http://bit.ly/1u9iq3j
http://spoti.fi/1nZeRtC
http://bit.ly/1wM433v
It's got a lot of good stuff, especially 'I can fall' and 'Another Prayer' which were the types of songs that spring up out of nowhere and almost write themselves. But there were some others which took time, spend a lot of time in the 'queue' and I had to keep going back and tweaking and tweaking until in the end, they were over produced and quite dull. I realise I'm not selling the album very well but it's how I feel about the last 8 months it took to write and record.
So it's been about three or four weeks since the album 'dropped' and I thought about not writing anything for ages - in fact, we're re-recording the 1996 classic album 'Magic' after the success of our re-release of 'Six String' (remastered) last month. But I've decided to stop trying to write 'the best song ever' and go back to where it all started. Not back to the beginning, but back to the albums that were the most quirky, creative and interesting. 'Magic' was like that, and one of the reasons was our ignorance. We invented rhythms, chords, sequences - or at least it felt like that. The lyrics were odd, ethereal almost and mostly driven by the feelings we had internally (we were 21 years old at the time) rather than how we looked at the world. It was very personal and interior.
So a few things happened at the keyboard this morning. Everything I felt was slow, sentimental and not at all unique (the thing that makes me go back to a lot of the stuff we wrote back in the 90s). Then I changed tack - I started using sounds that you wouldn't put in songs (and I won't put in songs) just to get that weird atmosphere. What's happened is really good; you get to put notes together that don't work on a piano or a guitar, you get to hear a melodic minor scale 'clanging' when you use a reverb heavy glockenspiel, or a haunting choir voice to play a bass line. It makes you do things you just wouldn't ever do with a basic Piano sound.
I've been listening to Alexander O'Neal's 'Hearsay' and very much enjoying the electric piano intro to 'Never knew love like this'. You get the feeling Jam and Lewis felt everything they wrote and bled emotion into the production. Although I have only written three snippets of ideas for songs this morning, it feels very much like it's going to end up being different, unexpected, weird, experimental, ethereal, odd, quirky - everything 'Magic' was without sounding anything like it. I'm not a fan of dredging over old ground unless it can be improved - this time I think it can.
If you want to keep up to date with everything we're up to with this new album then you can follow us on twitter at @UrbanFox1993 or at our website www.urban-fox.org.uk
We've also got videos for some of our songs on Youtube here : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyLG7idU_k-Xd68c0UaHanQ
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