Affirmationcont...

The Animal Song:   Darren - This song was written for the Gary Marshall film, "The Other Sister".  It's a surprisingly "up" song for an album that I at first thought was going to be very moody and very electronic.  I find it infectious.  It was written during the bleakest time of winter in New York, and I wrote it, in part, as an antidote to my surroundings as well as my reaction to the film.   Daniel - I love the production of this song.  That big drum pop feel with the percussion is just amazing and huge.  I sat down and created this drum loop, which was really jungly, then we added the base line and Darren started singing over it.  I'd have liked it if we could have made the drums even bigger! The Lover After Me:   Darren - This is about a haunting love that you probably shouldn't have left, but you did and it would be so much easier if you still didn't care about them.  You're walking around the city with that feeling you have when you're free of something, yet you also miss it.  You're reminiscing, where the bulidings speak the person's name and how memories of love seep into the pavement and are everywhere you go.   Daniel - This was one of the hardest songs to record on the album.  We had to be careful that we didn't suffocate the guitars with too much keyboards and vice versa.  It's a really honest song with great lyrics.  Emotionally, this is my favourite song. Two Beds And a Coffe Machine:   Darren - This is a very raw song, about an uncomfortable topic: abuse in a relationship, from the perpective of looking back after the whole thing is finished.  We wrote this very quickly in the studio.  Walter Afanasieff is such an amazing musician that we asked him to play the piano part.  It was about 3 o'clock in the morning, and I was in another room to him recording my vocals for the demo.  We flew to New York to record all of the vocals for the album, but we ended up using the original demo vocal on this song because it was the best performance.  It's not perfect....but we liked it that way.  It had so much emotion, because that was the first time I'd sung it all the way through from top to bottom.   Daniel - It's a beautiful, pure, honest and sad song.  There's really nothing else that needs to be said. You Can Still Be Free:   Darren - This is musically extravagant and is meant to take you on a bit of a journey.  It kind of immortalizes two people that died-a really close friend's father and an experience that Daniel had.  Everybody's life deserves to be remembered in some way and I thought this was an amazing way to remember the beauty of someone's life, in a song.  Steve Smith from Journey played drums on this, and he gave an amazing performance.   Daniel - This song is about two people very close to us that died.  One was the father of a very dear friend and the other was my next door neighbour when I was 12.  He shot himself in our backyard.  Afterward, this bird used to appear in a tree outside our house and just sit there, and I made up this story about how the bird was hovering over our place to ask for forgiveness.  After the first album did well, I bought a house five minutes from where my Mum and Dad lived, and I looked out the window and there was this same kind of bird again, which I've never seen anyplace else.  That's why the song talks about spreading your wings and taking flight. Gunning Down Romance:   Darren - This is all about disillusionment with love, romance, the chase, just the whole game.  It's wallowing in self pity, but very tongue in cheek, not the way I feel everyday, but just a way to deal with disillusionment.   Daniel - This is a very angry, intense song about what's going on in your head when you're not completely sane.  We used an angry sort of driving music with a morbid trip-hop sound, and expressed the anger instrumentally through this guitar riff you hear. I Don't Know You Anymore:   Darren - It's a very literal conversation about going home and realizing that my whole life has changed and a relationship is over that consumed six or seven years of my life.  Now, as I return, my things are packed up in boxes.  My partner has put all of my clothes away, saying she had to get away from it.  When I opened the suitcase, my life just came out at me through the smell of my old after-shave, and I felt the impact of no longer being in someone's life.