Belle and Sebastian

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, y'all, it's justin Richmond. Today on the show, we're talking to Stuart Murdoch and Stevie Jackson from the Scottish folk pop band Belle and Sebastian. The band formed in ninety six after meeting through a government funded class for unemployed musicians. It soon became a showcase for Stuart Murdoch's catchy melodies and witty stories about the everyday lives of Scottish bohemians. Inspired by the sounds of the sixties like the Beatles, Paul Simon, Burt Back Iraq. Their music has been described as perfect chamber pop music. On today's episode, Bruce Helm talks to Stewart and Stevie about writing and recording their latest and tenth album, A Bit of Previous. Stewart also talks about how getting sick at twenty one was a critical moment in the start of his music career. This is broken record Liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Bruce album with Stuart and Stevie. You've got a new album coming out. Can you tell me a little bit about the making of this album? Because it was done during the pandemic. How did that affect how you did the album, Where you did the album, How did all that shake out. We had our bags packed for Los Angeles. We were ready to go, and this was back in the spring of twenty twenty. Of course, the pandemic happened. We were locked down. So for the first six months or so, we didn't do anything. Everybody was locked in, you know what it was like. By that time, we decided, you know what, this is going to take a while, So we gave up the idea of going to Lae. Chris the band, and also Brian, who's our engineer upstairs. We all decided to renovate the studio, turn the studio into a proper recording studio rather than just a rehearsal place, and we made extra rooms. We made little booths so that it could be safe, so that we could work safely in pandemic. Time to go a whole year for us to start recording with a Vengeance, because it was another surge in the pandemic. By that time. The song line up had changed, but that was quite nice. I'd written quite a few new songs and so we brought them in really in a raw state. The beauty part of that was that instead of preparing to go to Los Angeles and having everything written, we had more time and we could make it up as we went along. So how many songs did you have written for LA? It's kind of hard to say, Stevie. Do you remember the pool of songs we had for LA? No, it's too long ago. There's probably maybe a nebulous pool of about fifteen or twenty, but I think maybe probably ten of those got ditched along the way somewhere. Is that typical for you to go into an album with sort of that many songs ready to go? I think yeah, it's I think that's probably about the top number. And actually we've done records in Atlanta, we've done two in LA. We us try to record about seventeen or eighteen because they usually needed it, but also it makes a better album if you've got songs to choose from. You know, things ended up very differently. Like I said, we kind of left a lot of songs. A lot of the songs went off the boil and didn't seem to appealing anymore, and then new ideas sprang up, and because we were hands on, between the band and Brian, we were producing ourselves we could invent new techniques and new ways of working and go back to our roots all that kind of stuff. So I'm interested. Tell me which songs on the album now are the new songs the songs you developed after you initially thought you were going to be recording in La Sure, so the first song young and Stupid, and then I think if they're shooting at you might have been a German, but the words came along later on, and then certainly profits on Hold that just came up on a day in the studio and was talked to me quite a late one as well, Stevie. Can you remember I can't remember? That was a tune that Sarah and and what about your own tune? That was quite a late edition as well. Yes, yes, yes, which was called Deathbed of My Dreams. That's a beautiful song, by the way, Oh thank you. That was doing the process of being here. I think it end up being different than a traditional balance of Bastian album that Moore was worked out in the studio, as opposed to you coming and the writers saying here are the songs and choosing from those. I think we've been loosening up for a few years now. We recorded a bunch of EPs in Glasgow previous to this, and on that occasion that was almost like a dress rehearsal for this record. We were trying different approaches building songs up from scratch. We were meant to be working with Sean Everett in California, and we were very prepared to meet him halfway, and I think it would have been such a different record. We might have ended up writing to order. There's a songwriter, I'm affected by the environment find yourself in. I think we would have ended up writing songs, especially for his production. You were such a prolific songwriter and the band is so productive. Was this the longest hiatus you'd had away from songwriting during your career. I wouldn't say it was a hiatus away from songwriting at all, as far as I'm concerned. The longest gap that we had was around about two thousand and six to two thousand and ten or something like that. I went away to make a movie, but I was working on music and Stevie was working on music. He did a solo WELP, so everybody was still working. You know, A song I was interested in a lot was profits on hold and Nactually when I saw the title, I thought, well, is this pandemic related? Because of course everybody was on hold. That's an angle