This started out as me practising piano on a midi keyboard wurlitzer at my old studio, I recorded it on my phone and stretched it in time. Chopped it up and layered it, put a vague structure around it, slapped an 808 under it and called it a day.
After that I imagined a melodic line, tried it on guitar but I didn’t like it, so I recorded my clarinet using an SM7b resting on my desk, and added a few swirling clarinet parts.
At this point it gets fleshed out considerably more, detail gets added, guitar parts recorded, chopping boards get sampled, everything gets real cool and I think I’m done.
THEN, Hades does a session with previous collaborator Lucy Wroe, who plays him a demo of our track She’s Like A Dream, he gets in touch and I send him this to play around with, a week or so later he sends me his stems. I drop them into the track, expand the structure a bit more, things are still good.
After a CONSIDERABLE break of working on this (maybe 2 months), Hades sends me some new vocal stems, and I throw myself back into working on it, in my new studio. I realised that the basic 808 that I threw in at the beginning is still there, and is sticking out a bit now that everything is a bit looser. So I record a few takes of me playing bass and chop them up, before throwing everything away and recording one full take, which I kept. I also record myself playing the bass line on an acoustic guitar, in an empty room, and use bits of it to cut in. I start treating Hades’ voice with lots of tape delay, and strip parts of the wurlitzer track to tape, things get very wanky.
Lucy comes in and records a few lines of Hades’ vocal and octave above and I treat them heavily with reverb and again, chop everything very harshly.
I think that's everything, here are some odd bits…
I stole the cheering transition from the Super Great Kids Stories podcast, the chch sound going into the final section is stolen directly from the Lucy Wroe song “Upjump” which I produced, the cafe sounds throughout are from a collection of BBC SFX CDs, the tremolo transition going into the breakdown is stolen from an unreleased song of mine, the same song I stole the synth from for “Better” by Lucy Wroe.