As a drummer, if someone put that kind of process in front of me I’d run screaming. Was it a real challenge for you, Darren?

DS: Yeah, it was, although it was a really good challenge. I’ve kind of worked backwards – I played by ear for a long time and then, about six years ago when I came back from a stint overseas, Graeme asked me to help out with some teaching on his contemporary music course. He showed me some basics of reading rhythm. Then, as I was getting my business going, I ended up doing quite a bit of other teaching in high schools as a bit of an itinerant, so I got a lot of time to work with that and use it. So this was a really good opportunity to put that into practice on a real kind of project.

GD: The session drummer! (laughs)

DS: Don’t get me wrong. A lot of it’s pretty straightforward and there’s still improvisation there in the fills. But moreover it’s just a process of dealing with phrasing – Graeme’s forever putting in five-bar and seven-bar phrases. Stop Messing Around is full of nine-bar, 10-bar phrases. He was actually in the control room when I was doing the drum tracks, counting through it. I listened back to it and thought ‘How the hell did I do that?’

GD: It’s an organisational feat to have got it as good as it is. If I had the time over I’d probably devote more time to us practising it up as a full band before going into the studio. We did a lot of messing around, as you can with Protools, shifting things 10 or 20 milliseconds this way and that, but at the end of the day you can’t fake it entirely.

DS: We do acknowledge that fact that in doing it the way we did it, you can lose feel and spontaneity and the intuitive thing that you get, but that was the way it had to be. That’s the big challenge – even though you don’t know the part you’re playing you’re trying to make it sound really natural.

GD: The next time, it’s just drawing up battle plans of how you can circumvent these problems. So to a certain extent this was also a ‘clean out the cupboard’ exercise in terms of songs, some of which the music was written for in 1981. And I don’t know whether it’s brave or stupid but let’s just do it and see what happens, and just live with it. And then see what we can do. Having done it, and having been quite productive again this year, song-writing wise, from what I’ve learnt from it I know we can do it – make a record – even though distance is a tyranny in some respects. If we take care to do more pre-production, and maybe record over a longer period of time, maybe just concentrate in three songs and just hammer them to get chemistry going, then send out the karaoke parts again for the next three songs . . . That type of thing might make it work better.

DS: Put it this way, it’s the least amount of time I’ve ever spent on a recording project. And doing it this way means that you don’t sit in the practice room twiddling your thumbs as the drummer while the guitarist’s working something up. Quite a bit of that has always had to go on. When we did Way Out Where we spent 14 12-hour days consecutively doing the pre-production.

GD: That was also something we didn’t have an option of doing, and it’s why Sibelius was about how well, in the virtual realm, it could replicate something of that pre-production process we did with [Joe] Chiccarelli in LA. It was about making sure the kick patterns and the bass parts were all interlocking and that the fills were all nicely organised and out of the way of the vocal. The songs were scored in Sibelius with strings, trumpets, guitar lines, the bass and rhythm section all there. You’d press play and go ‘OK, it sounds all right in Sibelius, so let’s just hope we can play it and that it sounds OK in real land.’ Next time, it might be about trying to get some of those things that you can only get in real land. It’s still musculature – you’ve still got to play it physically to get it into real sound and that probably needs more time than we gave it.


Given that the songs didn’t come from one focused period of writing, can you say that any theme emerged out of it?

Nah, not really. A lot of them were technical. Teaching song-writing since I’ve been back here, since 2000, I’d get to second-year song-writing and say ‘Well, I have taught second-year song-writing at a university before so what am I going to do? What am I going to set these budding song-writers to do?’ So I said ‘OK, well, as second-year students they should probably know a bit about chords and what chords are available to them in what key, and they’ve analysed modulation, so let’s modulate. Let’s create a song where the brief is we want you to modulate to a new key when you hit the chorus, which is always a good way to make a chorus sound like a chorus.’ Having set them that, I went ‘OK, I’ll do one myself’ and sat down and wrote It’s Easier To Harden A Broken Heart. It was like song-writing callisthenics, really. With passion . . .


It’s interesting you should tack ‘with passion’ on to the end, there. Standing outside of that and not fully understanding it, it seems a long way removed from how an 18-year-old is going to write a song, doesn’t it? Do you ever have a fear that that academic side of things can put you in a position where you can’t see the wood for the trees?

GD: Absolutely! I’m constantly afraid of it, especially with something as subjective as song-writing.


