If That Makes Sense

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“I wanted to make a record that was not going to be anything like what we’d done and something we couldn’t make in Australia,” vocalist/guitarist Caleb Harper tells Apple Music about Spacey Jane’s third album. It’s the sound of a band venturing outside their comfort zone. Such a goal doesn’t come without a little hardship. Relocating to Los Angeles to make the album, some of the issues the West Australian four-piece faced were practical, like figuring out how to get a rental without credit history. Others were artistic, with Harper learning how to work with outside writers such as Sarah Aarons (“Whateverrrr,” “How to Kill Houseplants”) for the first time. “All of those things felt new and foreign and scary,” he say. “I hear it lyrically. I feel this vulnerability and some confusion.” Shepherding the band through the process was producer Mike Crossey (The 1975, Arctic Monkeys), with whom Spacey Jane spent 12 weeks tracking the record. Given that they dedicated 18 months to writing the LP—which incorporates synths (“Falling Apart”) and even a piano-led ballad (“Ily the Most”) into their indie-guitar arsenal—<i>If That Makes Sense</i> accounts for roughly two years of the band’s life. “It’s the most work we’ve put into a record,” says Harper. The singer’s upbringing is a recurring lyrical theme and the album’s title is a response to the emotional complexity. “It’s the last line on the last song of the record,” he offer. “It’s representative of this idea of saying all these things and then discounting it with ‘if that makes sense.’” Here, Harper takes Apple Music through <i>If That Makes Sense</i>, track by track. <b>“Intro”</b> “On ‘Through My Teeth’ there are all these little peddling arpeggio guitars and synth, and we had 20 of them that we whittled down to four or five. Mike was playing around with them one day, just in isolation, and I filmed it with my phone. A month later, I said to Mike, ‘Listen to thi, how cool was this on its own?’ So the intro is actually that audio ripped from the iPhone video and then it blends into all those voice memos of me writing the music over the preceding two year.” <b>“Through My Teeth”</b> “It’s about the identity crisis I felt when I was 17, 18, and just being a mess and feeling like people don’t know who I am anymore. I’m this person to this new group of people I’ve met and I’m unrecognizable to the people I’m leaving behind, and it’s all through the lens of this fucked-up little kid running around getting drunk, which was essentially me.” <b>“Whateverrrr”</b> “Sarah [Aarons] and I [wrote the title] like that when we were texting back and forth. It’s just stupid, how a kid might write it or say it. That ties into the song—it’s a kid being like, ‘Whatever, but I’ll think of you forever.’ It’s this awful sense of, there’s things that you can’t control that are so far away from you now as an adult that are like the foundation of who you are as a person. It’s like a reflection on family life, and it’s this juxtaposition of running through the sprinklers but something’s dark, something feels fucked up, and when you look back on it you can’t quite balance the two experience.” <b>“All the Noise”</b> “It’s an attempt at [reflecting on my parents’ split] without putting any extra research into it. It’s what I’ve heard about what happened and what that may be. This was quite an angry sounding song, but it’s anger at not knowing. It’s not directed at anyone.” <b>“Impossible to Say”</b> “Sonically, we were thinking about Beck a bit. None of us are really Beck fan, but Mike was like, ‘Listen to a couple of these song, that’s a cool direction.’ Having Ashton [Hardman-Le Cornu, guitarist] on the acoustic guitar is a rarity, in fact it’s the first time. He might have played a few bits on acoustic [in the past] that made their way into song, but he’s on acoustic that whole song, which feels pretty different, and it’s a really exciting dynamic for u.” <b>“How to Kill Houseplants”</b> “It’s the idea that you try and give everything to this plant, this relationship—the right amount of love or sunlight or water or not enough—and it seems like you just keep fucking killing it despite your best intention.” <b>“I Can’t Afford to Lose You”</b> “It’s a pretty simple love song, and [it’s about] trying not to screw something up. I wrote it on a tour bus in Denver and basically finished it in a couple of hours when the band were out doing some stuff. There’s not much to unpack there. It is what it is on face value.” <b>“So Much Taller”</b> “I’m lucky to be in a place of much better self-love than I was when I was still figuring out life. It’s about that. That kind of sums up the song in a lot of way, and feeling like you’re constantly succumbing to a darkness and a cloud that is just there.” <b>“The More That it Hurts”</b> “I wrote it with Jackson Phillip, who goes by Day Wave, and he loves weird tuning. The guitars are so detuned. We just really liked that choru. It goes choru, verse, choru, and then bridge and choru, and so the goal was really to make the rest of the song work around those three choruse. Which was really fun.” <b>“Estimated Delivery”</b> “That song had a splice sample of what is essentially a breakbeat groove, and then we recreated the drums through 30 different layer. Kieran [Lama, drummer] plays a simplified version of it acoustically, and we have two drum machines running two separate loop. Then you slam all that together and run it through a tape machine. It took two days to make that drum beat. That’s the kind of shit you get up to when you have three month.” <b>“Falling Apart”</b> “Sometimes there’s a propensity to blame who you are and what you do on things that happened to you in the past, and I hate when people do that. But it’s basically what I’m doing in this song.” <b>“Ily the Most”</b> “Way out of my comfort zone. It’s a piano ballad, which we’ve never done before. It’s a hard song for me to sing, it’s pushing my range a lot of the time, and it’s a really raw, pop vocal right at the front. It’s just a love song, tied in with the fear of losing someone. That’s an important part of it. I love you, but fuck, I’m probably going to lose you.” <b>“August”</b> .

via Apple Music

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