Track by Track: Orpine - ‘Grown Ungrown’
Heist or Hit newbies Orpine have just released their debut full-length album ‘Grown Unknown’, they took a moment to talk to us about it - track by track.
Same Tree
Oliver - This was the first Orpine song I wrote that I liked and for me it was the catalyst for taking this further than the two of us writing songs. It was pretty fully formed from the beginning - all of the demos follow the same structure as the master recording. Lyrically it focuses on the differing coping approaches people implement to survive the same problem and how in a relationship being able to draw from two systems creates a bigger safety net in which to fall when it gets too much. It’s a song about love and support.
In Line
Eleanor - I started this song off pacing round my living room singing over a repeating guitar line on my phone. I felt like it could be an actual song when I found the little melody for the chorus. It’s about the time that I met my partner Tessie, and the feeling of our lives being thrown up and open. I wanted to try and capture the way she sees the world around her, never misses the changing light, or a bird hidden in a tree, or a dog half a mile down the road.
Oliver - We weren’t sure whether In Line would make it onto the record, it had these dirge-like drums I had written and it dragged the whole song down. We got Demelza Mather, the drummer on this record, back into the studio in the final few days to see if she could fix it and she came up with the groove on the master and it lifted the entire thing.
Climbing Black Hill
Oliver - This is the only song on the album that we wrote entirely together. We had climbed Black Hill in the Scottish Borders that morning and stood above cloud level looking out over these little protruding peaks of distant hills and it was a special moment. The lyrics focus on the freeing feeling of being within nature and the restorative powers of experiencing beauty with friends.
Eleanor - After we’d written this, I remember us both just really enjoying singing our parts together over and over again. It was so nice to be singing about a shared experience we’d just had, and hear our voices working really nicely together.
Hands
Eleanor - Hands is a song remembering my Grandad, and thinking about the skills and traits that have been passed from him to me. When I sing the song, I‘m always back in my Grandparent’s garden, in the comfort of family. It’s such a simple song, we knew we needed to tread carefully with any extra parts we wrote for it. I love Oliver’s harmonies coming in right at the end, along with his piano part. It feels like a friend coming to join me in the garden.
Migrating Geese Overhead
Oliver - Migrating Geese Overhead is about the fear of settling and the places your mind goes when you’re struggling with comfort. Being in love is an all-consuming thing that allows fear and doubt to operate untethered. It's a song about yearning for diversion from a narrow path and all of the consequences that come with taking that decision. The title is as much about movement and migration as it is taken from Demelza mishearing the line “climb the Ural peaks” as “something about yellow geese”.
Eleanor - This song was the first one we had to battle through to get it to the right place. I’ve got a video of us going stir crazy to a loop of a hand clap and a clarinet honk. It wasn’t until we rehearsed with other musicians and fleshed out those honks with a bunch of other instruments that we realised our weird idea might actually work. I love how big it feels in the second half of the song now, with a chorus of singers and musicians behind us.
Sondern
Oliver - Sondern is a song about separation and grief and defeat. I wrote it around the time of the first Brexit deadline. Sondern is a German conjunction that derives from an old Germanic word which meant to separate. I liked the idea that this use of the word is outdated and it had morphed into something it was never originally intended to be. This is one of those songs that completely fell out of me. I have no recollection of writing a single part of it, it was just there one day. All I remember is that it came really late on in writing for the album.
Dissolve
Eleanor - A few years ago Oliver and I made a little EP with our friend Billy where we each wrote and recorded a song over the course of a day. Dissolve came about through that, and we thought it’d be a nice addition to this album that we’ve made together years down the line. Nothing has really changed about the song since that first recording, except that this version has our friends Lan McArdle and Rachel Kenedy singing beautiful harmonies!
And Sunlight
Oliver - This song began with the guitar part. I’d been listening to The Milk Eyed Mender by Joanna Newsom a lot and really had the sound and feel of a harp in my head and wanted to create something that sounded like that. For the words I tried a new kind of writing in which I focused on a very specific memory and tried to write about it in as much detail as possible. It’s a memory of being on the boating lake in Parque del Retiro in Madrid and lying in the hot sun and feeling truly happy. This is my favourite song on the record. I love the way Eleanor sings every step of the way with me and I loved arranging the instrumentation at the end. A huge thank you to Halena Pritchard and Saskia Janicki for doing the leg work to pull the melody out of my mind.
Two Rivers
Eleanor - Two Rivers is about one very specific and simple feeling - being held, still, in water, and the peace that comes from feeling that life is temporarily on hold. It came about orally rather than through any ‘played’ instrument - which was a new way of writing for me. Apart from Fresh Water Fishing, it was the last song written for the album, so it feels like a nice way of wrapping it up.
Fresh Water Fishing
Oliver - This was the final song I wrote for the record. It was recorded in one take halfway up Fremington Edge in the Yorkshire Dales with only myself, Eleanor, Jonny and our friend Chris present. It’s a reflection on the childhood that I wish I had had. I wasn’t an innocent teenager tentatively stepping out into the world, I flew out of the traps in an amphetamine-haze and missed a lot of the beauty and purity of growing up. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties I learned to slow down and take things in. I owe a lot of that to Eleanor.