that I never thought about. It was just a song that popped up in the studio. But then again, you're taking everything, everything that's going on, and it percolates. Songs just come out, so it seems to be unre related to what is actually going on outside. Maybe in fact, the experience of Lockdown did infect affect this song the way it came out, But I'd never thought about that. And you play a few bars of it, Yeah, there's a slight caveat here. What happens with my songs is that we construct the songs in the studio and the band comes in and colors in once we get into the production and we get into the song making I forget. I never have it under my fingers. I've never played this song from start to finish, you know, especially this one, So obviously we have to learn to play this song when we come to the concert. What I'm basically saying is that me and Stevie are just trying to learn how to play a few bars for you just today, so we don't actually know it, but well, we'll have a goal. Can I call you sometimes talk get out on the phone. We don't have to be loved first, We could be less alone. It's a rough, rocky road and it's gonna get steep. I just wanted your soft tone to allow me to sleep. And I sometimes confuse you fuck God or angel yo, just a person sometimes confused. I Gocklorian my mind a soft song once. Well, you guys are quick learners. That was terrific. We were kind of like, I'm looking at the chord sheets and for the listeners, that probably kind of replicates the idea of what happened when we brought the song in at first and we were just feeling the chords. Was that purely a musical idea you had and then added the lyrics or did the lyric come at the same time. More regularly for me, the words and the lyrics will come at the same time. It's sometimes it's not a strong urge to say something lyrically at first. It's more likely to be a musical idea, you know, and then immediately I'll try and cannot call you sometime. And you might even think that that would start off as a scratch lyric that you would replace later talk it out on the phone, but a bit quite often your first lyrics end up as the actual song itself. It's got a great rhythm on the record. It's got the same kind of bounce as the sound of Breaking Glass by Nick Lowe. If you know that song, Oh yeah, that's a great one. Yeah yeah, how does that one go? Stepe? I love the sound of Breaking Glass. You can learn his songs even faster. That's amazing. And because I love the title so much, Profits on Hold. I mean, are you sitting around somewhere you've got a notebook and you think of the phrase profits on hold? Or are you on the phone and you just write it down thinking I'm going to use that at some point? When did that occur? I take note of titles and then sometimes they lie for years and then they become songs later on. That was a case of that came out in the lyric that day, just as I was writing underneath your Thin Skin, we are profits and Hold, that occurred to me that that could be the title. I'm going to talk about the source of the songwriting in the group. You know, you are one of the those bands that's not afraid to be witty. I don't mean sort of modern lee witty, but there is that kind of tradition in English Scottish, you know, songwriting. Morrissey is a good example, and I think he was an influence on you, almost that kind of nol Coward school of being kind of funny. Where does that come from in your background? It's sort of hard to say. I mean, I'm not sure it's a gift that we have for wet Maybe it's a gift that we have for honesty and not being afraid to leave it all out there. That is a progression from say, for instance, you know, the Beatles through the Smiths to us and to other bands that if you draw a line, I think the people, you know, songwriters are more inclined to be very honest and talk about their feelings, talk about what's on their mind, very conversational. Whereas you know, if you go back a little ways, songwriting was more rigorous and there was rules, and there was things that it would be cringy to say. At the time, when I started songwriting, I didn't have anything to lose and I wanted to tell the world how I felt from my position of pain and anguish. But sometimes the humor or being able to have a joke about it, and even if the joke is on yourself, can be refreshing, it can be liberating. But you're known for that level of kind of wit. You know, if you're feeling sinister, go and see a minister. There are a million examples in your music. Were you a particularly literary kid. Was there a lot of reading in your background. I did quite a lot of reading as a later youth. I did everything at the wrong time. When I was at university doing science, all I would be doing was reading English literature to the extent where the way that you speak actually changes. I don't know if Stevie ever felt that phenomenon, or yourself felt that phenomenon. I did go through a couple of years where I was reading Jane Austen and French authors, and the way that you actually talk you could tell that it was changing because you would be composing sentences the same way as these Victorian all arts. And so that that was a period a couple of years, and then I actually dropped out of university. I didn't do signs anymore. I got more interested in the art side. We're going to take a quick break here, but we'll be right back with more from Stuart and Stevie from balan Sebashtan. We're back with Bruce Adam's conversation with Stevie and Stuart. There's a couple of songs I want to ask about and then we'll dive into some