Dear Listener,
We’ve never really been a band than plans things; we’re not really the type of people who plan things full stop. Maybe we’re just drifting through life oblivious to stuff, I dunno, I don't really care, the fact is we cringe at the idea of sitting around talking about how our records are going to sound before we’ve started them. It’s a waste of time, get writing, get rehearsing, get recording and see what happens, the best laid plans will change forty times in the studio anyway. Making a more electronic record wasn't really the point, the point was to do things we hadn’t done before. It was the most natural thing in the world for us to look at moving our sound somewhere new, to write songs on different instruments, to record in different ways, so that in the end hopefully we’d have a record that feels different from what we’ve done before. Don't get me wrong, I see a great leap forward in both sound and song writing between The Back Room and An End Has A Start and I’m very proud of both records but In This Light And On This Evening is very much a new chapter for Editors. In my opinion the great bands evolve over the course of their careers and take risks…this album will alienate some Editors fans, it will split opinion…good.
I started writing towards the end of touring An End Has A Start in the summer of 2008 and as the songs started to come they were sent out one by one via email to the rest of the band. Russ and Chris now live in New York, Ed is in Birmingham and I live in London. But despite the great distances between us this is the way we’ve always worked, even when living in the same house together in Birmingham, everyone attacking the songs individually before getting together in the rehearsal room. Once the time had come to rehearse these songs into shape for recording we had nearly 20, and joining us in the rehearsal room was Flood. Flood was vital to this record; he helped us take that feeling of playing the songs live into the studio. We set up with a full P.A. and recorded the songs as live as we could onto tape. Many of the mistakes and flaws which in previous records we’d have ironed out were left in - if the take had that special something, it was about the groove and the feeling, and it was about us getting that energy we naturally have when playing live on to the tape, even when stood behind synthesizers. It was a liberating approach for us, personally it gave me the confidence to stretch my vocals in ways I haven’t up until now, and I think all four of us felt unafraid to try whatever was in our heads, however foreign or silly the ideas may have first felt. It was fun. We laughed and smiled a lot……we are capable of this do you know!?
But this is still a dark record, a record that sings of no God, a record of broken love songs, a record where the filthy city is so close you can smell it, taste it, a record of drunken violence, a record which has lost all trust in those in charge of our world. We must be four miserable people to make a record like this though right? I must be troubled to write words like these?....No, absolutely not, dark is interesting, dark is exciting, dark can be funny, there’s real life in the dark, real life IS dark, when an album feels like this the fragments of hope and love that do occasionally shine through shine through ten times brighter than they would normally do so. I am so fucking bored of people asking us why we’re so “dark”, or worse questioning our integrity for being this way, this is how we do it, it excites us to express ourselves like this, to be honest we don't even understand what the alternative is and the alternatives we can imagine are too boring for us to even consider.
I hope you enjoy the record. We recorded nearly twenty songs and whittled them down to these 9 for the album, the other songs will come out in various ways over the coming months but these 9 songs we felt to be the best album, a record that flows from start to finish and a record that needs to be listened to as a whole, so I do hope you have the time to do so, maybe even more than once?
Thanks for reading and listening,
Be good,
Tom Smith xx
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