SPRING’ – Part Two in Series of Four Seasonal Releases featuring the tracks: The Coming of Spring/Lullaby of London which will be FREE to Download Exclusively from www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk from 13th APRIL 2009. It's accompanied by a Two-Track Limited CD in hand-screened sleeve – Available Exclusively at Live Shows. From snowdrops to daffodils here comes the follow-up - Double A-Side Single, ‘SPRING’. Once again, available to download for free exclusively via God Is In The TV [from 13Th April] and once again, in print and available only at shows courtesy of Strange Torpedo Records/// [from 11thApril].
FREE DOWNLOADS:
A – The Coming of Spring
(L.Jenner/V.Roccoforte/M.Safer/G.Andruzzi)From the 2003 album ‘Echoes’ by The Rapture. Suggested for the project by Nicholas Miller.Vox - Maeve, Emmet, Vicky, Matth, Ian, Markus Acoustic Guitar - MarkusElectric Guitar - Emmet Violin - Vicky Bass - Ian Drums - OskarPercussion - MaeveA - Recorded by Their Hearts Were Full of Spring and Robert King in February 2009 at Z-Noise and Bedrock Studios. Produced byMarkus.
AA – Lullaby of London
(S.MacGowan)From The Pogues’ 1988 album ‘If I Should Fall from Grace with God’. Suggested for the project by Jacqueline Martins.Vox - Markus Guitar - Emmet Accordion - Vicky Synths - MarkusAA - Recorded by Their Hearts Were Full ofSpring in February 2009 at Bedrock Studios. Produced by Markus.
We’ve seen ‘WINTER’ come and go, bringing with it: Over SEVEN THOUSAND unique downloads via God Is In The TV. An overwhelmingly positive embrace from the breadth of the blogosphere. A completely SOLD OUT physical release through Strange Torpedo Records. And more gushing praise than should be permitted amongst strangers...“Some of you might remember The Pixies doing a rather good version of this Neil Young track some years ago. Well this version is better...”“...evokes the chill winds of December...” we now jointly present the SPRING downloads
THWFOS lead singer Markus talks about the choice of covers for SPRING:
Choosing the songs for our SPRING single was a much harder task than we’d anticipated. For a long time the two front-runners were Nirvana’s In Bloom and our signature tune Their Hearts Were Full of Spring. But in the end the latter seemed too obvious a choice, and both tracks - despite their obvious differences - posed us a similar problem: how to make a new version that’s different, interesting, and not justa pointless and inferior version of the original? We couldn’t come up with an answer to that question, so we ditched those two songs and instead chose a brace that leant themselves much more willingly to re-interpretation and the playfulness that’s at the heart of the idea behind this whole Seasons project.[Art by Sophie Rautenbach]
The Coming of Spring///Originally by The Rapture
This song might not have been an obvious choice for us, but the sparseness of the original’s arrangement – just drums, bass, one guitar, two vocals - gave us loads of room to fill in the space however we pleased and take it somewhere totally different to the original. I’d just bought a box -set of Sergio Leone DVDs and was immersed in Spaghetti-Western-World, so the Ennio Morricone-style outro - which was the initial spark of the idea for our take on the track - kind of suggested itself (the original has something of that in it already, but we played it up a lot more strongly). From there I could work out what the instrumentation had to be (lots of voices, acoustic guitar, bass, strings, percussion) and apply that to the rest of the track. I’m still not quite sure how the versescame to be some kind of East-European folk / calypso hybrid, but I think it works, so I’m happy to take the credit and call it my idea!I hadn’t decided how to arrange the vocals before we started recording, but once Maeve had sung hers it was obvious that itwould be the lead. There’s a certain ennui in her delivery that has a calming effect on the track which could otherwise have felt pretty frantic with all that percussion going on. But as it’s her job to play all that frantic percussion when we play live I think I might have given her a tough job to try and pull it off at our next show…
Lullaby of London///Originally by The Pogues
“Can we get rid of all the folk?” The answer to Ian’s question, as we tried to decide how to approach this song, was not quite, but nearly. The Pogues’ original is so rich and colourful and dense with it’s instrumentation that there was no room to do anything new or different with it without first stripping away all those layers and starting again with just the bare bones of the melody and chord structure. From there we tried to add as little as possible, making sure that what we did add didn’t reference the original in any way. So although our foundation still sounds pretty folk-y on paper –Emmet’s finger-picked acoustic guitar and Vicky’s accordion (its recorded debut, we think, although she did buy it second hand, so who knows for sure?) – we kept it simple and unfussy enough to do nothing more than support the vocal melody, which takes centre stage. And when the wobbly synths appear it definitely doesn’t feel like you’re listening to a folk song any more.I also attempted a little experimental production technique on this track that I’d always wanted to try out. I remember reading an interview with Jason Pierce of Spiritualized in which he talked about recording Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space. He said that his intention from the outset had been to record a different mix for the separate left and right stereo channels - each speaker would play a different and complete version of the song, but playing both together would give you a third version made of the other two combined. In the end it proved too expensive to make the album that way. But I thought I’d give it a try on this one simple track. So I got Emmet to record the guitar twice and panned one performance hard left and the other hard right. Same thing with my vocals. I played in two tracks of the synth arpeggios - one with just the odd notes (panned hard left) and one with just the even notes (panned hard right). And, finally, two takes on the accordion to finish the job.Try it out at home - turn the balance on your stereo all the way right or left and you'll be listening to two completely differentperformances of the same song! Markus x
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