A new single! Which was of course always going to be the album’s other lightweight track, ‘7:38am’. Though a fairly simple idea, this is the second oldest song on the album, and it’s had an interesting history from it's original inception to finally appearing on an big boy record. Well, I use 'interesting' in the loosest terms possible...it's not so much a story as a sequence of very bland and commonplace events.
But before I drag you down our dank and sunless memory lane, take a moment to check out the video that Cosmic Joke made for the single's release.
So - once upon a time...
It was written about eight years ago in the Blairgowrie days of the band, if these were even the ‘days of the band’ at all. Sean and I were there, complimented by a cellist, guitarist and drummer. It was written much in the same way as Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ and Queen’s ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’: ie, in five minutes, to order, for a specific need.
We were about to play what we thought would be our biggest show to date. It was at a gala in a large park in Dundee. By this description, our young minds imaginatively conjured up images of a Glastonbury-style festival, complete with a crowd that was chanting our names as we finished a long and triumphant set. The problem was that we only had like five songs. So, just before leaving we sat down and wrote ‘7:38am’. It was, of course, totally rocking, with a big cello riff and really funky kit drums. Unlike the present version, it’s main body was a jumpy, lively guitar strummed in compound time. Rock music, man. 666! YAHH!
Anyway, when we got to the ‘festival’ it turned out to be some fun park with a stage thrown in, the main purpose of which was to give the guys who were running it some work experience. In the entire expanse of the field there were about 15 families with small children (all easily about twenty metres from the gig), a purple dinosaur, and a balloon salesman. The guy in charge introduced us as ‘The Mediators’ and then put nothing through the P.A. except Sean’s voice. It was disaster in the most thorough sense of the word, and to cap it all off we nearly crashed the car on the way back.
Aye well. It was worth it for the song. We originally named it ‘Cobwebs’, and it wasn’t till two years or so later that it gained it’s current title. Sean and I had been fannying about as first year students one night – not doing anything particularly rad, just fannying – and we realised it was morning time already. Too late to go to bed before we’d have to get up again, we went to record some songs in the laundry room ‘to harness the vibe’. Yes, we were assholes, but so were you.
Anyway, as it happened the vibe was pretty good: bit of reverb, bit of stone, bit of glass. Your classic laundry room feel. The only song we ended up working on was ‘Cobwebs’, and we finished with a version that sounded sleepy and peaceful. It was just an acoustic guitar fleshed out with lots of vocal harmonies, though with the same rhythm of our original version. When we finished it the time was…well, I’m sure you can guess where this is going.
When I learnt to play piano we wrote a really nice keys riff that seemed to make a good case for changing it to 4/4, and when the rest of the guys joined us in the year after that this was the version we beefed up to full band proportions. Check out this video of some pretty lassies having a dance to it.
It was around about this stage that it appeared on our EP ‘The Sea Wall’. But after playing it at every show for two years, it was beginning to get a bit tired and old: we all knew that it wasn’t the most exiting of all possible arrangements. When preparing to record ‘Take No Thought For Tomorrow’ we reexamined the fine details of every song, but there was something about ‘7:38am’ that wouldn’t budge. It was too ingrained in everybody. We’d played it so often that the muscle memory made us appreciate as something purely mechanical. After a few abortive attempts at re-arranging it, we ignored the need to do so and gave up.
When we came back to it in the studio, Jim encouraged us to go right back to basics. We spent a couple of days building it back from the bottom up, starting with a uke lick that Mark had been playing around the original chords. Arranging in the studio is a god damn luxury: you get a much more objective view on how you want things to sound. I think it’s because of this that we managed it’s sparse, empty feel, that is so different from what we normally do.
And last night we re-arranged it AGAIN, and it sounds more awesome than ever. Adz on drums, anyone? That's how you make rock music.
So – hope you enjoy it! Ta ra!
ROCK AND ROLL!
Al.
Al.
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