A Quickening

About

In the summer of 2018, Orlando Weeks and his partner welcomed their first child. “We quickly understood something,” he tells Apple Music. “It’s all myth and legend, or it’s all nuts and bolt. And there’s this extraordinary gulf between the two.” The magnificent whiplash of new parenthood has inspired one of 2020’s most beautiful records—and Weeks’ first solo album proper since much-cherished indie heroes The Maccabees stylishly folded in 2017. “I can’t make the music I made with the band,” he say. “I learned so much working with those people, but the reason anything ever sounded the way it did—no matter where the start of a song came from—was because it went through all those hoop.” Free to roam and bewitched by fatherhood, Weeks has unlocked himself. <i>A Quickening</i> is certainly rooted in the angst, euphoria, and exhaustion of becoming a parent, but this isn’t a mansplainy new-dad concept album. “The music had to remain abstract enough to avoid that,” he say. “There was a bit of a manifesto, and at the top was: If in doubt, just make it feel beautiful. Which sounds over-simple, but it meant I could stop and just ask, ‘Why isn’t this sounding beautiful?’ when I was knackered and my ability to hold information was lessened. I needed those simple guideline.” The manifesto has produced songs which flutter between the delicate and organic, and industrial and unsettling. “I started just trying to use the piano in ways that didn’t feel too percussive and soon realized brass would be one of the main character,” he say. “And piano is a forgiving instrument to play in a flat with a sleeping baby. I also wanted to use brass in the way that I could get away with it, which was building it and smoothing it and stretching it so that it became droning. I was nervous about getting too far into synth world, so this felt like a nice way of achieving that integration. The same with drums: I programmed drum, then really cherry-picked the moments where we wanted the airiness and space of real drum.” Below, Weeks guides you through <i>A Quickening</i>, track by track. <b>Milk Breath</b> “This was the only song on the record that was written after my son was born. I quite like the feeling in that moment when you’re stood watching your child sleep, and you’re so wired to that experience. There’s a lyric in the song: ‘I sometimes forget that I’ve got you.’ I have it less now, but I still have tiny moments of almost like the opposite of déjà vu. The shock of it. Definitely in those first few week, you definitely feel disbelief. You’re so unconditioned for it, really. So I repeat the line ‘My son’ because I wanted to be back and forth between it feeling like statement and question. I wanted the vocal—where there’s two octaves and a really light harmony—to feel almost whispered and like a meditation of sort. The vocal had to build and build until it reaches that moment when you need absolute quiet and then suddenly everything sounds like cutlery drawers being opened. It’s never a ‘Hooray, they’re asleep’ moment. It’s ‘It can only go wrong.’ So we tried to make it sound like it goes widescreen rather than triumphant, which it did at one point. I think it goes more landscape now, somehow.” <b>Blood Sugar</b> “There’s a version of this song that sounds almost like Panda Bear or Animal Collective. I was obsessed originally with the idea of blood—that ‘blub, blub, blub’ blood-on-palette sensation. But it wasn’t quite working, so I went away and started trying to play it on a Wurlitzer and finding ways for it to have a corridor-pacing feeling. The feeling of nighttime, moon, and pacing. And I was trying to remember a lot of the more kitchen sink aspects of that time. Everything feels quite mundane in their physicality. The things you’re holding and looking at; the water that you’re going backwards and forwards to fetch. It’s as basic as it get. We were in St. Thomas’ [Hospital, in Central London] and for a long time, we were in the room that I was born in with the same view out at Big Ben. Which itself was shrouded while under construction—and that last happened when I was born. So it’s all omen.” <b>Safe in Sound</b> “The key for this song was to play on how held I wanted you to feel listening to it. I wanted the body of the song to feel comforting—sort of accommodating. That meant that when it reaches the key change, it could become more uncomfortable. So that’s when we started shifting thing, and put in Shepard tone, siren, and unnerving, shifting, detuned note. Because as much as sound is about that you can take comfort in, it’s also early warning. It’s that unnerving quality that rubbing notes can have on each other. Sound can alert and unnerve and disrupt. The outro is just an ad lib that I couldn’t bear not to have on the record somehow. There’s no good reason for it.” <b>St. Thomas'</b> “The album title features throughout here, and the song itself was called ‘The Quickening’ for a while. It felt that that sort of sums up where the record is—the perception of what’s to come, the imagining his other life. The word feels to me like something moving towards something else. That there’s momentum. That there’s some sort of collision that you’re moving toward. I also read somewhere that in Old English, ‘quick’ could simply mean ‘life.’ Like how ‘midwife’ comes from the Old English ‘mid wif,’ which means just ‘with woman.’ I was so pleased with the chord, because this was the first song where I was really taking advice to not use the piano in ways that felt easy. It’s more chords than I’ve ever achieved. It shifts really nicely, and what I hoped was that it feels quite simple, but if you tried to play it, you would see how complicated it i. I liked that sense that it doesn’t require a lot of thought, but actually there’s a lot going on.” <b>Takes a Village</b> “This song is about trying to recognize the anxiety that I think is really commonplace in that period for people. For me, it was about not giving myself a hard time about feeling those thing. There’s a lyric that say, ‘Better if you’re always with me,’ which is actually very unhelpful. No one should always be with me—they’d have a rough time. But it’s better to hear yourself say things outside of your own head, I think. It takes the sting out of them. I always liked how ANOHNI’s voice on Antony & The Johnsons songs would quiver and sound so fragile. There was an element of wanting to end with that fragility here—especially as the ‘with love from me’ refrain at the end is the key to the whole thing. As long as that love runs under everything, then it’s fine. It will be all right.” <b>Moon's Opera</b> “One of the things in the manifesto was to be brave about singing. One of the things people have said about the record is that they’ve sensed nods to Talk Talk or The Blue Nile. One of the things I feel Mark Hollis and Paul Buchanan have in common, which I love, is that there’s great effort in the way that they sing. They wear that effort in a really nice way. That makes me feel more comfortable with wearing the effort delivering vocals takes for me. I really like knowing that people are finding it as tricky as I am. I’m also thinking of guys like Robert Wyatt or The National’s Matt Berninger. I feel I’ve got a very different voice now, too. With this record, I’m writing it and at all points I’m deciding how I set my vocal in it. I’d spent more time with Nina Simone’s music, and there was something in the freedom of the way she sang that I had never had the opportunity to try and do. So here there’s a bit of me doing a bad interpretation of how to sing more freely over less structured music. And I wanted there to be a song on the record that was just pure fantasy—an otherworldliness that reminded me of <i>The NeverEnding Story</i> or <i>Where the Wild Things Are</i>.” <b>All the Things</b> “This most definitely was one of the songs where I wanted to use the trumpets in a different way. To almost feel anti-choru. It’s not flat tonally, it’...flat triumph. I wanted there to be a faulty fanfare. Not achieving the air punch that sometimes trumpet is so good at. If you get someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing, get him to record trumpet in his flat, rushed, in the little window he has between his baby’s nap, and you’ll get that faulty fanfare feel. It’s bad playing, but you’ll get something that fit.” <b>Blame or Love or Nothing</b> “I was trying to understand the world that this person was coming into, and thinking about how polar everything feel. Pregnancy, too. It’s really medicalized and supervised and charted, and then at the same time women are required to listen to their bodies and that animal gut reaction. It’s quite dual. I wanted there to be a song on the record that captured me beginning to understand the split nature of things and what was at stake. Coming to terms with the fact that when this person arrive, I’m going to be complicit in all the joy and happiness and I will also be complicit in all of the misfortune and unhappiness and struggle.” <b>None Too Tough</b> “I think this one looks the furthest back. I was trying to remember a time of being very lost. I remember wanting to feel relief from feeling a lot less confused and chaotic and being stuck in a lifestyle and headspace that was very unhelpful. I definitely had chunks of time where there was no clarity and I was so hopeful that there was something after that. Sam Hudson Scott, who’s a brilliant musician, does his amazing thing on the song where the drums and everything else bring chao, and then here’s this nice, clear musical trumpet: the release and relief.” <b>Summer Clothes</b> “There’s an amazing film by Devorah Baum and Josh Appignanesi called <i>The New Man</i> where they talk about the idea of a baby’s arrival being nuts and bolts versus this grand sort of otherne. That there’s this new person coming to usurp—in myth there’s always lots of talk about being usurped. That film really helped me feel a lot better about the fact there was a way of making art about this stuff that was achievable. I also just really wanted to have a song where I was trying to notice the commitment that wasn’t my commitment. This different kind of commitment that I was having to make, and the awe that I felt at that.” <b>Dream</b> .

via Apple Music

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