London punks Crows return with their third album Reason Enough on 27 September via Bad Vibrations. An evolving soundscape is evident from the first singles from the new album, ‘Bored‘ and ‘Vision of Me’ . All four members of the band joined me for an open wide-ranging conversation which included discussing a different approach for the creation of Reason Enough, the importance of creativity for mental health, the economic struggles for artists without major label budgets, but perhaps most importantly, we find out who did end up in jail the most while playing Monopoly when taking a breather from recording!
The new album Reason Enough is more melodic than the previous two albums. Was that a conscious decision? Did you want to go for a slightly different sound?
Steve (Goddard, guitar): Yeah, with the production for sure. With the writing it was fairly natural, I think. The first few songs we were coming out with were a little bit more melodic, and we thought this is a bit more interesting, rather than another full-on, blast-through song like we normally do.
James (Cox, vocals): Beware Believers didn’t feel hugely dynamic. So we thought lets be more dynamic on this one instead of just being an out-and-out punk record.
Is there a theme that goes through the album, lyrically?
James: It kind of came out of me having a pretty bad year mental health-wise, and it goes full circle, the beginning to the end of that. Some parts are pretty unhappy and depressing. But then there were the parts where, I think, they are quite positive, where I finally came out of that, and with the help of friends, start to do a bit better. That’s the general overall theme. But then there’s a lot on the state of the UK and the general crap news cycle that we have to face every day.
James do you find making music quite cathartic? Does that help?
James: Yes absolutely. It’s the best kind of therapy to get to release certain emotions in a way, that not a lot of people do. It’s quite tough when you have to repeat some stuff. You write something quite intense and having to repeat that quite a lot is interesting, because sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. You have different reactions every time, but generally, it’s an absolutely amazing release of emotion.
The single ‘Vision of Me‘ is being incredibly honest, it’s a powerful track. I have to mention the video which is a striking piece of work. Was director Alex Do someone you’d worked with before?
Jith (Amarasinghe, bass): We always have trouble with videos, to be honest. We don’t have major label budgets so we rely a lot on someone who wants to get involved on the basis of having a creative opportunity and also having an idea that’s strong, that they can execute for next to no money. It’s hard. It’s a lot of favours and trying to get a lot out of a little. My day job is working in that world, so I basically reached out to a couple of friends who work in that industry to ask if they had any links. So Alex came from that. We hadn’t worked with before. He sent us over this amazing idea of multiple versions of James, kind of trapped in this monotony within this brutalist world and one of the James’s finally breaks out. We thought that was really poignant for the song, simple but quite hard to execute. He did amazingly well with the resources he had, and really hit the nail on the head with the themes of the song.
James: Yeah, it wasn’t very simple to film because I had to do the same thing over- and- over. It came out so well, he was a real pleasure to work with. Probably one of my favourite videos.
And I understand that this album took the longest of the three to write. Was that circumstances, or choice?
James: I think more circumstances. Again, we all have day jobs. We don’t have a label putting money forward so that we can concentrate on just writing an album as easily as we’d like. So it’s a lot of taking weekends away when we can to get in the flow of writing a certain amount of songs or ideas and finessing those ideas. This was the first time we actually had way more songs to choose from. Usually we just write the amount of songs we need for the album. It messed us up a little bit, because then we ended up getting attached to songs. We were like, “Which one goes on the album? Which one doesn’t?” That became a whole issue as well. But there’s worst issues to have, and now it just means we have more for the next record.
And was that partly because a lot of the songs were written when you were finishing touring in the States, so you had more material
Jith: Yeah it was really after we came back from the States, that we were able to meet up and make sense of whatever individual musical ideas we had. When we did meet up it just meant that we actually work quite quickly. When we did have time together, we had really strong ideas to flesh out
I believe that you changed your rehearsal space this time as well. You were in the crypt of a church!
Steve: We went to this studio in Stroud in Gloucestershire. We have a shared rehearsal space down the road from where we live. But it’s not the most inspiring space sometimes, especially coming out of a full working day and then trying to go in there in the evening and trying to write. So we booked some time in this place in Stroud that was a studio in an old Catholic convent, and so we were set up in the crypt of the chapel there. And, yeah, it was pretty spooky!
Did that add to the creativity!?
Jith: I mean, it was nice because we could kind of go in there all hours. We’d go in in the morning, and sometimes, we’d come out, and it’d be dark already, and it feels like you’re in a bit of a black hole there. You’re working on something, and you’re in there for hours. You come out and the whole day is spent. So it was kind of cool being immersed in a space, and not having any distractions. We had an Airbnb and we stayed together, and that really helped. We work better when we’re just going for it for a few days instead of trying to steal a couple of hours.
Sam (Lister, drums): Yeah it works best when we can go home and play Monopoly together for hours which we did! We obviously did loads of drugs while we played!
I’m not gonna ask you who ended up in jail the most!
James, Sam, Jith: Steve!
