After dropping the 2015 single ‘Living A Lie’ local indie pop talents Buchanan have recently unveiled their new LP – Pressure In An Empty Space. The long awaited sophomore effort, the record saw the band (spearheaded by frontman Josh Simons) working hard on the release for the past 18 months.
Pressure In An Empty Space was written and recorded with writer/producer Simon Duffy in London and follows the creative journey of Josh Simon working through the compounding worries of the dissolution of a long term relationship and his diagnosis with an obscure (but fortunately treatable) form of cancer. Despite these setbacks, Simons completed his most prolific body of work to date.
A stunning and incredibly moving piece of work, Simon kindly took some time out to pen for us a track by track run down of Pressure In An Empty Space which you can now check out below along with the LP stream. It’s a long one, but definitely worth the journey. If you like what you’re hearing pop by the Buchanan Facebook page for more info.
Only Us
Choosing how to start an album is always a challenge – it’s equal parts about setting a mood sonically and lyrically, and then you need a song that has enough energy or power to hook the listener in for the remainder of the record.
So when this backing track came along, which happened after I bought some nice reverb plugins and was playing around on Ableton Live, where I created that intro sound with a guitar playing back in reverse, it was immediately clear to everyone working on the project that we had a pretty special track that managed to encapsulate the mood of everything else we were recording at the time.
From a story perspective it also kind of tells this tale of where I was at personally before some of the drama that would inform the rest of the album had come to pass.
Learn to Love Again
This was one of the first tracks recorded for Pressure in an Empty Space – in fact it was the recording of this track with producer Simon Duffy that finally made sense of what kind of record we were going to make and solidified our working relationship, which strictly speaking is dance meets indie-rock, which isn’t so traditional.
Lyrically it poured out in a couple of hours and was one of the easiest and most fun tracks to record – which is funny given its somewhat earnest and serious nature. It’s probably my proudest Buchanan track from a song-writing perspective, as it’s a simple message – “learn to love again” – told in a simple way, and yet it’s also hugely personal to me.
The track has barely changed since its initial recording, and yet so many people who have come and gone and been apart of our lives during the making of this album have been involved in this song or affected by it in some way… making a personal record is a strange and complicated process indeed!
Coming Down
I love where this song sits in the album; I love that it managed to debut at 29 in the UK Music Week club charts while still working on the rest of the album and dealing with some health and personal not-so-great shit; I love that it was the first thing people heard after Human Spring and how the vocals are so a lot more present and perhaps more mature than on our previous album.
It’s very much a highlight for me and a song I’m immensely proud of. Also one of the first songs recorded, we knew roughly what the album was going to be about at the time of putting this out but we never realised how personal it would come to be and yet reflecting on the lyrics of this track, it very much laid the foundation for how personal the rest of the album would be. Plus, it makes me want to dance!
Stop!
This was just a backing track for the longest while. It was one of the last things we put down before I flew back to Australia for health treatment in September 2014.
It took a while to nail, particularly the vocal flow in the verses, but I think it’s a really fun track now and it’s quite complex. It doesn’t really have any chords in it, which is a challenge when trying to write a topline! The videoclip for this is really great and was a lot of fun to organise and put together – big shoutout to Renee and Sarah at Do Dance Academy in Brisbane for helping us make that a reality!
From memory I think I was trying to channel Lorde, Ed Sheeran and Mark Ronson in equal parts when making this track – I’m particularly fond of the funk bass breakdown, vocal chops and guitar solo which were all last minute additions. Those parts make the track and it’s hard to think we could have ever been particularly happy with this track before they were added– in fact, I don’t think we were!
Pressure in an Empty Space
The title track and another song which came along fairly quickly and without too much editing – that was kind of how we A&R’ed this record to be honest. Anything that didn’t come through me particularly fast or had to be forced out was axed (with a couple of exceptions).
That process of working wasn’t true of the production though, which we laboured over for almost every track, but certainly of the song writing process – it’s a bit of a slow way to write an album, and it means you can sometimes be waiting around for the next song for long periods of time, but if you can afford the time then I think it keeps everything really fresh and honest.
This song was written about two very literal frustrating things that were going on in my life at the same time, but I tried to make it as relatable as possible as I don’t believe going through multiple frustrations at the same time makes me particularly special or unique!
I Don’t Want To Die
I find it tricky to talk about what this song means to me but I can talk about its history. We were digging through all of the first demos I had ever put down from when I first got into music, basically to see if there was any childlike genius in there and this whole backing track was just sitting there in full and was just very pretty and special.
I had so many ideas for the top-line… ideas just kept flowing, and it was really hard to edit it all down into a digestible song – it was at risk of being about 37 versus long with no chorus! When we finally got it right, I think Simon and myself both had a moment there when more than a couple of tears may have been shed and we both acknowledged it was probably amongst the most sophisticated and accomplished works we’d ever been involved in making – I still feel that way.
All That Remains
Lyrically this song is about as honest as any track on the album gets and I think it speaks for itself. I had always tried to write a piano ballad but had never really been able to nail one for any of our previous releases.
This time it just felt right and I recorded it back in Australia on my piano fairly quickly. And you’d think it would have been the easiest song to mix with the fewest number of moving parts and stems, right?! Haha nope.
I’d say this track took the second longest to mix, simply because everything is so intimate, exposed and raw that all the sounds and details have to be perfect, and that’s not as easy or cheap as you might think!
Pleasure
I wrote this track with about six days to go while we were mixing in London. It felt like we were missing a track, something positive, uplifting and a message of hope after a pretty reflective and personal album.
I was watching the news during a break in mixing and was feeling equal parts frustrated and inspired by what I was watching and somehow we managed to jump straight in the studio and capture the entire essence of the track that night, while simultaneously being like, “Fuck! We now have to finish another song with only a few days left and we’re already behind!” That pressure was unnecessary in the end as we’ve remixed it something like 50 times since and I think I can say with some confidence that no one in our camp can really listen to it anymore as a result haha, but I do think we managed to squeeze the magic of the original idea out of it by the end, despite the numerous mixing challenges, temperamental synth patches and project crashes we faced in our bid to finish it!
Uncuff Me
This song was demo’ed around the same time as Galileo, a track from our Living a Lie – EP, which was probably around July 2013 while we were still on our Human Spring tour.
From the moment I put down the backing track it always felt like it would be the final track of our next album and it definitely got me excited about writing again. I wanted to use pianos in an interesting and unconventional way on this album from very early on in the process – and this song kind of hit that brief.
Originally, I had recorded that piano intro, and resampled and chopped it up, which sounded really cool and informed the rest of the production on the track, however in the end we decided to re-record it as a performance and I think it sounds really special and a musically sophisticated and interesting way to end this album of ours.
