Hits 21 - Something Different... (Part 1)

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

FIND ROB's ALBUM IN THESE PLACES:https://open.spotify.com/album/6EP0o8wuPnjU5L7saDYuih?si=_AGIpxGWR8ShvPb12IeEPQhttps://colourfulsevens.bandcamp.com/album/dream-machine-and-a-happy-end-monument-to-a-computer-keyboardhttps://colourfulsevens.bandcamp.com/album/dream-machine-from-opera-to-workFIND ED's ALBUM:https://edwardthomasuk.bandcamp.com/album/exorcism-2

Hello there everyone and welcome back to Hitch21 where me Rob and me, Ed, will be chatting about something different this week. Andy is on holiday for a couple of weeks having a grand time around continental Europe and so we have a couple of empty weeks to fill and we thought that, well, I thought that one of the better ideas I had that actually stuck in my head and didn't feel so terrible was that Ed was going to say. sit and chat to me about something and we were going to chat together. About three months ago, I released an album of mine and it took a very long time to put together and I figured since we have a few people, hopefully, listening to this, who were sympathetic to mine Ed Anandhi's various causes in life, that you would spare a bit of time while I chatted through it, the creation process, how I feel about it, now it's out, any questions that Ed has about it

and I imagine we'll probably end up just chatting about what it is to be a musician and to make your own stuff because we talk a lot on this podcast about things that other people have done, songs that other people have written and so I think it's fair enough if we turn the microscope back on ourselves a little bit because we give out a lot of judgments on this podcast

we don't often have to defend our own efforts and our own merits and so I thought you know what let's put me through the ringer for once. So before we get into words questions about it, I just want to explain that away from Hits 21, I operate, well, operated musically under the name Colorful Sevens. The name is taken from an unreleased Boards of Canada song. Boards of Canada are not a group that get much of a mention on Hits 21, but they are one of my favorite groups, the electronic group from Scotland and an unreleased song of theirs is just called infinite lines of colorful sevens.

And a very long time ago when I was 18 or 19 at uni we were asked to start up blogs because we did a journalism. I did a journalism degree. And I thought, right, what name could I get for this blog? And so I looked up a load of song titles from borders of Canada and it was either going to be infinite lines or colorful sevens and colorful sevens ended up sticking. It became the the name I attached to absolutely everything for a very long time. Now I'm in my 30s and I put so much effort into this album and it took so long to put together. I'm kind of happy to leave colorful sevens behind. The album that I did put out was my fourth. It's the fourth proper sort of like, I wouldn't call them studio albums, maybe bedroom studio albums. I also released a couple of

BPs under that name as well. But this fourth album and final album that I released earlier this year has a super long title, Dream Machine and a Happy End Monument to a Computer Keyboard. It was initially just going to be called Monument to a Computer Keyboard, but then I read the first half of the title somewhere, and I was like, oh, that's cool. And so it became this super long, pretentious rock opera thing. And it's been out for about three months now. Ed has listened to it.

I know at least once and he multiple times multiple times so yeah he has a has a few questions about it and you know hopefully after listening to this some people might go oh that sounds kind of interesting or something I could you know devote a bit of my time to it doesn't sound too annoying you might feel differently when you've listened to the record but um yeah hopefully some people just go and listen to it like it's not really a money making venture for me uh if it was then I would have failed drastically on most levels, but I don't play live. I don't want to be signed to a label or anything like that. It's just never really been that kind of thing for me. I just kind of put it out and see which of like 50 people care about it. And one of them is Ed. I should mention as well

that, you know, Ed, you are also a musician as well. Me, you and Andy are all musicians and we all know things about writing to various degrees. And we are, I think, I think people would realize by now if we weren't qualified to discuss the songs that we do discuss on the main show. But, you know, so I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about the music that you do, actually, and where you're coming from as someone who, you know, critiques music as well as makes it. Not really, but I feel I can. I probably should for context. Look, I could be described as a lapsed musician.

