The pop-punk revivalist and king of YouTube covers recounts the most mind-blowing moments in his music discovery journey, while Hayden Merrick listens on with goosebumps.
It’s a question that piques everybody’s curiosity: what would this song sound like if it was written by that band?
Alex Melton is the GOAT at answering this question. His viral YouTube covers have shoved country songs through shredders set to pop-punk mode, slicing them up before he kintsugis them back together in ways you never would have expected.
He just as frequently and comfortably works in the opposite direction, or with any other inventive mismatch for that matter – bastardising everyone from The Police to Sheryl Crow to Taylor Swift. There’s also the worship band that’s really into emo, and the pop-punk a capella Christmas carolers. He dubs these creations Hypotheticals – the name given to his series of covers albums.
Melton isn’t the first to attempt these novel reworkings, but he’s arguably the best to do it, having garnered a devout fanbase – as well as acclaim from the likes of The Darkness’ Justin Hawkins – due to his flawless production chops and unique arrangement style. In many ways, he is a spiritual successor to the late producer Jerry Finn.
Finn was the legend who quietly pulled the strings during the heyday of pop-punk, mentoring bands such as Sum 41 and blink-182. Fans still delight in picking apart the stems of albums he produced in order to uncover missed details, such as buried organ lines and surprising harmonies. Melton very much works with this level of detail: copy and paste is banned, he’s always got tricks up his sleeve for verse two, and you better strap in for the bridge.
But Melton is more than a covers artist. Recently signed to Pure Noise Records, he has started releasing singles from his forthcoming album, produced by a member of his joint favourite band, Alan Day of Four Year Strong. “Feel It All” is his latest – a bouncy singalong anthem with polka-dot guitar work that’s reminiscent of Angels & Airwaves.
For now, though, Melton’s half-a-million-strong fanbase may have to settle for a one-way relationship, as playing live is not in his DNA. That’s partly because he enjoys a close-knit existence with his wife in middle-of-nowhere South Carolina. Heading up to Massachusetts to record with Day at Ghost Hit Recording was “a big, big deal for me,” Melton says. “To go three weeks without seeing my family, that just doesn’t happen for me. My world is very small.”
Accordingly, there aren’t many local musicians who could populate his hypothetical (pardon the pun) touring band. And a solo show – well, that would be missing the whole point. “I feel like I shine in the arrangement of it all,” Melton tells me.
“It’s like I’ve been training to be a firefighter for a decade and then I finally get to be a firefighter and they’re like, ‘You’re really good at that – you should be a police officer.’ That’s a different career, with a different skill set and different demands of me that I’m in no way prepared for.”
BEST FIT thought Melton would be a perfect Nine Songs candidate, given his job literally revolves around digging out old favourites and reappraising them. Phoning in from his iconic home studio, Melton bubbles with enthusiasm when talking about each of his Nine Songs selections, lauding production intricacies and songcraft, as well as the way in which each of these eureka moments shunted him off in a new direction.
“My process was really just to go through Spotify and keep clicking on related artists and keep digging into my memories, trying to find the stuff that really rose to the top.”
He shares his first experience with protest music and the uncomfortable realisation that the country music he grew up around is inherently Republican. There are gems from the era of Xbox disc drives, sharpie’d CDs, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. While recent, highly impactful discoveries, for him, transcend what music and concert can be.
“The order of the songs is roughly chronological for me in terms of how I discovered them”, he explains. “I tried to anchor some type of structure to it so I could start to whittle it down. But it was a very rewarding experience – this morning, going back and straight down the list, uninterrupted, just listening. But I found that I need that reason to go back and sit down and purposefully listen for my brain to hook onto it and say, ‘This is worth doing right now.’”
More than anything, Melton is great at articulating how each song makes him feel. On more than one occasion, he gives me goosebumps. “I love the songs for what they are, and I can turn on my musical brain and listen to all the parts and appreciate the lyrics,” he says. “But the bigger picture, for me, is what I do after listening to the song – how I’m inspired to either behave or write or even think differently.”
Without further ado, here are nine songs that we hope will do the same for you.
“Feeling This” by blink-182
BEST FIT: You covered this and also repurposed the drum intro for your “Fireflies” video, so this is clearly an important song for you that has stuck around. Was this your route into blink-182 and into pop-punk?
