Track By Track: Anavae - '45'
Anavae have just released their debut album ’45’ via A Wolf At Your Door Records, it sees the band once again pushing the limits of word ‘genre’ with their arena filling sound. They took a moment to talk to us about the release - track by track.
Afraid
Becca: This song might be one of the few that didn’t drastically change from first demo recording to its end result. Bits of my clunky guitar parts are still in the verses, and my demo vocals survived in the middle 8. I never expected this strange, no lyric chorus track to make it into the studio, so now, seeing it rack up 2 million plays on Spotify is surreal. The instrumental chorus with hums always seemed perfectly suited to a car advert to me, and I got incredibly stuck viewing it that way, so the words never came. Breaking your own rules about how a chorus should be feels great.
Afraid is about being sent into an anxious frenzy by just the sight of a person's name. It’s about being consumed by the idea of someone until they embed themselves into your dreams. It's about wanting to forgive and clear the horribly smoky atmosphere just to ease the feelings of terror they invoke on your conscious and subconscious. Hindsight is a funny thing. Even after making peace with someone from your distant past, peace isn't always easy to hold on to.
Jamie: I've always liked the fact that Becca and I bring extremely different energies to the music we write together - so I wanted to see what completely slamming my writing style into an idea of hers would sound like. That's what the chorus of Afraid is to me.
Human
Jamie: I was in the studio whilst Choir Noir were doing their thing for the Bring Me The Horizon album, and I fell in love with the idea of having a choir full of these beautiful voices singing something really dark and messed up. I wrote the intro for Human and asked Becca to come up with the most twisted lyric she could think of, with the choir’s voices in mind. The concept of wearing somebody else's skin because you want to be more like them/normal was exactly what I was after.
Becca: A series of songs on this album were written in a phase where I felt like I had lost my mind, and this was the concluder. Being in love can turn you into less of a human. Or maybe the insanity of being in love is too typically human.
Shy Girls
Becca: As soon as the melody for this chorus came out, I knew it was an unexpected keeper, and a little unlike anything we’d ever done. I think we sometimes get a little caught up in style, or experiments, or “cool” sounds, and this song just felt like something straight up, something simpler, and so much fun.
My ego took a hit, and underwent a complete reshape last year, after being rejected, which changed my routine, my outlook, and my relationship with myself. It felt like intensely negative growing pains. I think there’s something about reaching the end of your twenties which makes you question your purpose in a way you’ve never done before.
Jamie: Writing this album over the past few years was a traumatic roller coaster of fuckery and Shy Girls was me taking a day off from all of that. I wanted to see what it felt like to stop trying so hard with all the little production tricks I had become obsessed with over the years - and just write a flat out rock song that I enjoyed playing. It's a bit of a love letter to Dave Grohl for me. Watching documentaries about how they make their music together always made me realise that I should be having fun doing this shit. Shy Girls is me painting a smile on my face and remembering what I used to think being in a band meant when I was a kid.
High
Becca: High is in the same world as Afraid for me. Another messy demo that was first born out of my bedroom. I’m a very simple instrumentalist, which limits how I write, but not being a guitarist means I won’t and can’t write like a guitarist. I think it means the songs I write from scratch end up being in a slightly different space, from someone who can play guitar well.
High is about the feeling of hopelessness and numbing, slow melancholy. It’s the feeling you get when you forget that things can and will change. It’s forgetting how to look forward and beyond and that maybe love is meaningless amongst it all.
Jamie: I spent years obsessing over how not to be compared to Paramore. Nearly every review, interview and friend who checked out Anavae would say "It's good! It's like Paramore!" which always felt like a bit of a punch in the gut. Now that we have a very firm idea of what Anavae sounds like - and what kinds of sounds we like to make, I felt like I could let go of my Paramorphing anxiety - and wrote a middle 8 of drum madness that I could imagine Zac Farro playing in the Riot days.
Skeleton
Jamie: I wanted to see what it would feel like to really put all of myself into a song. To completely ignore the fact that I had to leave space for the vocals or compromise on styles and ideas once it was brought to the Anavae table.