background. If they're shooting at you, tell me a bit about the genesis of that song. I'm glad that you've asked me about this one. Let me just try and get the words of the song in front of me, and I hope you don't feel that's too feeble, not at all. So the funny thing about if they're shooting at you, although I said it before, it was a new song coming into this. I'd had the idea for the tune for a couple of years and I brought it into the studio pretty much the same day as Bob and the band. He brought in an idea, and this was during the time we were doing the EPs a couple of years ago. So he played me this idea and said, could you come up with words for this? And I realized it had the same rhythm and vibe as the thing I was writing, and I thought, well, this is good. I like that that's interesting when that happens, because you can combine the two in such a way that sometimes something interesting comes from it. I find that the easiest way to combine two ideas they probably need to have the same rhythmic feel. You can always go from chord to chord and figure out a way. I ended up lending Bob's song a section of this song, and we wrote words and became a song called Poor Boy and as You was a single. But as we approached this LP, I had the idea for this song in my head. I still had the tune in my head. I felt it hadn't been fully exploited, so I wrote discreet words. I wrote separate words. I actually said to the and beforehand it if you don't think this is too lazy of me? Could this be a song? Could we try this song? So maybe, like if if there's Belcabacitian fan, you know, listening just now, they might be able to reference part of the song. Will we play you a verse or something from the would be great? One? Two? So huh said, do you? I'm not free? I got a mountain falling down on me, I got say the san I've got down all the beeple one, a scream and shout. I'm so tired. I'm always on money and I'm called it's always januine worry in this huh and on this streets. It's so great. I can't take it. What happened to like fun? You sweat to? What did you go okay? What would just think would just give you a little taste lovely? What was behind the feeling of that song, the lyrics of that song. It started off very personal and became more general. It was me looking out there at stories that were in the news. If you look at the news any day, there's stories about violent oppression, you know. Like I said, I started singing from my own the way that I was feeling, and then I started writing from the perspective of the things that were happening that I could see happening to other people. And sometimes things that are happening to you they're quite small compared to the things that are happening to other people. People are dying, people are being tortured, people are in prison. This is terrible, terrible things happening, And what do you do. I can't imagine facing those things, but I know and I've seen it. People have faith sometimes that's the only thing that can get them through it. I know faith isn't for everybody, but I've experienced faith. But also I've seen faith at work in other people, and I know that at that point of disaster, upon it, even death, that sometimes faith is the only thing that's going to do it. So that's the second half of the song. Really. Now, when you talk about faith, because you're a practicing Buddhist, you're also a Christian, do you mean religious faith in that sense or another kind of faith in the sense it's a religious faith. And although I am a Christian and would say not so much a practicing Buddhist, but obviously very interested in Buddhism. You know, I don't mean to be badantic. If you're practicing Buddhists, you go for refuge to Buddha. But I'm a Christians, I go for refuge to God. And so that's who I feel that I'm talking about in this that God is actually a voice in the song. Oh see, like many of your songs, it starts as a conversation. Something you're you announce, you're saying to another person. Is that what the two voices are in the song? What happens. It becomes the person that I was thinking about, the oppressed person and God, and God is saying, they might do terrible things to you, but I've got your back. This might mean that this experience goes beyond this life. And I know that that's maybe hard for some people to imagine or some people to take, but I feel like we have to look beyond, and you know in the song, God is getting this person's back. You talked about sort of seeing things in the world, particularly with this song that you know we're terrible things. It doesn't strike me as an angry song though. Malcolm and I just did a big project with Paul Simon, and I don't think it made the final cut of the project. But I do remember asking him if he ever wrote out of anger, and he said he did, but he works on the song until all the anger is gone. How do you see sort of anger in your songs? Do you see anger underlying this song? No, not so much this song, and it certainly, I mean to be honest with you, I've had to work on anger issues in my life. I think we all have. I think perhaps many of us mellow as we get older. We're constantly trying to become more patient, especially I've had kids, and having a kid or kids is a lesson in patient acceptance. You're working on your anger constantly when you have kids. So I had more issues and I was younger. Stevie would probably a test, and you know, things you get quite spiky in the band and an everyday life, and sometimes that would leak into some songs that I could think about. But in this case, I think the song is