00:10Hey, this is Tim from ASH. I'm here to talk about our new album, Twilight of the Innocents,
00:14which we just recorded. We did a completely DIY in our own studio in New York, which we set up
00:21ourselves.
00:22I did a lot of wiring myself. I collected all the gear myself and set the whole place up.
00:30We found our own place and spent the last nine months working on it.
00:35I think it turned out to be a bit of a journey of discovery, but it turned out to be
00:40great.
00:46Track one is a song called I Started a Fire. It was a song I got pretty excited about when
00:52I wrote it
00:53because it opened up a new way of singing for me. There were certain notes in it, quite high notes,
00:59that I found I could hit for longer periods. I could really, I guess, find a new voice.
01:07I think there was something about the subject matter of a song. It's quite passionate and it's just quite exciting.
01:15So it has to be the first track on the album. It's something new, but it's got the energy of
01:21our older stuff.
01:22So it's sort of familiar, but exciting.
01:29Track two is a song called You Can't Have It All, which has been our first single.
01:35It's a song I had been kicking around for a long time actually, but I had it when I was
01:41writing Meltdown.
01:42But I just thought it was kind of too weird to bring to the band.
01:46But when we started writing the new album, we sort of had a feeling of anything goes.
01:50So I thought, may as well try this with the band.
01:53And it shaped up to, I guess, you know, we obviously got excited enough that we thought this was going
01:59to be our first single.
02:02Initially it was kind of a weird arrangement to begin with.
02:04It had a chorus that dropped down, it became quieter compared to the verse.
02:10And that was the first time we'd done anything like that.
02:12But eventually we scrapped the idea and went for that rocking chorus, which turned it into like a pop kind
02:18of hit thing.
02:18So it's interesting the kind of evolution the songs go through.
02:21You can hear a demo of it on iTunes actually, and it's pretty bizarre.
02:26There's even a rapping section in it.
02:34Track three is a song called Blacklisted, which is, it's probably the most like straight ahead, like rocking, Ash style
02:41song on the record.
02:42And it's, it's got quite a few references to the Woody Allen movie, Manhattan.
02:50There's a couple of lines in it, which I stole from the final lines of the film, where one of
02:58the characters says, everyone gets corrupted.
03:01It was about sort of moving on from something, because I moved cities, I moved from countries.
03:07Just, I went through a lot of like changes in my personal life, before making the album.
03:13And it's kind of about how once you move on, you can't go back and you just have to like,
03:16be brave and move on.
03:20Not give up. That's what that song is about.
03:27Track four is a song called Polaris, and this is a song that's been kicking around for a few years.
03:33I actually wrote it on a piano at Bono in the Edge's house in the South of France.
03:40It's not like a right wanker saying that, but it's true.
03:45I ran into them while I was just on holiday down there, and they welcomed me in and stayed for
03:49like three days.
03:50It was pretty much, I had this whole mansion to myself, and Bono was staying in the other one while
03:55he was waiting for his family to turn up.
03:57And I just wrote the piano line one night by myself, and it's kind of stuck in my head.
04:03I just thought, this is going to be a hit, you know, this is not like a great single in
04:06waiting.
04:08But it was like about two years before I could sit down at a piano and play it to the
04:12other guys in the band, because we were on tour.
04:14And yeah, it turned out to be a great song. It's quite emotionally heavily charged.
04:24It's a good pop song, dark lyrics.
04:25Track five on the album is called Palace of Excess. It initially started out being titled Suicide Girls, but we
04:30eventually changed that.
04:32It was one of the first songs we recorded for the album, and I wrote it in Norway on tour.
04:40And it's quite a rocker. It's probably one of my favorite guitar solos I've ever done, ever.
04:47And yeah, it's a good pop song, dark lyrics. The lyrics are kind of the fact, kind of groupies and
04:53the people you meet on tour and the sort of weird bubble that you live on when you're in a
04:58band.
05:00And it's kind of loneliness that can be at the heart of it sometimes.
05:08Track six is a song called End of the World. Probably the most depressed I've ever been writing a song,
05:15and it kind of came out in the lyrics.
05:16I just wrote how down I was feeling. But weirdly enough, it's got this really anthemic chorus.
05:25I like those kind of juxtapositions, you know, in songs where you've kind of just got something really depressing, but
05:31it kind of feels uplifting at the same time.
05:33I think it's probably from just knowing everyone goes through that. It kind of somehow makes you feel better when
05:40you listen to that.
05:41And for me, it was a cathartic thing to write it. It was a song that I didn't think would
05:47work as a band thing.
05:48I had a plan of having a website called Mystery Recordings where I'd put up, just put up any sort
05:54of songs I'd write on tour.
05:55Because I was sort of getting into programming and making music on my computer, and I thought this could be
06:01an outlet for that.
06:02But Mark, our bass player, loved the song so much. He was like, we could work on this as a
06:08band.