When I’m in a dark place, I tend to think in strange sounds or melodies...and this is the closest I've ever gotten to portraying that in a song. I could talk for hours about what each little phrase, effect, vocal sample (the voices of others that I've sampled, my own voice etc) means to me and what it represents - but it's probably too personal to ever be an interesting story to hear. Skeleton is me being completely selfish as a writer.
Becca: I think I’m a bit of a chameleon, able to shape shift depending on the scenario, or in this case, the style of a song. We’ve never wanted to limit ourselves to one genre, so this felt like a refreshing sandwich filler amongst our other album sandwiches… I was able to play with another version of myself, and write about a subject matter from a slightly different angle, with a self given freedom.
I woke up one morning to find a really long, detailed message from my friend Tom Weaver, recounting a fucked up dream he had had, and it immediately filled me with images. I wanted to weave my recently felt pains, into his nightmare, to create a surreal horror story of heartbreak, alienation, and separation.
Night
Becca: Night is an incredibly old song, written after a separation from a distant ex-partner, and even though it’s so old, bringing it into the studio with Pete Miles, and giving it a new lease of life, has definitely put it in the running as one of my favourite songs on the album.
It’s about navigating feelings of love, and feelings of hatred, being lost in dreams, and nights of withdrawal. At the time same wishing you could still be with someone, but also hoping they’re in pain, as if that somehow eases your pain.
A much longer version of the instrumental was sent to me by John Martinelli, which I then wrote to, and restructured. Jamie and Pete Miles then added sprinkles of themselves, and then eventually Will and Maddie’s string sections were extra pieces of icing.
Not Enough:
Jamie: This was supposed to be the last song I would ever write. We were half way through writing the album and sat down with Pete to go through the 50+ demos we had put together to form the rest of the album. We listened to every single one of them...and I suddenly realised that I had grown to completely hate the music I was writing and that maybe I wasn’t ready to be doing an album after all. It was a long, crappy drive back to London after that revelation.
After being home for a couple weeks, I had given up on music - but I just wanted to get one last idea that had been in my head for a few years recorded and out of the way. I felt like once I had done that, I could move on and leave my music days behind me. That idea was the first minute or so of Not Enough.
Becca came back with a few vocal ideas for it - but one lyric really stuck out and resonated with me. 'Am I Not Enough?’. I wanted to base the entire chorus around that concept, so I moved things into place.
I'd never had an Anavae lyric resonate with me that strongly before - so I knew I had to stop moping around and finish the track. Getting Not Enough finished in the studio with Pete then spawned a bunch of ideas for other tracks I wanted to have on the album (Human, Skeleton and Shy Girls)...so it'll always be the most important song that I’ll have written.
Becca: The lyrics and the tone of the instrumentation are in two different worlds, which both jars me, and intrigues me. Jamie named the early demo version of this ‘Help’ so I immediately knew he would appreciate a darkness in the lyrics, which suited me perfectly, as all I could find myself writing, or thinking about in this period, was of being lonely. A new kind of lonely, one that I had never experienced in quite that way before. An all-encompassing emptiness.
Never Want To Love Again
Becca: This song has been through so many changes and re-morphs over the years. It’s one of those tracks that quickly turned from love to hate, hate to love and back again through every section of the recording process. For me it was an exercise in writing plainly, and straightforwardly, without any mysterious metaphors. It’s very self-explanatory. We get a kick out of writing extremely pop verses and slamming into unexpectedly rocky choruses.
Jamie: I go back and forth on how I feel about this song every so often. Sometimes I forget it exists, sometimes I think it’s kinda cool. One thing does stick with me though - it reminds me that I like to sidechain everything.
Hold On
Jamie: I was doing a bunch of writing/production stuff with a group of American musicians last year. There were loads of really cool ideas being sent around by people in a super wide range of styles for other people to work on, I loved it.
Justin Comeau sent me this cool keys part that is at the very beginning of Hold On and it was a bit of a lightbulb moment. I could hear exactly what it would sound like if it were an Anavae song...so I asked Justin if I could have it. The rest of the track basically wrote itself - and we added some super cool stuff in the studio using analogue synths, cut up vocal samples and stuff.