looking for a different solution. Even though terrible things are happening to people and anger seems to be sometimes seemed to be an appropriate response, I think I'm suggesting in the song there's another way. I do want to shift to Stevie, and I did want to ask you about Deathbed of My Dreams. It's got a lovely kind of country feel to it. Almost sounds like one of those old kind of Nashville kind of dreamy slide guitar songs. Can you tell me about that song? Well, sure, without getting sued. That's the first time I wrote a song in a specific way. There was a song in my head which already existed. I basically wrote my own words to someone else's song, and I've never done that before got the folk tradition or something, and then I changed the chords under it so that the melody changed. And now you can't tell that you know that it started off as another tune and I just changed it. But this way, it's like a sort of an a moral dilemma because I actually deliberately used another tune to express myself and then changed it. But maybe you could argue that's a kind of folk process. Yeah, it's it's very common in folk and country music. I'm interested. It's got a beautiful, very distinctive sound on the record. Now, your albums are always full of different sounds. The song we just talked about, if They're Shooting at You, which we made sound fairly grim, actually sounds like it's like a great bird backrack song. Yeah, Deathbed of My Dreams has a very particular sound. Was it the sound of this other song that attracted you? A Stuart and his Songs and our producer Brian, you know, the aforementioned song If They're Shooting at You. I think they took a long time to get the rhythm of it, or you know, like they spend a lot of time in the studio getting it right. And I just don't have the patience for that kind of thing. I my kind of way of working is is that kind of audio verity thing. I just assemble the musicians, play them the song, and whatever will be will be, or would try and capture something, or you know, usually try and capture it fast. I think like with this song, I think it was in c and and I just said, look, just play whatever you want. I gave a couple of counters and didn't quite happen. Then we had a coffee break and as it us to it in the A and then it just kind of came together quite nicely and we got it in a few takes. That's certainly my memory of it. And then Brian and I overdubbed a steel guitar which they have played. The way it kind of came out, it did sound like that kind of Nashville nineteen sixty one kind of sound, so we kind of pushed it that way a little bit like a day or bass player he'd done that classic Nashville thing of he doubled his part with a Fender six guitar along with a kind of upright bass kind of feel. So has that kind of two basses playing which is about in Nashville kind of sound. It's a beautiful song. There are a couple of songs on this album. I think, maybe particularly the performance of Unnecessary Drama, that it felt like you were a band that was desperate to play live again. It just kind of had more aggression, more kind of a live kind of feel. Were you itching to get back out in front of a live audience when you were recording these I would say no, personally, no, no. Yeah. The key thing about this song is that this song is Bob's song. You know, Bob isn't here to tell his side of things, but Bob is. You know, he's very organized and he had a plan for this song. He had a sound. He has everything meticulously planned out. So this is very much his sound. When I I'm in the studio, I don't care whether I'm in Atlanta or Ellie or London. You're sort of in a womb. You're in a very safe place, and that's why it's a It's a wonderful place for songs to be born. I like studio stuff. I like a studio sound. You know, there's a lushnessism. I like middle of the road sixties and seventies records. For me, it's complete yean and yang. But of course, as members of the band, we're all ready to support the person whose idea and whose song it is, so we're really happy to I mean, Stevie, did you suggest that harmonic or did Bob suggest that harmonica? No, it was Bob, yeah, and it was actually an overdub. I didn't record it with the band. Bob did all the guitars on it because he's you know, like I said, it's not like an add to It's like it's like a military campaign when he does one of these songs. Honestly, it's like it's also a thought out and you know, as a guitar player or nothing that I can add to us. I just leave him to it. But on the day, you know, as we'll come and play harmonica on it. And that's just what came out, which you said about the studio being a womb and not thinking about playing live. So I have to ask you if you watched the Beatles documentary Get Back. Oh sure, I did. I mean, like a had a three D party at my house. I had food and invited interested friends. One of the things that fascinated me about it was that they had been in the womb of the studio so long, and they sort of announced their intention to go play, and there was that just stress between just playing for themselves and making things up and knowing they had to get in front of an audience. Did that trigger any memories or any studio trauma of your own going through that stress? Now? Yeah, the transition from studio to live is so different. You have to relearn all the songs, you have to be prepared to get up there and face the music, face the audience, and it's such a different thing. And even today, I mean, you've kind of inspired us to get our finger out and get moving a little bit. And even