I'm always like, oh, you know, I should get out there and play a bit more. But life gets in the way. I'm perfectly content for it to do so. But yeah, I've done some very lo-fi recordings in the past, came through, you know, did a music course at uni, music masters, what have you, with a composition and contextual side of things. So that might explain a couple of things about the way I talk about music or perhaps not.

Perhaps you just assume that I don't know if I call. Anyway, yeah, this is just going to be a casual chat. this is not part of some, you know, press junket. It just was a kind of an idea that's, oh, Rob's got a new project, and then we've put a hell of a lot of work into it, and it sounds like it. And I just thought, well, it'd be good to talk about it. So with casual chat in mind, Rob, your launch campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?

Let me just eat this three-eyed fish. Yeah, there we go. Yeah. Yeah, well, what I can't... You don't have to answer that one wrong. It was just a joke, it was just a joke. But yeah, now I first became aware of this years ago. I mean, I already knew your music.

I already very much liked some of the early records you put out, particularly an album called Hemhor OK, which has recently been reissued on Spotify and other platforms, as I understand it. Yes. So yeah, I very much like the style of that, a lot of kind of very varied, very personal kind of power pop, to put it very broadly. But I first became aware of this quite some time ago. I must have been years ago now, this new monument to a computer keyboard project, because you told me you wanted to do a concept album about the internet.

Now, could you explain why that stuck with you as a concept? I think because the origin point of this really was that I had a few kind of musical ideas but not many conceptual ideas. Nothing was really stitched together. This was about late 2020, early 2021. I just finished putting together the EP that I did that was called My Thoughts Only Have More Threads. And that EP wasn't to do with the internet or anything really. It was just kind of a few songs I wrote that were very stylistically similar to a lot of pop punk groups that I grew up listening to. And then the last song was kind of about imagining a future where there is no lockdown, which was called Voyage to 2025.

And it ended up being quite a inadvertently ended up being quite a serendipitous song title. because that was the year I got married and the whole song is kind of about like, you know, having a party, you know, when lockdown is finished. And so that was, you know, that was a really lovely coincidence in the end. But that title, you know, my thoughts only have more threads. It did come from this idea that, you know, on micro blogging sites like Twitter and Facebook and things like that, you know, you talk entirely in threads.

And that quite often, if I'm ever seen, starting one of these threads, they will finish 15 messages later because my, my brain has gone off on so many tangents that feel somehow related to the first tangent. And, you know, so I was, I was like, okay, I could, I could write something there because that stuck quite well. And I've spent far too much time on social media the last 15 years. And, you know, I realized I had a lot of conflicting and complicated thoughts about it because I've spent so much time that it has influenced a lot of my life. I have friends because of social media that I wouldn't have had otherwise. I have knowledge and music tastes and political beliefs that I wouldn't have had without social

media. I think if you put a line from things like Facebook to things like Tinder, I wouldn't have my wife. You know, I met my wife on Tinder. which itself was a form of social media. The relationships I had previously survived because of the internet. Like, I realized very early on in the creation process of the record that the three long-term relationships I've had in my life and the third is ongoing with my wife, they've all been long distance at one point or another.

The first one was long distance from beginning to end. The second one became long distance. at the end and was a contributing factor to the split. And then a year of my nine years with my wife, a year was spent with his living apart while she finished a master's course back at home in London, where she grew up, because we met while she was at university in Manchester,

and then she moved back to London for one year to finish her master's. And so I realized, you know, the internet has sustained a lot of my friendships. It's given me a lot of friendships. it sustained my relationships and given me those relationships. But at the same time, you know, because I spend so much time on it, I've noticed how I've maybe changed for the worse in terms of like, you know, picking up habits that I don't want being addicted to my smartphone for various points of, sort of my 20 years, sort of like my late teens and early 20s and, you know,

