Track By Track: Hot Shorts - 'I Understand and I Wish To Continue'
Manchester’s Hot Shorts have just released their album ‘I Understand and I Wish To Continue’, they took a moment to talk through it - track by track.
No Jokes - “No jokes / no irony / ‘cuz this is serious / well ... probably.” This song is supposed to be a mission statement about how we’ve put away our reliance on humour for our serious second album. It’s like when a band collectively starts wearing leather jackets or something.
Please Don’t Make Me Go to Space – Then we follow it up with perhaps our most stupid song ever. It seems like an extra layer of mistake to sequence the two loudest/least-representative songs as the first two tracks of the album, almost as if we’re trying to put off potential listeners?!
Who Brings a Guitar to a Party? – This is our softest/most “indie” song, I suppose. I tried emailing Steve Lamacq about it a couple of times; thought it might be up his street. “Hey Steve, you might like this one, m8, sounds a bit like Blur or Pavement or something.” (He never replied.)
Don’t Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One Before – This song is mostly about how average and by-the-numbers it is (but that’s okay!), and also slightly about being old and relieved that all the embarrassing teenage mistakes you made aren’t on YouTube. I tried emailing Pitchfork journalist Ian Cohen about our album a couple of weeks ago, telling him about how this song came w/ a built in P4K score in the opening lyric. (He never replied.)
I Found You on MySpace – It wouldn’t be a Hot Shorts album without at least 3 mentions of websites and ‘the internet’. So yeah, here’s one of them: a semi-fictitious account of uncovering somebody’s old MySpace page. Spoiler alert: there’s a pretty intense key change towards the end.
Summer of 2012 – There are a few possibly-litigious moments on the album: riffs and/or lyrics which we’ve taken a step too far for the purposes of a joke, but I think the intro to ‘Summer of 2012’ (“I bought my first real iPhone / in the summer of 2012 / I touched it ‘til my fingers bled”) is perhaps the best (or worst?) example. [FAO Bryan Adams’ legal team, our email address is: hotshortstheband@gmail.com]
I’m Not Mad (I’m Just Disappointed) – “I’m not your dad / I’m just someone who’s disappointed in you”. Perhaps the most serious song on the album, as in, it doesn’t have a really huge clunking joke or punch line in it. The one to put on a playlist for your humourless indie-snob friend, in other words. Also contains more swearing than it probably should, racking up somewhere in the region of 2,000,000 f-bombs by the end.
My Cat is Gonna Live Forever – This song is about my cat, Dorothy, who is four and a half and dislikes going to the vets. I once sent a Twitter DM to a record label asking if they wanted to put out a double A-side seven inch w/ two songs about my cat on it – this one + one that we haven’t recorded yet called ‘Dorothy, Please Stop Scratching Me’. (They never replied.)
Lostprophets Tattoo – I’ve been told, anecdotally, that when we’ve announced the name of this song live there’s often a collective inhalation of breath, like we’ve finally taken things a step too far. So if you just read that title and are worrying the same thing, please be assured that this song is actually, somehow, not quite as awful as it sounds like it should be!
Beach Ballin’ The opening question in the song (“I see you’re writing a song / would you like some help with that?”) is being asked by that friendly anthropomorphic paperclip that used to show up in Microsoft Office. But wait ... Isn’t ‘beach balling’ is an Apple-specific term? What is this song about, anyway?!