Becca: These were some of the only lyrics I had written about an important person in my life, and it just didn’t feel like enough. I didn’t feel like it accurately represented my feelings of loss, so quite early on, I expressed a dislike of this song. I couldn’t relate to Jamie’s excitement, or his eagerness to have it on the album, just like he couldn’t relate to my attachment to the song ‘Dirt.’ So eventually, to solve the issue, we traded, in order to find a middle ground.
Dirt
Jamie: I hate this song.
Becca: I think a part of me gets some kind of sick enjoyment from knowing how much Jamie hates this song. It’s such a ridiculous track, that slams and throws the listener around.
I’ve never owned an electric guitar, so my first demo version of this was me hammering out a progression on one string of an acoustic, and I’d say to Pete - I know it doesn’t sound right now, but I want some mad Queens of the Stone Age style guitars here. He took my clanky crap and developed it into something insane.
I wrote the first verse of this acapella in my bath, whilst I was singing to myself. “Taking baths in holy water, I tread your dirt all the way back home.” I was imagining rinsing off all of the horrible words someone had said about me. Washing away all of the bad feelings. As the song progressed the lyrics became more and more filled with rage, and I said all the spiteful things I wish I could get away with saying. I very rarely hate someone enough to want to write about them, but sometimes it’s impossible to avoid terrible people.
Smile
Becca: For me, there was something quite humorous about Jamie’s GIANT RIFF. It felt like play time, rather than something to be taken extremely seriously, so I rode the wave of playfulness and let my inner child say what she wanted to say, in a tantrum and a huff.
I had rediscovered my love for a band called Queenadreena, so had spent the week trying to mimic her tones. Whilst playing with the different sounds my voice could make, the lyrics for this track just poured out. I embraced the insanity I was feeling at the time, and let my inner childish character be as unhinged as she wanted to be.
Pete Miles often expressed an interest in hearing a middle 8 that felt like a world apart from the track it was in, so I wrote a middle 8 in the style of what I would write in a parallel universe, if I was solo folk musician.
Jamie: When I’m hashing out ideas for songs, I tend to just hit record and play a bunch of variations of chord progressions to a click and then come back later to move parts around. I accidentally linked the project to Splice (the software Becca and I use to send Logic projects back and forth when writing), so Becca got her hands on it before it was ready.
She ended up writing to my weird progressions that were played kind of out of time and didn’t necessarily make sense. Recreating all the little nuanced mistakes in the studio was not fun…
California:
Jamie: This is one of the most important songs we'll ever write. We were in a label deal we couldn't get out of - and they sent us to LA to write an album. We were carted around different studios with writers that had never heard our music before, and were given no direction for what we wanted to sound like. It felt really disconnected from what we wanted to achieve with our music. Seann Bowe was the first co-writer we worked with who sat us down, before even picking up a guitar, or sitting at the production desk and said "So...tell me your story...". We explained to him how we didn't want to be in California - and that we were only there in order to salvage a relationship with a label we didn't like.
The song is about how we didn’t want to go to California in the first place. This ended up being the only song we used from the trip.
Becca: Seann Bowe was the only writer who put such emphasis on writing songs that really meant something to the writer. The process wasn’t about trying to do something mainstream, or write something in the aim of trying to get sync deals, or high pay cuts. It was the first time on the trip we had really felt seen. I’ve also always been quite precious with my lyrics, so this was a really interesting exercise in opening up that process, and spit balling with two other people in the room. The lyrics were written by the three of us. It feels like such a beautiful collaboration during such a difficult time.
Anavae celebrated the arrival of the record with a sold out live show at St Pancras Old Church complete with live strings and choir and they’ll be hitting the road with Deaf Havana this week.
SEE ANAVAE LIVE:
Nov 06th Concorde 2, Brighton - w/ Deaf Havana
Nov 07th O2 Academy, Oxford - w/ Deaf Havana
Nov 08th Alexandra Palace Theatre, London - w/ Deaf Havana