getting into arguments with people on social media years ago and I still had the energy for things like that. And, you know, going through. phases where the last thing I looked at before I went to sleep was my phone and the first thing I looked at when I woke up was my phone and I'm pretty you know I'm sure that's something that a lot of people are quietly quite guilty of and maybe feel quite shameful about but we don't know how to change that are you the same like do you do you have like a phone off after 9 p.m. kind of thing and then oh god no it's completely ruined my relationship with books

yeah totally that's something I will say it's just transform now. I mean, if I want to, if I want to actually read a book, it's got to be an audio book nowadays, unfortunately. And I am very much a, you know, find a Wikipedia rabbit hole and fall asleep. That's, that's where I go now. My, my journey into sleep is accompanied by the internet these days, though I am off all social media except for WhatsApp because I couldn't stand it. It was making me very depressed. Yeah. And that's, to be honest, where the kind of grander concept of the record comes from the you know so all of these feelings and thoughts i was like okay i have to get this out there i originally the idea was that i was going to release the album and then

drop social media i was just going to have that as the last thing i ever really posted but actually to be honest my relationship with social media is a lot healthier now and so i feel more comfortable being on it because i don't i'm not on twitter anymore which was the main instigator of a lot of this and where a lot of the battlegrounds were in the culture wars, which we all love. But obviously during the writing process of the album, Twitter was bought by Elon Musk. And so however negatively I felt about Twitter in 2021, 2022, it only got worse over the course of writing the record. And so it ends up in a, you know, it does end up in quite a negative place with it. But, you know, I think the origin point of it in terms of songs being written for it, like towards once I had that concept that I was like, okay, I want to write this about the internet.

And at the time I was listening to a Russian pop group who were called DLB. I think the crude thing is that if you put D, L and B together in a logo, it looks quite phallic. And I think that was the joke. But they did a song with a group, a guy called DJ, L. the Atman and it's it was a pretty fun like they were Russian but they were really into Scouse House you know the kind of house music that like the bass sounds like somebody hit in a plastic pipe you know don't don't don't don't and it's really really stupid song that was called like party in Kamash I think it was called it's like Russian party and

Kamas do do do do do it do it did it's great fun and I looked up where DLB were from and they were from a city called Yacaterinburg or Yerkeritinberg or something like that in Russia and I was just looking at it on Google Maps above, you know, Bird's Eye View and I saw this thing and it said computer keyboard monument and so I zoomed right in and I was like, oh this and then I went on street view and there is a there is a literal monument to a computer keyboard in Yekaterinberg in Russia that the public can go and see. I did wonder where the cover had come from. I was going to ask about that.

Yeah, and so I found a royalty-free picture of it and edited it and messed around with it. And that was like, okay, that'll be the cover. That's it, monument to a computer keyboard. This album is going to be that in a way. And at the time, I had very, very early ideas for some of the songs. because my last couple of projects had been very kind of pop punk focused

because I've been listening to a lot of the music I loved when I was about 15 or 16 like groups like Paramour or Motion City soundtrack or All Time Low who I mentioned on last week's episode and bands like that but then in the pandemic and a little bit after lockdown when we started getting our jabs in 2021 I started listening to a lot of groups from that sphere, but maybe who were a bit more alternative, groups like American football or Brave Little Abacus or Reliant K, who used a lot of acoustic instruments and pianos and horns and things like that. And I also was listening to the Postal Service, their one album,

Give Up from 2003, and a song on the record, which I'll play about 10 or 20 seconds of just underneath while I'm talking was up down up. That was the first thing I wrote. And initially it was very, very stripped back. And it was more, it sounded more like such great heights by the Postal Service. And then as I was writing it, I realized that the thing I was writing instrumentally was reminding me of train journeys I've taken while all of my relationships. have been long distance.

And initially the song was called Purple Post, because the demo was just Postal Service. That was all it was called. And then I realized that, you know, like the trains were, they always had, the first trains I ever took in my first kind of long distance relationship were purple. They were Transpenine Express trains. And so the train itself is a form of purple post.