having a rough play through some of these songs is built a bit of confidence for me because I'm thinking, no, that that tunes Okay, that's a tune that that we don't need to you don't need to hide behind studio trickery. It'll be okay. Could we maybe play a verse of unnecessary drama for you? Sure? Even though it's a hard hitting song, I think it's a nice pop song, you know, even when you strip it down. So so I've just added something that cursed to me that I like this one, because it's when someone else writes music for stuarts, it maybe puts them in a position which he would normally wouldn't find himselves in, you know, if he was, you know, writing for himself, which he does, instead of just having a feeling. I thought, where the word's going to be about. I'm gonna have to tell a story. I'm gonna have to ride on the song. And I ended up kind of telling a story about my friend. Yeah, and I didn't play guitar on the record. I've played a monicas. I think I've just learned it. So here it goes okay, So one, two three, I read your letter from before. You've been having so much fun, and is it possiful? You're just telling me to drum me in. There's an array of douche bags landing up to play the stupid it pots. And did you ever pass before you gave your loveful way? This is my life, This is my soul cold life, this is my life, This is my owly life. And when you came to me that summer, you were just a shell and you were holding close to mother. She was ashing with the strange, and there was Master go yet Master built that sister loving bund and then I figured that the music set your soul place and us probably not surprising that ju funing through the day. And if I had a second uncoke, I would probably do the same. And if the intimacy I but stopped. So miss your stories, miss y'all. Let us every awkward fumble should be prayed. Okay, they're gonna be holding up their lighters for that one. That's gonna be a big, big concert pleasure. That was wonderful. Thank God, you're instilling us with confidence. I feel that's my job now. I didn't think it was going to be my job. We'll be right back with more from Bell and Sebastian. After a quick break, we're back with the rest of Bruce's conversation with Bell and Sebashtan. Here's the performance of their song Young and Stupid. Oh one, two, three four. I was yelling in my seat. I was crying, feeling weak. Do we have to feel this way? It wasn't like this yesterday. Everything it's behind when you're young and stupid. Everything's did behind when you're young and stupid. There's an easy start two things. There's a thrill that beauty bring two together at the hips, start together at the lips. Nature was the lea heat when you're young and stupid, nurture will and phat when you're young and stupid. I thought you could talk over this book. Let's just go into the last verse two three four. Now we're old with creaking bones, some with partner, some alone, some with kids, and some with dogs. Getting through the nightly slug flashes in the behind. We were young and stupid keeps us warm and nahi all a Young and stupid makes us feel de la high. We were young and stupid makes you feel with grayhead when you're young and stupid. That was fabulous. Well let me ask you now about the origins of that song. How did that come about? This was like prophets and hold. This was like a walk up song where it was kind of walking into the studio and I might have actually walken up with a tune of this and then sort of just tumbled out of Ben walked into the studio thinking about the tune, coming to the piano and just writing down the words. It was the quickest is definitely the quickest of all the of all the songs. Something that's to be noted about the session was because we were still in a form of lockdown. The band members with kids were on duty, you know, they couldn't do full days and they had to work around families. We were so lucky. We actually had a friend staying who was our pair, and so I got to come in every day because I've got kids. And so there was a couple of songs that we actually built up with drum machines, and young and Stupid was one of them. Profits on hold and mostly the first out of the record, but then Rachel would come and play over later and he would add his own inimitable groove to it. The lyrical idea for the song, you know, because you've written so many great songs about being young and being in school and being in those strange kind of in between times in your life, it's just kind of looking back now and thinking I was stupid the whole time, and that's kind of a good thing. I think it's a classic glory days song, and the song very much exists and was written from the present. I e I'm in this position now, I'm I'm in a dark spot and I'm looking back on glory days. Most of your glory days, you probably wouldn't really want to go back. But it's rose tinted spectacles, isn't it. And I had a cutoff point, which was probably about nineteen ninety when I started to wise up a little bit. But my glory days were from eighty five to ninety because I had these you know that, I was just you're running wild. It's so much energy, so much energy, but not having the wisdom really to know how to use that energy wisely. Most people, if they are in a hugely successful pop band, would say that their early days in the band were their glory days. Your glory days pre date being in a band. Well, I had a specific thing that happened to me was in nineteen eighty nine ninety I got sick. Before that time, I was I had boundless energy, and then I got this thing called emmy chronic