Bag Raiders

About

“We just did 12 songs and then we were like, ‘All right, cool. It's a record,’” Jack Glass tells Apple Music of Bag Raiders’ self-titled 2010 album. The electronic duo—Glass together with Chris Stacey—were already staples in the Sydney clubbing and DJ scenes, and their full-length debut allowed them to create a more fully realized body of work, immortalizing the sounds, styles, and ideas they’d toyed with in booths and on stages for years beforehand. “That was a time in Sydney where there was a lot of really fun stuff going on,” he says. “And we felt really like a part of this scene that was exploding at the time. A lot has happened [since then], but we've kept touring and playing songs from the record, so it’s never really gone out of our lives.” The statement rings especially true for their hit “Shooting Stars,” which immediately became a club mainstay upon its release and has since enjoyed renewed waves of fame thanks to memes and online videos. “The label, which was all our friends, were like, ‘Cool, well done, guys. That's great. We're going to put it out.’ And the whole thing was just so quick and easy and painless. We later realized that’s not always case, for it to be that smooth, but it just flowed. It was so easy.” Below, Glass talks through some of the highlights on <i>Bag Raiders</i>. <b>Castles in the Air</b> “At the time, we were listening to a lot of French stuff, like Roulé, sample-based. I remember thinking it was really cool to start it with a kick drum. It was in some way symbolic of the kind of album we were trying to make. It was rooted in the dance world and in clubs, and as part of that whole movement. Now I remember when we were doing that song, and there's a piano house beat right down in the middle, and it would be relative to how many drinks I'd have before the show whether or not that was well-executed or not.” <b>Sunlight</b> “That was in collaboration with Dan Black. He was in Paris at the time. We’ve since gone on to become really good friends, but at that time we just did it over the internet. An interesting experience to write a song with someone that you hadn't met and didn't know too much about, and just do it over email. I remember emailing back and forth lyrics and stuff like that, and then sending little voice notes or whatever back and forth. It was a novel way to do it.” <b>Shooting Stars</b> “We'd written it as an instrumental, and then at the last minute we were like, ‘You know what? Maybe this would be cool with a vocal.’ And so we quickly wrote it, and then we had our friend Rhys come and sing it. We had to submit it to the label, and this was the day before. It had a good feeling around it, and we were DJing a lot at the time. We used to actually play the beginning bit and then we'd mix out in the breakdown, because we were like, ‘It’s too cheesy,’ or ‘It's too poppy,’ or something like that. And I remember then, we were DJing somewhere, a friend was in the booth, and we started to mix it out a bit, and he was just like, ‘Nah. Play it. What are you guys doing? You guys are idiots. Play this. Let the ending play.’ And then we did. And then people liked it. We've never stopped playing it. People never seem to get sick of it. And then it had this crazy second and third and fourth life. Many people tell me they got married to that song or they lost their virginity to that song, it’s funny.” <b>So Demanding</b> “That had a weird life of its own because it became really popular in South America. People would come down to us and say, ‘Why didn't you play “So Demanding”? What's going on?’ It was a nice slow jam on the album. It was a bit more downtempo and groovy. We were listening to a lot of ’70s funk, and that song is based on that. There's no verses or choruses there. We started out in the club, we started out as DJs, and even when we were making a slow jam, it’s like it has more of a dance-track structure.” <b>Snake Charmer</b> “We still play this all the time. People seem to love it and have a connection to it. It was really fun to make, all the percussive stuff and the flute leads and everything. I remember at the time thinking it doesn't really sound like anything we were hearing in the club. It's just such a weird mix of different parts. It’s not the clubbiest song on that record, but compared to what we were listening to at the time, it was all really aggressive. It was all pretty DIY in a back shed. I think we found that really cool flute sound and we knew we wanted to do something with it. Even the percussive stuff, I'm pretty sure it was all samples.” <b>Way Back Home</b> “That was a bit tougher as well, a bit darker. That song was really transformed when we got our friend Martin [Solomon] to sing on it. He was in the band WIM at the time. If they haven’t written the part, it's not always that easy for them to come in and nail it. It might not be in their range, or they might not feel it, or it’s uncomfortable for whatever reason. But with Martin, it came back and the whole song was just transformed in this really amazing way into something that was just so much richer and cooler and more interesting than the demo, which would have had me or Chris singing on it. What you learn from that is, if you overthink things you can fuck them up, while if it comes out easily and quickly, then it's probably good.”

via Apple Music