And so it kind of ended up there for a little bit. But when I handed it to my producer, who I'll talk to about, and masterer, who I'll talk about in a bit, he had slightly different ideas for it. That actually took it in a bit of a pop punk direction. But from there, I kind of had it, that it was like, this was going to be an album about the internet that was going to be, that was going to start at the point where it was about my first major experiences with the internet, which was like sustaining a long. relationship when I was about 15 and from there it would then go into maybe you know my process of becoming addicted to it and not finding much peace with it and then get into the point where I am now where I feel like I've outgrown quite a lot of social media and feel like I've moved beyond it somewhere and that was kind of the rough that was how the

rough shape kind of came together yeah there is a sense of there is a sense of there is definitely an ambivalence about the whole experience because as well as moving on and growing up and you know transcending it somewhat as it is alluded to at the end of the album there is a kind of sense of the loss of childhood things and are moving away from that like there's lines about the you know the playground being boarded up and yeah there's there is this sense of so there's almost there's there's a nostalgia to it Is that, would you say that's true as well? Definitely.

There are quite a lot of songs where, even though it may not be directly mentioned in the lyrics, they were at least written from a place of like looking back over my journey with it and wondering if there were any points where I could have jumped off the ride before things got too bad. But then kind of realizing that I actually, until I was about 24, I actually felt quite positively about social media. You know, I'd made loads of friends there, and I didn't... I was reading books at the time, like, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, the John Ronson book.

And I have to give him, you know, immense credit. He was the first person in about 2016. So actually, you know, when I was about 22, I was about 22 when I read that book. And he was the first person to put the thought in my head that social media had been Twitter specifically had been kind of flattening everybody's sense of justice and retribution

that the ways in which people were being dealt with for wrongful behavior on social media was the same regardless of if regardless of what they'd actually done because somebody could make a racist tweet on social media and would be hounded by thousands and thousands of people saying, this is wrong, you idiot, why are you saying this? And then the next day, I remember somebody who I ended up working under at Metro years later,

Jess, Jess, her name was, Jess Austin. And she tweeted something like, I've watched Alien a million times, and I don't think it's a horror film. I think it's a sci-fi. I think it's just sci-fi. and that any horror elements come from stuff that you could attribute to the sci-fi genre as well and she was dealt with in the same way thousands of people going you idiot you're stupid why did you say this and when that is the justice system regardless of how people have erred and regardless of what people have done and obviously there were loads of examples in john ronson's book um justine saco is his first

example. She was the woman who on a plane grabbed her phone and said, on a plane to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white. And obviously the joke there is that like, you know, this huge racial inequality across the African continent and that the majority of the majority of HIV patients in Africa are not white and that it was that it was a very, very clumsy way of

trying to point that out. By the time, she got off the 10-hour flight, there was a crowd of people at the airport waiting for her because that tweet had gone around social media while she had her phone off and people were reacting to it very strongly and very negatively. And there were people waiting for her at the airport where she was landing, saying, oh, I'm near there, I'll go there. That was the first kind of like, oh, okay, maybe I'm not in a completely harmonious. place here. Maybe, you know, maybe the way with like people dealing with, you know, the way to

deal with people making mistakes isn't to go to the airport that they're going to land at so that you can shout at them or laugh at them or take a picture of them. And he equated it to being put in the stocks in medieval times where you are parading in front of a public while rotten vegetables are thrown at you. And that, that was interesting to me. To be honest, I didn't find Justine Sacco's joke funny at all really but no it is very clumsy i understand the thing is though i can understand why it was misread and it says i don't think anyone nowadays would dare do something like that just because there is so much potential for it to be misread do you know what i mean so even though i understand the principle behind what she was saying like the satirical point it's that relies on

