Track by Track: MCRAE - How to Start A Fire
Manchester Indie-Poppers MCRAE took a moment to talk us through their recently released debut EP How to Start A Fire.
How to Start A Fire
This song was written in the later stages of the whole writing process. It’s vastly different to the rest of the tunes as it was a blank canvas, I played around with a poppy disco beat as part of the foundations, and tried putting that in a MCRAE context, then I wrote the bassline for the whole song first and just tried to find exciting ways to add layers of guitars to expand on the soundscape of the tune. I also wanted a big anthemic ending to the tune, using a simple but effective kind of philosophy. - (Aidan)- Lyrically this one is just kind of a love song for me, might actually be my first one!How to start a fire just came to me in the shower and felt right for a reasons. We felt like this song was a step away from what we’d put out before, so made it the title track. -(Jake)-
Subjective
Like most of the remainder of the ep, this was an old song we had which we’d played for years but I thought it had more to say, the structure for the song stayed the same I just re-wrote the verses and the ending. This is the most classical “indie” tune on the ep as when I was re-arranging it I thought, sod it, other bands play one chord in a chorus right? Its also the first time I really thought about using synthesisers as textures in our songs, this was mainly due to just having the freedom to play with the song and see what would happen if we went abit ‘the killers’ in the demo process - (Aidan) - I’ve had subjective written a long time now, it’s about what ever was happening with me at the time I guess, I remember writing it all in one go but after rearranging we had an empty section so I wrote that last part in the days running up to the EP -(Jake)
Lucy
Lucy is abit of a weird one, it was written years ago in jake’s bedroom in around 5 minutes, I came up with the chords and jake just sang over it and we called it a day. After re-writing subjective I thought it’d be a good exercise to do the same for this track, I took the same approach of using the foundations of the song and just trying to flesh it out, I knew the chorus was catchy with jake’s lyrics so went in with a attitude of ‘let’s make it a bit of a banger’ the main riff came really quickly after putting all the parts together which gave me time to play with tones to get the best reflection of what I envisioned the song sounding like as a final product. I’m a bit of a sucker for big ending so stole the chords for the ending from an old song we left on the cutting room floor and slapped it on the end. The song really came together when we were recording and the main flourishes of synthesisers and drum sounds came from Jordan (bass) and Joe (drums) which tied it all together - (Aidan) - Age old tale of guy meets mythical creature in bar whilst tripping -(Jake)-
Time Spent Freely
This song was written from scratch for the EP, it started with creating the drum loop and then the bassline, I was trying to write guitar riffs to lead the song and just felt it wasn’t impacting the same as the other songs were. This is when playing with synthesisers more on the other songs came in handy as I wanted to make the synth take the lead more in this one. With all this space created from having the looping drums and bass and the synth, I tried to do the same in the chorus, have big chords playing but leaving literal space in between playing them. This one came together really quickly when recording, the synth lines were already written, everyone knew their parts and we just focussed on getting the right energy to make the song sound big. - (Aidan) -
This song is another one written a little bit more recently than the others, it’s basically about looking in on a domestic abuse situation, the melody on the verses was really easy as Jordan’s doing most of the movement - I had the chorus melody from a previous tune and it all worked well, the ending has a few different vocal lines running which we thought gave the song a ‘big’ ending. -(Jake)-