How, then, do you reality-check it?

GD: Um, I reality-check it through what people have written about the process, in terms of what lyrics do, for example. And there are plenty of texts out there that we use – Sheila Davis, Jimmy Webb, Rolf Harris (laughs). And they all pretty much say similar things about what a song should be about – believable people in a believable situation. It should have a clear who, what, where, which means you should be able to summarise in a sentence what the song’s about, all these sorts of things. In fact, teaching song-writing for 10 years has made me a lot more aware of failures in this regard in past work. These songs are technically quite well constructed with regard to how the textbooks tell you you should write them, for the most part. And yeah, trying to find semi-rules from the repertoire – you find new ones all the time. Springsteen’s method, for example, and he has a very discernable method of what he does harmonically. He uses the minor chords according to their morbidity to match the lyrics – if there’s something morbid comes up in the lyrics, like a massive insecurity, bang, he’ll go for the most morbid chord he can find within the simple harmonic thing that he’s using. I go through Tunnel Of Love track by track as an album and he’s doing it again, he’s doing it again . . .


You’re still talking process, though. At what point do you check the emotional aspect – your own gut feeling about the song, outside of whether the song follows rules to create a certain effect? Presumably, these rules are useless unless their effect is to move people?

GD: Heart or head? Both.

DS: I think we all like to believe the romantic notion that it is all done with heart, and I guess part of being a musician is about is to take what you know technically and fool people that it’s not an intellectual process but more an emotional process. But I think it’s hard to do, not being obvious about what you know about music or what you can do. That’s when it turns into prog rock or the like. So you’re trying to keep it real.

GD: Yeah. That’s part of the growing process, too. I mean, I’ve completely changed the way I’ve been writing this year because of compositional issues that have arisen and annoy me about my own songs or other people’s songs. For example, the lyric for Sevastopol was provided for me by Dave [Kominsky] and that’s the reverse of what I usually do, which is to write music and try to get a text to fit it. With some of the songs on the album, 16 Years for example, the music’s been sitting around for well over a decade and I could never think of a subject that was right for it, lyrically. So I went to stick the emotion to the music in words, and what was it about? A colleague’s marriage break-up. And what is it like to end a 16-year relationship? That’s got to be pretty gutting because it’s time that’s gone and you can’t get it back. You’ve got to start again, and that’s a really hard thing to do. Going the other way, music to words that have been given me, that’s a completely different process. With Sevastopol what I tried to do was stigmatise the music according to what the lyrics were. The lyric is about something to do with being in an environment that’s both scary and reassuring at the same time, so I’m trying to make harmonies in music to try and brighten positive things and be dark for negative things. And then of course you get to the second verse and you’ve got different text, and you start getting a square-peg, round hole thing going on because you’ve set up a relationship between music and text in the first verse that doesn’t work as well for the second. So there’s all sorts of those sorts of compositional issues that happen a lot when you write really complex music first and try to get text to fit it. You get these square-peg, round hole moments all over the place. So emotional things are one thing that you try to build in, but there are a whole raft of technical things that you have to be able to do to get around that square-peg, round hole things that comes about from time to time. It strikes me as an atrophying of my aesthetic outlook as I get older, but so few songs seem to escape that peg and hole thing in some measure. And I’m still learning my craft, and it would be irresponsible for me – because I’m trying to teach the subject – not to leave any stone unturned in terms of finding out what a technique is that you can pass on to your students. You can say, ‘If you stand out in the rain, you’ll get wet.’ It’s not a rule you have to follow to make a good song, it’s just that if you’re in this key and you put this chord in there, it’s gonna sound real dark. And is that what you want? This is the thing – how do you determine what is a crap song and what is a good one? I have to spend my life doing it – I have to give grades. I have to try to understand what makes a good song as best I can, through analysing other people’s, like Springsteen who, whether you like him or not, has got a big bank account, so he must be doing something right. Or Bacharach. Or Kings of Leon . . . They’re doing really well, what is it they’re doing that’s right? What is it that connects with people? Do they have square-peg, round hole in their songs and if there is one on their latest album I can’t spot it. It’s brilliant! Only uses four chords but they’re very well chosen for the emotion that’s in the text. So it’s a lifelong learning thing, to learn as much as you can about the language so you can use it effectively to create those emotions.


Related artists: Graeme Downes, The Verlaines

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