Blog
Background to Songs: Floating with You, KHT
Written by Jimmy
Floating with You is a song off our fourth album, King Henry Tears, featuring our teenagers as lead vocalists!
Lyrics: Just a bit of fun nonsense, about a down and out couple, probably students, madly in love while ‘real life’ crashes down all around them. Luckily they are fully immune.
Musically: this is really all about Ed’s tune and our attempt to have a Juno-esque moment for our two teenagers. We asked Ed to deliver a Jack Johnson tune. Ed wrote the song on a couch in Spain, trying it out on Gus and Mike. Ed is particularly proud of how the songs moves seamlessly from chorus to the middle 8 and outro. Ed gets very excited about these things. We did a demo of this in Spain and then tried to re-create the mojo live in London. Took a very, very long time to get back to the feel of the Spanish version. All about Ed’s guitars, Mike’s percussion and Rob’s bass. And, of course, Jimmy on tin and duck whistles. That was easy bit. The hard bit was vocals, especially male. We churned through singers in and out of the band and couldn’t quite nail it. Then we gave it to Michael, almost as a counter to his depressing lyrics. He totally nailed it. That made us say – okay, this is for teenagers and we focused on Hannah for female folks. We let them come together and do a little duet. Michael just went right at it, without breaking a sweat, even though these lyrics are about as far away from Michael’s style as you can get. Sadly, Hannah suffers from the ‘chicken effect.’ The ‘sad chicken effect’ is all about the sad (for chickens) fact that the worse you trip them, the more they seem to lay eggs. Shove ’em in the dark and don’t let them move? More eggs. How does this apply to Hannah? Well, to get a classically trained vocalist to sing silly Juno tunes you basically need to her laugh. To laugh while singing, you basically need to knock her about and throw stuff at her. The more we disturbed her, the better she sang. Hannah, suffers from the ‘sad chicken effect.’ You heard it here first. And yes, that is Toby the dog on the track. Finally, we all think the coolest part of song is Michael’s guitar at the end. He was just goofing around between takes and did this track. Luckily the record button was on (with Jimmy in control of buttons this is more often just a coincidence) and we stuck with his take.
Recommendations: if you like this, listen to all of Michael’s leads and all of Hannah’s back up… Also, maybe Too Many Weddings off the first album, which is also having fun with love. But if you like the feel, then you’ll want to listen to Moldy Peaches
:
That’s it. Jimmy