everybody who could potentially see that, which is a hell of a lot of people, being on the same hym sheet aesthetically and in their understanding of context, in their understanding of irony, and that's never going to happen. So unfortunately, obviously, just the, if people are going to keep talking a lot and have opinions of things on the internet, it has almost become necessary to reduce or get rid of old subtext. And in some ways, that's that is almost counter art but that's another that's another dispute that's exactly one of the things that I was thinking about and you know so having all of these thoughts in my head I was like right I have ideas I have kernels of ideas so it seems that you know the album's going to start from

a romantic point of view and there will be a little romantic storyline and then it will be something quite small and quite pure and quite innocent like that just a little you know relationship between two teenagers or you know another relationship between someone in their teens and early 20s or like now with you know with with my wife you know we're both sort of you know either side of 30 you know it's got quite sweet and romantic things like you know at first the internet is this novelty thing that allows me to have a romantic connection with another human being you know then it becomes the place where you do everything. You know, it is the Bo Burnham song.

It's a little bit of everything all of the time. Apathy is a tragedy and boredom is a crime. So the lyrics go. You know, this idea that every sort of five seconds, you get 5% of something and it's like it becomes a bit of an addictive whirlwind and an environment that you want to keep going back to. And there's this comic from years ago where this wife is shouting down to her husband, come on, come to bed, you know, it's two in the morning,

and then the husband's staring at the computer going, sorry, sorry, I can't, someone is wrong on the internet. And I felt like, you know, that's where I'd ended up, sort of in my late teens and early 20s when I was at uni and I had fuck all else to do. And then it would end kind of where I am now. It's why there's 15 songs on the album, because I tried to group it into like three groups of five

that there would be the romantic storyline, there would be the kind of slow addiction storyline and then the last storyline would be reaching a point of acquiescence if you will more than anything else just kind of admitting defeat to it and then realizing that maybe I need to let go of it sort of thing

and that's kind of my journey with it but then I realized that I had a concept I had a beginning and a middle and an end where you sort of have at the beginning you have you sort of established the character's kind of personality and his relationship with the internet and I had this idea that the internet itself would be personified by this Emily character that I threw in there where I had lots of spoken word elements and stuff because I realized

that getting people to sing on songs was a lot harder than just emailing them a script and sort of saying like look just kind of say this imagine I'm saying, things back to you because they were all recorded separately. All of them. I got them to say all of their lines on the script, send me the file, and I would say all of my lines and then spliced them together. And I did that for all four Emily characters. Initially, it was going to be three because I thought, like, oh, I could have an

Emily for each, you know, long-term partner I've had in my life, where, you know, the first Emily would be my first girlfriend and so on. and then the third Emily would be my wife. And I actually briefly considered having my actual wife play one of the Emmylies. But then the story just went in a different direction. It became less about the Emmylies more of personification of the internet itself rather than actual human beings that I'd met. So you have Emily 2, who was played by my friend Serena.

She is kind of there as kind of like an initial guide. when my only relationship with the internet is kind of like sustaining a romantic thing and then i have the second emily come in emily three who was played by a friend of mine called jenny who uh she wrote she wrote the basis of jenny's song on the record which i'll i'll play underneath uh as i'm talking now she wrote the basis for that um it was a very sketchy electronic demo and she said yeah i don't want it anymore you can do what you want with it so I paid her to use that song. And she,

her character was kind of like, uh, kind of like being moved from computers to smartphones where it becomes more addictive, if you will. And then Emily four was played by my friend Vicky. Um, I say, I say my friend,

our mutual friend, uh, Vicki. Um, and she was more, she was the one who maybe personified the internet the least that character. she's more the person who comes to me in a moment where I kind of realized that I'm actually beginning to step away and outgrow this and become quite disillusioned with it. And she's there just to kind of go, oh, well, okay, I kind of, I see where you're coming from there.