06:08So I didn't quite believe him, but we started playing it, and it turned out to be great.
06:15Yeah, I think it could be a single in the future.
06:23Track seven is a song called Ritual. Some people say it's got a police feel to it. It's got this
06:29arpeggio guitar figure, which leads the whole song.
06:34Normally our sound has been very dense, and this one has a bit more space to breathe, because this kind
06:40of guitar figure has all the space to the sound.
06:43So that was something new. We kept sort of trying new things on the album, even as simple as new
06:49ways of playing guitar or different beats.
06:55And I guess it sounds like nothing we've ever done before, but at the same time it's got the familiar
06:59ash sound to it.
07:02I guess it's about a domestic fight between two lovers, and yeah, it's about that.
07:18Track eight is a song called Shadows. It's got a sixties feel to it, a very melancholic pop song.
07:26Again, strangely uplifting. About half of the album we recorded live, and this is one of the songs that's live.
07:35We recorded it all as a band together instead of the modern process of doing drums, bass, guitar, vocals.
07:42It's got a really sweet groove to it, really nice drum beat, great tom sounds, and kind of a heartbreaking
07:51lyric.
07:57Track nine is a song called Princess Six. Again, a bit of a sixties feel to it.
08:03One thing whenever we went back to being a free piece was that we realized that Mark would have to
08:07fill up the sound a bit more with bass lines.
08:11This is kind of a song that's typical of a new approach we took, where Mark would be playing kind
08:17of busier bass lines, things with more notes to kind of fill up the sound.
08:22And it really drives the song along. It's kind of a bit of a rocker.
08:27For a while I was sort of subscribing to this biography website, and every day you'd sort of get a
08:34biography of people.
08:36And one day this story came in about these six daughters of King George, an English king.
08:42And how basically he went absolutely mad, and consequently all his daughters never married, because the Queen was very jealous
08:55and guarded them all.
08:56And this sort of empathizes with him. It's like a story of unrequited love, and that's what the song's about.
09:08Dan has a song called Dark and Stormy. It's got a nice minor feel to it. It's minor chords. Again,
09:16like you hear the bass line drives the whole thing.
09:19When we were mixing the record every time, pretty much every mix we went into, the guy who mixed the
09:25album was a guy called Michael Brower.
09:26Every time the mix was sounding really good, but we just did one thing, and every mix we just said
09:32turn the bass up.
09:33So the bass is pretty loud in the whole album, it drives the whole thing.
09:37And when we were writing the song, and you just wanted to feel like that kind of sultry summer day,
09:43where everything's kind of too hot and everything's moving at that kind of sluggish pace.
09:48So I just made sure we were sort of holding back the whole time, and it's kind of, it's a
09:54dark, summery song.
09:57Covered cows head floating at the bottom.
10:00Track 11, probably the weirdest song we've ever done. It's called Shattered Glass.
10:05I wanted this one to feel like dreams, where almost every line or two lines of lyrics, you change the
10:13scene, you know, and you're in like, things are connected but not connected, if you understand.
10:20And yeah, it's a weird kind of song, about like, changes and dementia.
10:34The final song on the album, track 12, is a song called Twilight of the Innocents, and it's the title
10:40track of the album.
10:42And it was an experiment that turned out to be possibly what I think is the best thing we've ever
10:50done.
10:52Basically, I had written a verse, like, a few years ago, and just with this repetitive four chord loop, and
11:04I never knew what to do with it.
11:07But there was something about, I kept coming back to it and thinking, you know, maybe I can work on
11:11this.
11:12And we, one night I recorded just like a load of loop, and just looped it up, and started like
11:20adding stuff to it, like on my laptop.
11:24And then we got in the studio, and I got Rick to like, just play whatever he wanted for like
11:28half an hour, and we edited that down.
11:30And it was sort of, I had this nine-minute sort of piece of chaos that I just kept sort
11:36of chipping away at.
11:39And eventually, it started to take some shape, and it really came together whenever, like, Mark told me I should
11:46write more verses for it.
11:47And it became like a three-verse song, it just builds and builds.
11:52And we just found so many different variations for playing, like this little loop.
11:58And we got Paul Buckmaster, a great string arranger, to do these beautiful strings on it.
12:04And he did the first five Elton John albums, and Moonlight Mild by the Rolling Stones, and stuff like Carly
12:11Simon, You're So Vain, as well as the 13 Monkeys soundtrack.
12:15So he's like this amazing string arranger.
12:18And, yeah, it turned out to be really beautiful, and when we play it live, people's jaws just drop.
12:23You know, it's like nothing we've ever done before, and there's just something very emotional about these four chords.
12:28So, I don't know, we just managed to get some really magic out of it, and that's it.
12:35And, yeah, it finishes it off with, you know, the probably most adventurous track ever, and, like, leads away from
12:40the future.
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