background that I feel like I had to fight the whole world to keep in there, Peter (Katis) and the guys all agreed it sounded weird but I kept saying if we got rid of it you’d really notice that it wasn’t there – so the compromise was we kept it in there and it sits back there in the mix. I think everyone was actually surprised with how this song turned out, we all keep coming back to it.
DOES IT EVER CROSS YOUR MIND
This song was a real dark horse actually, I’ve had so many people comment about it. Originally like ‘Flashes’ we had planned to put it on ‘On The Train Ride Home’ and I recorded it with Tom (Iansek), but it just seemed bookend both the albums so nicely by placing it on this album so we held off putting it on the first album and saved it for this. I’ve always wanted to make a record of just piano songs, and I’d written this song and ‘It’s Not Like You’ which were just my voice and a piano not thinking that either of them would be on the albums but I just wanted to write them, and they both made it on. It’s a song about catching yourself thinking about a lost love, it’s so simple, it’s not romantic or sad necessarily – it’s just true, and I think it it really sinks in because almost everyone has felt that at some point. As you get older and things change and you move in to the next phase of life, marriage, kids, you do catch yourself thinking about the other versions of life you could have led. It’s just about that split second thought, drawn out a little longer. Erik played these beautiful subtle clarinet parts throughout the song that are really something.
DON’T KEEP DRIVING
This was the very first song that I wrote – I hadn’t written a thing after finishing writing twelvefour back in 2014 (I’d scribbled lyrics here and there on the road) but I hadn’t written an actual song in almost 2 and a half years – and this song was the very first thing that came out – exactly how it is, music and all. I always wanted this song to finish everything off because it’s where it all started. This song to me FEELS so very much like those late night hours, like the city, the trains, the apartment windows, the stories, it felt like all of that – romantic, hopeful, the longing and simplicity of the words ‘don’t leave’ felt so poignant to me. I love the outro, the whole song is just one build up to that outro, the whole album really. It’s definitely got something about it and I’m really glad we recorded it. I’m not sure what the next album will sound like but I felt like this was the right song to sign off this chapter.
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On The Corner Where You Live is set for release on September 21st. You can pre-order it here.
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