Sometimes You Cannot Escape That Music DNA
Sometimes You Cannot Escape That Music DNA
Cris Cohen: Listening to the new song, “Gurl I Luv You,” what’s amazing when you play it in conjunction with “Velvet Kiss” is how seamlessly that song fits in with the rotation of the original songs. How much of that was, “Alright. We want to do something on purpose that sounds like our original stuff,” and how much of it is just, “If you get these players together, it’s a DNA thing. It’s always going to sound this way”?
Michael Lockwood of Lions & Ghosts: It’s scary that we didn’t try to do that on purpose, that it was all organic. The song certainly morphed as we wrote and recorded it. And because of the pandemic, there were lots of starts and stops. Actually, it was a song that shouldn’t have happened in the first place, because we shouldn’t have gotten together and shouldn’t have written it because it wouldn’t have happened. So, that started the process.
And then, as we recorded it, I didn’t really even think… The way I work, I usually listen to something. I sort of have a soundscape in my mind and I’m like, “Okay. It’s missing information over here. It needs color here.” I sort of paint the whole thing out in my head, and then I attack it. Well, the same thing with this, but after I finished guitars and Rick… Rick actually played bass on it. After we finished doing that and at the very last minute, I had my friend, Patrick Warren, come in and do a string arrangement for it. Then it really took on the extra flavor of what that first Lions and Ghosts record was.
And after we finished working on it and Rick mixed it, we were at the studio and we were listening back to it, he goes, “Well, what do you think?”
And I’m like, “It’s really organic. It really sounds…” And I just sort of stopped with the dot dot dot.
And he looks and he goes, “It’s really weird. It kind of sounds like Lions and Ghosts.”
And I just started laughing when he said that. I was like, “Really?”
And then he started asking me, “Did you purposely do the guitars like this?”, because I did them at my home studio.
And I said, “No.”
He goes, “So, just because of my voice, or what?”
And I said, “Yeah. I think it’s just that you fall into that pattern because you work together.” We had probably almost a 10-year run together -- maybe 7 years or something -- and you just…it works in that thing. And you’re right, the song… The mastering… I did try to master it in a way that they could sort of flow together, because they were coming out near each other.