fatigue syndrome where my energy went off at cliff and it changed my life radically and forever. So it's easier to look beyond that point now when I when I think of just having that great energy. And you were how old when that struck you? So? So nine about twenty one, and so you dropped out of college at that point, dropped out of everything. I mean, I ended up in hospital. I ended up living back with my parents, which was, you know, talk about stepping back into the womb. Almost the first part of that was a lot of that just searching for the diagnosis, trying to find out what happened. I had a good year and a half when I was going downhill and I'd be seeing doctors and they already It was actually my mum that said, oh God, I hope it's not that Emmy, because she was a nurse and she knew people with emmy, and so she was the first person really to diagnose me. And so it turned out that that's what it was. And they didn't know much. They couldn't really help me. There wasn't There wasn't much they could do. Maybe the next six or seven years there was where I would call my wilderness years. I was splitting life up into and what were those years, like, what was your day? You know? When I was back staying with my folks. Do you know what a greenhouses? Do you call it a greenhouse in America? It's like a glass house. They had a glasshouse and that my dad had built, and for most of the year it was definitely the warmest place. So I used to go in there and sit with the you know, the tomato plants that he was growing, and try and just grow. I just I would sit in an old picture with my you know, with my reading for the week, and you know, I would vegetate in the morning and try and grow, grow like a baby tomato plant. And then in the afternoon. Man, this has taken me back, you know. It just shows you that the day was like cut into portions because you and I had so much energy. So in the afternoon I had a friend Michael, now Michael and had the same thing that I did. We became friends and we would just you know, we'd meet up and we'd play scrabble, or we'd we'd driver in the countryside. We'd try and get some nature, and later on we try to play tennis, you know, so we'd try to build up our energy. Did you despair that you would never recover? I think in the first couple of years there was a shock, and then there was a getting used to it. But what happened was that maybe about three years in I had been sort of going along the bottom. Nothing much has improved. I paid a lot to see a doctor and he just he said he was going to move you better. And he took me for six months and he was giving me all sorts of alternative therapies and medicines, and at the end of the six months he told me he couldn't help me anymore, and that was harsh. That was the point where I actually, you know, I had a bit of a breakdown. So things got pretty dark for a while. But actually, in a sense, it sort of shook me up. Something happened that I became almost like so desperate that I tried to change things. I really tried to see more people, to get out, to make more of a connection. Michael and I moved back to Glasgow. We were determined from that point onwards, we forced ourselves to do more. Was that coincidental with recovery or do you think that helped? That helped your recovery along. Another catalyst to that was around that time I was seeing I went to see a Christian healer and she was the opposite of the other medical person that I told you about. She promised nothing thing but actually gave a lot, and she charged nothing but gave a lot. She's amazing. It's just a woman who did it like an amateur in our own house. I wouldn't have to describe myself fully as a Christian at that point. But she said, look, it doesn't matter. This is going to help you. So you know, she did her energy stuff. Can I ask you what was that that she did? Almost at hands on healing, except she to have her hands above me, and it would the whole thing would take about an hour of where she would just be going around and just she was obviously praying or focusing, and I would be thinking the same thing, and I it was a powerful experience, almost like the time went by really quickly, even though I was there for over an hour. And it wasn't until a few weeks afterwards that something broke and I felt that the healer had been part of the catalyst. Now, even if all this stuff was only going on in my mind, you can see how something like that could be a catalyst. You hadn't written songs before you were ill, is that right? That's right? Lit a bit of piano when you were young. I think you had piano lessons. How did the song start? By the time I'd gone to the heelert, I had actually started writing songs. So the songs started from this is me back at my parents' house, having got to the bottom of my health, just sitting at the piano. I remember very clearly writing what was to become my first song. I met a girl called Kira who was to become my best friend, and she also had Emmy, and I was thinking about her, and I just I felt like expressing something about her and to her, and I just I put my hands on the piano and started singing. And that was it. Could you play a few of those chords? Now? Do you remember what you played? Do you know? I never never imagined that we'd be and you don't have to tour with this song? Sure? And the song that the song has never been recorded, and the she's so young Da da da da da da da da da. I mean, I can't remember the words. I might have them written down somewhere. There's a long time ago. That's all. Like, that's all I can remember. But