ALEX MELTON: It was one of those Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation discs. It had “Fat Lip” by Sum 41 and it had “The Rock Show”. I had that CD because I loved Backstreet Boys and NSYNC when I was a kid – that’s what I listened to. But hearing those two songs, I was like, ‘This is incredible! What is the rest of this like?’
We were in middle school. It was right at the dawn of being able to download music – Limewire and burning CDs, custom mixes – and my friend burned all three: Enema of the State, Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, and Untitled from blink-182. He gave me three silver discs with sharpie song titles written on the disc itself. He said, “Go home and listen to all of these.” By the time I discovered blink-182, all those albums were out, and they were on the verge of breaking up.
All the themes I talk about for each song are definitely represented on their respective albums. I still listen to albums mostly, and a very narrow selection – more of a deep rather than wide net.
“Feeling This” felt like the complete distillation of every single thing I liked about that band and pop-punk in general. I still think Jerry Finn was the best to ever do it – rest in peace. The way he moulded those three guys on those records is the epitome of what I want pop-punk to sound like and feel like. It had the yell-y vocals, the guitars were blaring, and then all the weird Travis Barker stuff added the perfect amount of personality to what are basically octaves and power chords.
The simplicity of the lyrics was so endearing. Even listening to it as the first song on my Nine Songs playlist – I don’t want to call it rough by any means, but it’s the most raw-sounding song. I’m so used to hearing modern production, but it’s so charming in the perfect way. It’s not trying too hard, but it’s really authentic feeling.
I love that you picked out the production and Jerry Finn, because that was something I was going to touch on, because your production is phenomenal. My friends and I are always saying it sounds so tight, everything you do, so it makes sense that you’re a Jerry Finn fan.
Thank you for saying that. I work really hard on trying to get better at the production stuff. That’s my biggest goal as I move forward, so that’s really cool to hear.
This song is the happy outlier on Untitled. So you started with that and then when you went through the rest of the album – did you love the rest as much or was it kind of a surprise, how dark it is?
It’s so strange, the way different people process music, I don’t know if I thought of it in those terms. It was fast, it was aggressive, and it made me hyped up. I knew the lyrics, but you don’t internalise what they mean. It’s a strange thing, because you’re right, it is very dark, and even the music reflects that.
But it’s not dark in the way that metal or certain hip-hop flavours feel sinister. It still feels like there’s some underlying goodness, or hope there – thematically and musically – which never made it too overwhelming for me.
And the music video was ridiculous. I remember the jail, the fences and them playing on the rooftop and everything.
Making out through the glass…
I think they hired some famous director to make that thing [David LaChapelle]. But that was the peak of their stardom. They had “All The Small Things”, they had “What’s My Age Again?” They were the biggest band in the world. Then this hit and it felt like music had peaked right here for me – this is it, with my Mountain Dew and my Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
“American Idiot” by Green Day
This is a song that’s transcended itself – it became so ubiquitous and outsized Green Day that I almost forget it’s a Green Day song. And perversely, it became underrated; fans won’t say this is their favourite song – you have to outdo each other with the deepest cut. So is this you reminding everybody that it’s the best?
Yes, I guess. In a way. We could say that.
We don’t have to though!
When I was growing up and started getting into CDs, I had International Superhits! their compilation. They had a Greatest Hits before American Idiot came out. I listened to that religiously. I had ten CD’s and that one was probably number one, if I could go back and look at the play count. I had that identity with Green Day before American Idiot hit, it felt like they levelled up in such a major way, but it still was completely authentically them.
It was still power chords and fast drums, but all of a sudden it felt there was weight to it. It was the first time I realised, ‘Oh, you don’t have to just write about relationships and girls.’
Of course, the lyrics are still deeply personal, because of the lived experience of the people who wrote them, but they could apply to, at that time, half the country – or a little less than half depending on how you look at the Florida count. It was my first experience with protest music on a big scale, in front of a huge audience.
That record opened my eyes to so many new concepts, even “Jesus of Suburbia” being nine minutes and having five movements was like, ‘What is happening? It sounds incredible and I’m here for it, but it’s so new to me.’ For people who are plugged in, it felt very cathartic to have that and realise you weren’t alone in thinking the way you were. But it might be a weird choice as a Green Day top song.