But also your behavior earlier in the record was not that of a stand-up citizen exactly. And then Emily 1, whose voice you hear at the very beginning of the record and then comes in on the final song, she was played by my mindfulness instructor, Farah, who is also my wife's cousin. There's a bit of a family connection there. She was more than happy to do it. I needed someone who was gentle and motherly and soft and meditative. And she has that exact voice because she's been practicing and teaching mindfulness for 10, 15, 20 years. is, you know, and so she, she was perfect for it, really.

And I realized that Emily One was kind of like the, I don't know, I'm trying to think of a character, you know, like, the big computer in Hitchhiker's Guide, who, like, is all-knowing, is omniscient, you know, knows the answer to life, the universe and everything kind of thing. And it, you know, I reached the point at the end of the record where she has the means to take me out of this world and send me into another one. and as a kind of like, look, you don't really belong here, do you? That sort of thing. And it's, you know, you might make it to the other side.

You might not. And I kind of, because I'm like that, I just left that ambiguous because I don't think that whether I make it is the point. It's the fact that I chose to leave is the point, really, whether I make it to the next world or not. I mean, it's, I thank you for taking me through the concept as well. I mean, you mentioned that this was quite a, you know, a long gestating project. And I know for, well, the worst ideas already, but I mean, I was quite surprised to hear a song of yours reworked that I think you had written it before I even met you. Is that right?

Yes, in the Soul Aquarium, yes. Yeah, that was in the Soul Aquarium was a title that I had kind of floating around. All sorts of titles on this album have come from like, I have things that pop into my head. Sometimes it's lyrics, sometimes it's just words, and I just write them all down on my, and a notepad thing on my phone. And so from the record, things like telescoping and in the soul of Aquarium and Future Shocked and Demystified and album and song titles like that they're all just around and I thought in the soul aquarium that's that that could be applied to something like

this because I guess if the sole aquarium kind of stands in as a bit of a metaphor for you know I mean it's not the you know it's not the cleanest metaphor I suppose and it's maybe not the most you know astute but it's kind of like you know that that is what social media is in a way you know it's it's a large, you know, it is a very, very large kind of building that we all invite ourselves into and we just stand and stare and judge and we can't always gain access. There is that glass that's in the way. Yeah. And it's always, don't bang on the glass, you know, that sort of thing. And so that was, you know, that was there. And that was initially going to be given to a different song I was working on that I just, I couldn't take it past the first chorus. I just,

I was struggling to formulate the ideas. So I went back into my head because I was like, It was one of the last songs to be written actually fully because I thought, well, I've got this. Because I do need something on this record. If I'm going to have a, you know, if I'm going to have pop punk influences in this record, like Jimmy Eat World, motion city soundtrack and groups like that,

you know, I have to have a four quarter. I have to have the one five, six, four somewhere, forming the basis of one of the songs. And so I look back and I thought, Oh, there was that song that we, that me and you, Ed, kind of, you know, mostly kind of wrote together. I think that's generous. I think that's generous. I think a lot of the song was already in place.

I think what I added to it was a guitar line behind the chorus. In fact, I think that's it. I think that's my contribution. But that, to be honest, that ended up forming the basis of the kind of underlapping vocal melody. on the second verse because I did always like that line that the and that was a fun

kind of fun kind of syncopated melody and I'd always kept it around because when we did it a very long time ago which I'll be playing the live audio of as I'm talking about this at the pint pot in solvent in 2013 when we played that

it was probably the song in our set list that belonged there the least. I think we were in a bit of a hurry, weren't we? Because we had to put four songs together for a fast kind of 20 minute set list for an exam. So a four chord song was

ideal for getting all that together. It was not a difficult song to perform. I'll put it that way. I did have this idea. I did like that chorus a lot. It's one of the favorite choruses I've written melody-wise. It's always been there and it's always kind of like oh, that's really catchy actually.