kind of like that, that was that was enough, you know, to get going. Okay, how long was it before you wrote a song that became a recorded song. Yeah, that's a good question. When I realized that this was the thing, that maybe I could do this, that even as a hobby, I should try to. It made me feel good every song that I did. It took me a month. It was took me a month and a half. It took me a long time just to try and wrestle this. So I would say after maybe three years of that, the pace picked up, and I think it helped that I picked up a guitar as well, because it was easier. I would say it was maybe another three years before there was a song that appeared on a B and S record. It does sound a little almost miraculous, like the famous Oliver Sacks story about his patient who had a stroke and then woke up and just started composing music almost incessantly. Do you have this incredible gift for melody? You write melodies that sound like they should have been written hundreds of years ago, but you just thought of them for the first time, and they're very sophisticated. How do you account for that? That's an extremely nice way to put it. Another way to put it in Stevie, he quite often says, all your songs sound like something you know. That's the other side of the coin that even though they're coming out of you, that it's quite possibly you are bouncing around melodies that are deep down, you know inside you they've gone in when you were very young, and that you're you're borrowing little bits of pieces of those Though music, to generalize is miraculous, I think it is miraculous. I used to think so when I was young and I couldn't write a song, and I still I still think so today. It's the most abstract form of art. It's pulling, it's pulling magic out of thin air. What were you listening to at the time, What were their singers or were there songs that were inspiring what you were doing? Kind of Obviously that seven year period was a long period, and up to that point I was very current. I used to DJ a lot, so I'd be playing current records, and then, you know, once I got sick, I tended to fall back on older records and also explore the sixties and seventies more, and also just be more honest about what I loved rather than you know, trying to be hip and cool. Just I'm what I love. Often was quite middle of the road pop music from my youth. Can you give me an example? Songs like you know the one that goes you walked into my life. I don't know what the next chord is, and now you're taken over and it's beautiful. Oh no, it's beautiful. I remember hearing that song on the radio around about that time, not having heard it for years and years, and just being a ghast, thinking, I know that song is wonderful, and I know maybe the guy next to me is ignoring it, or this guy thinks it's chewing gum. For the years, I think it's wonderful. You know. So you have kids, your fans have kids. Some of those kids have become fans. Where do you sort of place your own music in the in the kind of firmament that's an interesting question. Do you simply produce music because you have to him, because you love doing it and you're you're happy with just that process, or do you still ache, you know, to be a pop star, to be you know, every generation throws a you know, a singer up the pop chat, as Paul Simon wrote, because I think there is always that thing you forget that we're all ambitious little buggers. And all these people that you mentioned, and all your peers and the people, all the greats that came before you, most of them would be nothing if they didn't have a relationship with the public. Partly the reason we haven't made an album for so long. Quite frankly, it's because after we did the last one, it didn't feel worth it anymore. It didn't feel like anybody's listening, you know, maybe like some of our hardcore audience. So that's mean, being pretty honest with you, maybe that's not the kind of thing that folk want to hear. But if the music isn't connecting with people anymore, I would rather do something that really gets me going, you know. I'd rather go back and make another film, write a book, try something new. I'm a creative person. In the band is full of creative people. There's no there's no law that says band must do album tour album tour until death? Right? Was it just sales or downloads or you just didn't feel it was connecting somehow. I think maybe the last record connects so well, and that maybe it's just a general feeling. I mean, the band's been going for you know, at that point, the band had been going for some time. You know, people want the new thing. We'll see what happens with this record, Okay, Well, I hope great things happened with this record, because it's a great record and everybody should listen to it, and everybody should go out and clap along. When you play Unnecessary Drama live, you definitely delve down there. There's some things that I haven't thought about for years and years, So as therapists say, we'll pick that up again next time. Okay, thank you so much, Thanks Birth, Thanks the Bonds, the Bashion for talking to us about their latest album and about their career. You're more our favorite bones of Bashtian songs. Check out the playlist at Broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Records. Broken Record is produced a helpful Lea Rose, Jason Gambrel, vent Holiday, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick chaff Our. Executive producer is Mia Lobell. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. 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