The Artist Explains: Alice Mary - 'Loving Game'

We had a chat with the wonderful Alice Mary about her track 'Loving Game'.



Alice Mary Explains
I'd bought an old autoharp from Ebay and set myself a task of tuning all the 32 strings to the notes of one chord, recording myself playing it, then re-tuning, recording etc until I had all of the 24 major and minor chords. This took a lot longer than I expected! I then had a huge sample bank of these really rich sounding chords to play around with.

This song started out as an experiment, just messing around with filters on the chords to get the 'wooosh' sound that goes throughout. I then picked out string-y/twangy bits from the recordings and added them in, and programmed in drums and bass in Logic.

I was really only intending it to be an instrumental but around that time I was also getting really into singing and had been collecting fragments of lyrics in my phone for months. So when I got dumped and I needed to distract myself and I sat down and wrote the verses while listening to this instrumental. I dug into my phone notes and found lots of them were really about the same things, one major theme was struggling with constantly bouncing back and forth between extremes, that comes out in the lyric “I’m scared that I don't care enough / I’m worried that I care too much”. In my songs I like to say all the things I wouldn't say in real life so they're really quite unflattering, in this one the lyrics are petty and bitter, but then the melodies are sweat and cheerful sounding so it's always fun to sing live, particularly the chorus “I'm gonna kiss you and run away”. I love these kind of juxtapositions in songs as I find it boring to be too much of one thing.

After I got my live band together my drummer Alex suggested we go in to the studio to add some live parts so now there's a Juno-6, extra drums and live bass on there. I recorded the vocals with Marc Pell of (Micachu And The Shapes) but we decided to keep the 'la's in the intro from my original bedroom recording as they had something we couldn't quite recapture.