I don’t mean to make you second guess it. I completely agree: this was the song and the album that did it for me. You mentioned how it’s still simple power chords. Again, with the production, there’s those little tricks you don’t notice when you’re ten years old, but now I realise it’s so well put together.
Yes, and there was a guitar solo! blink-182 didn’t have proper guitar solos. I didn’t know you could do this. It speaks to how sheltered I was prior to hearing it. I’m not saying that me discovering these things through these bands was the first time they were ever done, but I think there’s a specific millennial experience to go through and see, from this vantage point, how you get into the wider world of music.
“Faint” by Linkin Park
This band are a blind spot for me – they were too heavy back in the day. But Chester Bennington’s screamy vocal on this is incredible. Tell me what this song means to you.
This is a really weird thing to do, but the original Xbox had this feature where you could put in a disc and rip the music to the hard drive of the Xbox. Then it could insert that music in a video game as you’re playing the game. I did that with one of those Tony Hawk games. I had this record on loop shuffle, and I would skate around in this video game for hours and listen to this record out of order.
I was getting into playing drums, and that breakbeat thing is so infectious. Then when he comes in rapping on top of it, it’s so satisfying, the way it syncopates with the drums. It sounded fucking badass – ‘This is new shit here; I don’t know what’s happening.’
Linkin Park felt like an accessible way to appreciate hip-hop. I was intimidated by a lot of actual hip-hop for some reason – ‘It doesn’t feel like they’re speaking to me, and I don’t know how I fit into this.’ This scratched some of that itch – the rhythmic appreciation of what they can do and how they switch up the flows; how things sit on a beat, behind a beat.
Then to combine that with the most aggressive, heavy singer I had ever heard. What a voice Chester had. It was so unabashedly heavy compared to the stuff I was listening to. It blew my mind open even further, to go down other rabbit holes and find different bands. I had a brief Slipknot phase, but there was something special about Linkin Park and those first two records.
It didn’t really inform how I write. I’m not really on that side of the heavy alternative scene, but I respect the hell out of what they did, how they did it and how different it felt when they were the first one to hit.
Is this an album that’s followed you, or is this something that you dug out because of this article?
Around the Transformers era is when I started dropping off. I’ll go back to Fall Out Boy or Taking Back Sunday. I’ll put those records on, but not until the last couple years did I rediscover Linkin Park. I almost let popular culture trick me into thinking that it wasn’t good.
People look back with hindsight and call stuff cringy. But no, it’s timeless. The production felt more like pop music in the way they were sculpting things – even the kick drum having an actual sub-frequency in it, compared to Travis Barker’s doom-ka-ka-ka. That’s what my brain craved more than anything – freshness.
“Heroes Get Remembered, Legends Never Die” by Four Year Strong
I love how you described that. I remember that mind-blowing feeling of finding a new band. I’m excited about your next song because Four Year Strong was that for me – possibly the band I’ve spent the most time with over the years. I saw them last week on their UK tour and this song, “Heroes…”, is the one that got me into my first mosh pit in ages.
Oh man, that’s so cool.
And Alan Day is producing your record!
Yes! A big full-circle moment for me. I grew up thinking those guys were the coolest, they were my musical role models.
There’s a lot of reasons to appreciate an artist, whether you like how they write, their voice, the way they play an instrument, or the way they capitalise on a sound at the right time – that’s a skill in itself. But to respect an artist for the literal skill under their fingers, combined with the creativity to know how to use that skill – that is exactly where Four Year Strong is for me.
They could do anything they wanted on those guitars. They found the thing they wanted to do, and they fucking did it. They were almost superhuman to me – you would watch a video of them shredding the fuck out of the guitar, while also screaming at the top of their lungs. It made me feel like I could fucking run a marathon. It’s the ultimate hype music.
It absolutely is. This is perhaps their definitive song. I’m glad that’s the one song from the Rise or Die Trying album that they still play every show. Is this the album for you? Have you stayed with it?