It's one of those where I have ideas that come in and out of my head all the time and then I wake up the next morning, it's like, fuck, it's gone. What was it? Whereas with that one, the, you know, that-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. That was there and pretty much sat there in my head for a very long time. And after we'd done the exam and I started a different unicourse and things like that, in 2017, I rewrote it with different lyrics again.

and then I wrote it with different lyrics again this time, keeping the broad kind of structure. But trying to focus on, like, growing the composition in the second half of the song, which is why you get loads of counter melodies that are thrown in, sort of in the last third. I was going to mention that, interestingly, I didn't realize that it was like a calculator thing.

It's like, oh, we need that four-cord song, something more stripped back, because I was going to say that, this is a song, just, you know, knowing your trajectory and listening to your, having heard your previous stuff, it's like, this is the one that in many ways

sounds the oldest, just because it's the most, in some ways, cyclical and linear in a lot of ways. And while, you know, you've never, you never lose sight of, you know,

solid song structure throughout this record, and there's some quite long songs towards the end. At this record very much illustrates your most, I would say, I don't want to say complex because when people say,

oh, it's some of your most complex songwriting, it just makes it sound like it's a fucking prog opera, and that's not what I'm coming around. What is lovely about this is that there are tracks on it that have the structure of a, you know, a power pop song,

but they do have textual variety. And for instance, you know, as you say, you'll add backing vocals that stack up and just change the feel as the song goes. through or there'll be a harmonic shift like for instance I made a whole list of these just a moment I mean for instance like the end of tape my phone it sounds like that

the harmony changes somewhat and so the whole feel of it changes while keeping the same mativic ideas in place melodic ideas in place it just takes it in a slightly different direction while keeping the shape and character so all of these and there are quite a lot songs. All of these songs do have a discreet character while being varied through their own. Because one thing, and probably if you've heard me rant about 90s songs on hits 21, you'll know that I do get very frustrated very quickly when songs repeat themselves. And all I ask for is a little bit of variety. And it feels like you've done the best of both worlds in a lot of cases here. And there mean there are some instances on, because I mean, I don't like, I don't love all the songs

equally on this record. Though I think it's a really good. album. Even in some of the ones where I'm perhaps not as enamored by the chorus, for instance, I won't really skip it because it never stays quite static. There's always somewhere else for it to go. And it usually ends up in a richer environment than it started. And so there's something quite rewarding about that. You don't often get from, to say broadly, again, broadly power pop or emo pop, and that is a broad assessment, but certainly there are aspects drawn from that. I mean, you did an accompanying playlist for this that's, that the sort of puts together your influences for each of the songs, and I can see that very much there,

but I think there's something, I think there's something quite telling about the, I mean, people already know you're a big Weezer fan, but there's something quite telling about the fact that there are elements of that like Weezer's dexterous bright power pop touch, even though they aren't included in the influences. And that's admittedly just naturally, I think, going to come through with your enthusiasm for the group and what Rivers Cuomo does. But also, that probably comes through due to your relationship with the producer. Do you want to say a little bit more about that?

Yes. So first of all, what I will say about the arrangements never staying still is that I realize that with this producer who I worked with, who I'll talk about, there was a lot more scope all of a sudden. I wasn't limited to like an eight track and working with like audacity and things like that. You know, he's, you know, my producer, Fekundo, who I would talk about a little bit more in a minute, he has like a full desk and it's Logic Pro and it's Ableton and it's, you know, all those things that more sophisticated computer software, things like reason. And so I thought, right,

with all these tracks available, there's no excuse really for not throwing ideas, new ideas onto the songs because I've become very, very, I have to say, this podcast has also been a huge influence on the way that I write as well because I also get quite bored with songs that do the copy paste or the recycling or, you know, don't at least rephrase things. If you're not going to add that much to the arrangement, could you just at least change the way something is played so that with each new section there is something new to grab onto, whether it's a countermelody or whether it's just playing the same chord sequence, but in a slightly more syncopated fashion. I think quite a lot about Paramour and how even on their first album at 15 and 16, they're very keen on

sort of like, at least strumming the guitars differently in the second verses, finding different patterns, finding different melodies. And then if I've got all this access to all these tracks, and I might as well fill in with something, you know, and it means that like, you know, it's more ideas, more reasons. And I kept thinking about all, you know, so many songs that I love where like my favourite bits are towards the end. And I thought, I want to challenge. myself to find in the second half of songs things that feel as to me at least felt as potent as they could have been if you'd introduce them as the main chorus like you know I spent a lot of time listening to the the first ever EP that made a parade put out which was called Tales Told by Dead Friends that the my favorite bits of all of those songs are all within the last minute and a half or two minutes where they introduce all these overlapping vocal melodies and harmonies. So I was like, right, okay, let's do this.

