Over five days in July 2022 a group of Northern musicians worked with Manchester collective Honeyfeet at Blueprint Studios and Sacred Trinity Church to write and record new music. Using the concept of Truth to Tape, with just their instruments and interests to use as inspiration, the group ended the week with six new tunes!
Speaking about the different songs, guitarist Isaac describes them as “quite grungy and post-rock heavy with a bit of brass in one. There’s quite a dissonant R&B, jazzy one. Then one of the later ones is very soul-heavy, quite bluesy. Generally quite spacey and vibey, not like your regular tunes.”
Bassist and guitarist Lala adds, “It was about not trying to make something that fits the mould of a type of song. It was more about whatever you felt was stuck in your head. This project was a channel to getting that out and turning it into something together.”
Press play on the six track EP, plus some behind the scenes commentary from the Truth to Tape team about how the songs were made and what inspired them...
Track by Track Commentary
Read on for the written transcripts of the above audio commentaries for each song...
Balance
Samuella: Balance to me was a track about how you can't have one thing without having the other. When we were coming up with the lyrics and the theme of the song, we were talking about themes like no good without evil, that type of thing. That's kind of what I think Balance is about. Coming to acceptance with having both of them, not just the good and just the bad. And we brought different perspectives on the theme of balance. I wrote mine on how humans are in a cycle of just wanting the good, which is literally impossible so we need to break out of it, and taking responsibility. Owning up to being in the wrong, coming to terms with it, accepting that this is what it is, just leave it alone.
Allergy
Lala: I enjoyed recording this because usually when you’re recording, you're trying to play all the notes as perfectly as possible. But this was literally about finding the most disgusting notes that you could. Making it sound awful so when it got to that nice resolve bit, it was this complete relief.
Eleanor: We didn't really have anything solid that we wanted to do. But the room was bright orange and we all connected on the feeling that the orange colour of the room was a bit eerie and a bit uncomfortable. Which was how we came up with Uncomfortable Orange as a title, which then shifted to Allergy because we were talking about fruit allergies. We had this synth playing over a perfect C major. And I thought, what if we played anything but what is in the C major chord?
Letting Go
Rioghnach: See, you don't wanna just workshop people. I don't like to call what we do work. And I don't like to call it a shop. Really I just wanted to get to know everybody. We did everything but sniff each other's pits! We got to really know each other, and we got to love each other. When you sit in a room together and you play a drone, and then you ask everybody for a note to come out of them, you can start off by throwing it out into the room to see what it looks like. But really what you're asking is what's your mark on the world? What is the sound you wanna make in front of me now? And the sound that they wanted to make in front of me at the start of the week, and then at the end of the week, was totally different. Everybody was polite at the start. But by the end we were in it together. We just made a chant out of a really beautiful conversation that we had. It's poetry, what we wrote together. And we had loads of fun bouncing notes off the walls at each other. And notes were allowed to get ugly! As long as you resolve them again. I love that game of bending a note to see it go sour, and then the relief of when you resolve it afterwards. I could talk about that track for weeks. It made my heart burst a wee bit listening to that.
Ordinary Grunk
Will: Isaac wrote that one. It was a very heavy, grungy type of track, and it came to us really quick. Because we just started playing and then it came out when everyone was improvising. Isaac had already got the lyrics down on his phone without anyone even realising. So it was made in less than an hour. And then I wrote the sax solo on it and that just came to me as well.
Phill: We wrote in lots of different ways over the week. We had composite production, hip hoppy sort of things, and we had communal writing in a space. This one was done in the first two hours of playing together. It was very "that's a riff. Oh, let's do that bit. Let's do that bit". Literally like a garage rock band. The thing that I love about it is all the additional stuff, the saxes, the textures and also it's really raw. It's got no apologies to it. And I think when you write something really quickly like that and then you throw it out there and it's done, you don't go back and polish the edges. It has that energy to it.
The Change
Anreé: The idea was literally just about change, and accepting that certain things are going to happen and you can't exactly change the fact that it happened. You can only change what's going to happen. And that was sort of the original idea.
Rioghnach: Change doesn't always happen when you want it to, does it? It's a bit rude. It's a bit abrupt. It's a bit unintentional. It's uninvited sometimes. But yeah, I think it’s a very good dissection about ephemerality, and how nothing really stays the same.
Lala: I thought it was really interesting how we recorded the vocals for that one, when everybody sang on it. There were only a few of us who had headphones on and could hear the track, but we connected everybody else to it by leading that and then everybody followed. It just felt like there was a real unity there because we all connected together.
Samuella: I felt at first it was gonna be like “oh, everybody's watching me.” But then when you get in there, it's like “oh, they're really helping me.” It's that thing where you feel really comfortable. It's like a safe space.
Will: You felt quite close to people because when you're singing around a lot of other people, it's something that a lot of people are quite embarrassed about. So when everyone's doing it, you don't really feel that embarrassed about it. And it's almost like you're kind of forced to show a more fragile side of yourself that you usually would be quite embarrassed to show. But when everyone's doing it, it makes you feel quite close to them.
Voices
Jenni: There's a lot always going on with social media and the news. Like everything is always there. And it's quite difficult sometimes to get away from it. There's stuff that's going on halfway across the world that all of a sudden is your problem, that you can't do anything about. And sometimes it gets quite overwhelming. And that's where the song came from. Being like, it's okay to not care about everything all at once. Sometimes you need to just be like “okay, shut up now”.
