Sundried
There had to be a big change of pace and dynamic somewhere on the Tinyfish album and Sundried was the perfect chance to try something different. I’m not a Classical aficionado and barely know my Debussy from my Messiaen but every now and again something purely classical will just rock my world (heh, Debussy would be revolving in his grave at that thought).
Every now an again, a rock band will apply a string quartet or quintet to their sound and the effect it produces really appeals to me. It’s the stripped down sound that gave us ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and there are two particular uses of this sound that I used as the basis of this piece (look at me, I’m now calling it a piece!). The first is called ‘Under The Table With Her’ and is by a band called Sparks from an album called Indiscreet, which has a delicate loneliness to it. The other is by PJ Harvey and is a reworking of one of her early songs called ‘Mansize’, this tune has a really dark, angular quality to it (almost Bartok like). Somewhere in between ‘Sundried’ was crafted. It took a lot of arranging as I had never done anything like this before but the shifts between dissonance and harmony alone was worth the effort.
Jim adds a nice little touch by adding the melody line from ‘Too High For Low Company’ into the mix which counterpoints nicely with the staccato stuff the violins are playing. He’s clever like that.
As has been mentioned before, Rob did a sterling job of creating a lyric to suit the mood and feel of the song (yay, I’m back to calling it a song!). It was the driving force behind the lyrical transformation of ‘Too High For Low Company’ too and sets up a sense of unease in readiness for ‘All Hands Lost’.
It’s my personal favourite track on the Tinyfish album.
Simon
Another one for me where the song caused the lyrics to pop out without much effort at all. It’s like the old joke: How do you make a statue of an elephant? You take a big block of stone and carve away anything that doesn’t look like an elephant...