You know, and I always love pop songs as well that like the final chorus is either completely different to the first two choruses or the song has gone off in such a wild direction that bringing the chorus back in would be silly. And I think that, you know, they go off. one of my big big influences structurally was in terms of how I wrote certain songs on the record was cute without the E cut from the team by taking back Sunday where you know you have the main sort of two choruses with a big hook that will you tell all your friends you've got your gun to my head that bit but then in the that never comes back after the second chorus it's it's the big bit and the with the final.

final final chorus is a whole new bit and it's that I stay wrecked and jealous for this for this reason reason I just need to keep you in my and I was like okay yeah great I can come up with things like that and so on songs like take my phone whether the chorus is you know I just didn't want to take my phone and I thought that in the final chorus then okay fine you've got to build up to the point where everybody expects the chorus to come back in but then just go off in a different direction. And so you get the, don't call me, don't call me, I've thrown it all away.

You know, things, and then it's on other records as well, like Information Highway, where in the main chorus you get the, how long does it take to feel good? But then in the final chorus, you get the, have you ever seen? It's the information highway. And I thought, like, if other bands can do that

within the kind of pop-punk genre, then, you know, in genres that don't have progressive as a prefix, you know, could I not then do that, you know? And so I was thinking about all these songs, like 19 by Charlie Bliss as well, where the chorus, the second chorus is the last time you hear it, and there's like a giant coda section that goes on for about the last minute or so,

and it pulls the song in a completely different direction. And I was also thinking about songs that, like, where the bridge feels as strong as the chorus or it feels like it could be another chorus in some way Cruel Summer by Taylor Swift is one of those where you get the main chorus with the It's you, the shape of your body, it's you with that bit

But then with the bridge You get the I'm drunk in the back of the car And I'm crying like a baby coming up on the bar And it's like that's within the last minute and a half, this whole new section is introduced. And it's just, it's, it's added value.

Yeah, exactly. A classic example, you want a classic example of the, I don't know which ones the bridge, which one's the chorus, because they're both as memorable. Don't you want me by Human League? Yeah. I mean, it's either one of the,

no, don't you want me. You know I can't believe it when you, that sounds like a chorus. But then there's, don't you want me, baby. It's like, why choose? Just have them both. Exactly.

There's a song that we're actually going to be covering very, very soon on the podcast, which does this, which a little bit of a spoiler from my review of it, Dynamite by Teo Cruz. Because you get the, I throw my hands up in the air sometimes saying, and then it jumps right into, because we going to rock this club. We're going to go all night. We're going light it up like it's dynamite. And it's like, yeah, why not have two choruses? just fucking do it.

And so, you know, and so I thought, yeah, have that in mind when I'm writing as much as possible. And some of these songs took absolutely ages. The reason it took so fucking long, partly because I went through periods of leaving it alone. I wanted, you know, I wrote the, you know, I can't really remember the full order in which they were all written. But like, you know, the last song to be written was the last song.

And like fully completed. And that's in the end. that's the only song that Fekundo didn't touch in the... Oh, really? Yeah, he asked for some... I asked him for some advice, and he just kind of said, look, I think you just kind of have to leave... I wanted to, like, you know, should we go for a big finish?

Should we go for what? And he was kind of like, no. And he said, he said, like, I think this needs to be like the epilogue. I think this needs to be what plays as the credits come round.