I did want to ask about the track ‘Living on my Knees‘ because of the lyrics. It could be political, but it could also be personal. It has an intertwining of that language and I just wonder if you could share a little about it.
James: Yeah, you kind of nailed it. It’s obviously about Britain and its politics, but I wrote it like being like a person that’s really just fucking grinding you down. I used that phrase, “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees“, I just love that line. It’s a great piece of piece of writing. So I was like, okay, I want to work with that somehow. And again, it came out of the fucking grim news cycle we’re in and how shit the UK has been for the past 14 years. So yeah, it’s political, but I want to not be so obvious with it, and kind of write it as if Great Britain is a person.
Sam: I love that song, it’s my favourite song on the record. We wrote most of it in a soundcheck. Steve just started playing it, and then it came together really quickly. I’m really proud of that. I think it’s a real banger and Jith’s backing vocals are really special.
So do you have a normal way of working in terms of creating the songs? Do the lyrics come first and then you, you then create the instrumentation around it?
James: It’s just chaos!
Sam: I think that is generally the best way to describe it! No one really brings ideas in. It all just happens in the room, which is another factor, I think, why it takes us so long. We don’t have a songwriter, per se. It’s all just picking little bits out. Someone might come in with something, but it’s generally just all of us trying to make it happen.
James: I’ll always be writing lyrics on the side. And then once we’ve kind of got some loose structure of song, I’ll be like, which lyrics might fit this, then figure out the melody on top of it. That’s the tried and tested Crows ethos.
Sam: Yeah, we also have, like, no technical ability when it comes to software or recording. So voice notes on a phone is basically how it all comes together, which probably slows stuff down, but it’s just what works for us.
Sam: Someone in another band the other day who was talking about recording their record said how they had the whole thing demoed and they just do everything themselves, which I think is a really common process nowadays. You can write an amazing record in your bedroom and produce it, and I think it’s quite nice for us, because we’re not weighed down by trying to finesse the production element of it. We just try and get as many songs written as possible between 5pm and 8pm on a Tuesday, and then hope it all comes together.
Sam: I think Andy (Savours, producer), influence is really visible on the record. We also had a lot of help from Joel (Amey, drums) from Wolf Alice, to finesse a lot of the ideas. And I think it works nicely in this way.
Steve: It was almost like pre-production with Joel, basically, mainly with vocal melodies and things that we’re not crazy strong on. It was good to have an outside opinion on that kind of stuff for a change, and that probably has led a bit to the whole record being a bit more melodic as well.
Jith: So yeah, that was really important. It really helped us kind of steer it in a direction. And he’s been a mate of ours for ages, and he was so, gracious with, kind of his ideas and kind of letting us use them, basically.
Sam: I think we were all quite blown away by him, taking all of these rough voice notes and then somehow chopping them apart and creating massive songs out of them, and we’re like “Jesus, I don’t know why we didn’t think of that!“. Yeah, that was really cool to see, and to work with a proper musician.
And how was it working with Andy? (Savours, Mercury shortlisted producer)
Steve: He’s a legend, slightly different approach to how we normally do things. Everything else we’ve done before, more or less has been with Felix (Rashman) and Phil (Brillo). Phil used to do front of house for us most of the time when we were playing so he really knew the songs. It was very much like, get us in the room live and, just crank things up. I mean, they did a lot more than that, that’s actually dumbing it down. Andy’s approach was a little more, tactful – that might not be the right word. For me from a guitar world, he had just one place on the amp for when we were tracking. And to me, actually doing it, I was like, “This sounds like shit to me!“, I’m really concerned. But the way he likes to do it is to layer it and build it out bigger and bigger. Then I was like, okay, I get it now. I trust the process. I get what he’s doing.
Jith: We wanted the sheen. We wanted the Andy Savours sheen! Phil and Felix are amazing, but we were definitely going for grit and we wanted aggressiveness and power. Whereas we wanted to be a little bit more subtle this time around and a bit more melodically focused so he was perfect for that.
James: He likes to do a lot of takes. We were even joking about naming a song ‘One More for Luck’! We’re not used to that at all. We’re very much do five max, and then we’re done. But yeah, first day, I think we only did two songs, and we were there all day. I probably did each song 30 times. He’d be like, “Do it again. Do it again”, and I don’t want to do it again! But he’s then able to pick the best take. At first, I was I don’t like this, but when we start to get stuff back and hear it, and I was like, now I get the method in the madness, and it’s uncomfortable, but it works. And I’m gonna keep singing a song as many times as you want.
I just have one final question. I believe that when you were in the States and you began working on some of your ideas for Reason Enough you were listening to indie bangers. And I wonder if you’d like to share what you were listening to?
Sam: We can make you a playlist if you want! It was mainly 2007 to 2011 the golden era. That was our clubbing heyday, lots of White Lies, lots of Kaiser Chiefs, you know, all the real cheesy shit.
Excellent! And the perfect place to end….