I probably enjoyed the follow up Enemy of the World, even more in certain ways. It was a little more polished. They had a little more ‘tough guy’ in their voices. It was less Fall Out Boy and more hardcore. But that first record with “Heroes…” – I didn’t even know how some of that stuff was possible, like pinch harmonics.
The way they’ve done their career is very inspiring to me as well. It never felt like there was a moment where they didn’t do what they personally wanted to do in favour of some metric of success or outward appraisal. They have that one infamous record In Some Way, Shape, or Form, where they took a different sound, but I guess they wanted to do that, and to their credit, even if it didn’t work, that’s where their heart was.
That’s how I do my stuff. I’ll sit here and go, ‘Oh, man, this song would be algorithmically perfect to cover.’ Then I try it and I’m not feeling it, so I put it aside. I keep the possibility that something else is going to call my name that I’ll feel more fulfilled by.
I like that you’ve related this to almost a life lesson or philosophy from the band. It’s not just, “It’s a great song.” You’ve really thought about this, and I think about stuff like this similarly – Four Year Strong being your therapist.
Yes, and that’s the cathartic moment that you’re talking about when you’re at the show – everybody’s screaming “Team up!” – there’s probably no better feeling in the world.
“Island (Float Away)” by The Starting Line
This is a very Alex Melton arrangement – that hi-hat beat.
This band is my favourite band, I think. I used to say they were my favourite band that were inactive, so I could say that Four Year Strong was my favourite active band. But those two are constantly going back and forth.
I’ve stolen a lot of my writing from the way they wrote this album. It found me during senior year of high school. Direction came out and I bought the CD as soon as I could, because I’d heard “The Best of Me” and I’d heard a couple other songs. This record comes out and the production is through the roof. It sounds so lush, and there’s layers and samples and keyboards. It’s epic. I was like, ‘How is this not number one on every radio station? It has everything everybody could ever want.’
But the songwriting, the themes, the feelings it evokes – it’s so airy. It tickled my brain in the perfect way. Then you have one of the most authentic emotors in the genre in Kenny Vasoli – the way he sings, the way the words fall out of his mouth, is perfect for me. Especially on this record, it felt like he was speaking to me.
I am definitely going listen to the whole album after this. It blows my mind that they started when he was 14 and this would have come out when he was 21?
Yes, he was super young through that whole thing. To go back and listen to that second record, where he talks about his frustrations with the industry, and the way he uses metaphors – it’s so beyond what my brain was capable of at that age.
“Begin Again” by Taylor Swift
This is a really nice song. Was Taylor your toe-dip into country music?
Well, a quick story: my relationship with country music is very strange. That’s what my parents had on in the house. When I woke up to get ready in the morning, CMT [Country Music Television] music videos are playing in the background. Faith Hill and Dixie Chicks – all of that. I loved it. Shania Twain was the Taylor Swift version point zero or whatever.
When I found my music, I had a very visceral backlash. I was listening to American Idiot and realising, ‘Wait a minute, the people that write country music, I don’t really align with their values. It’s not that the music is bad, but I hate the idea that these people are successful.’
Knowing what’s in their heads as they’re singing ruins it. It was not a healthy reaction from me. It got to the point where people knew that about me and would purposely annoy me by turning it up in the car or whatever. It may have traumatised me a little – how clamped down I like to keep my ecosystem now, and control what I’m listening to.
Can I ask where you grew up? Because your accent leads me to believe somewhere southern, where country music is I guess inescapable?
South Carolina, I’m pretty much the heart of it. Everybody listens to it and I forget that. I’m in a very small world down here in South Carolina, so thank you for reminding me that that’s not a universal experience.
After college I was listening to more indie music. Guitar music was very unpopular for a while when EDM hit, but Red came out in 2012. I was working at Walmart right after college. I graduated with a fancy Bachelor of Science and Music Industry degree, getting my job at Walmart.
I would sneak a little earbud in during my shift and listen to Spotify, which was brand new. I put on Red, and I thought, ‘This is probably the best group of musicians I’ve ever heard on a record together.’ The way the drummer was playing – you would hear him go ham on three bars of some crazy crash thing, and it was, ‘Oh, he’s got chops, but he’s holding back.’ And the Nashville of it all, where there’s a banjo tinkling away over here, an acoustic guitar is coming in, and everything is swelling up.
The way she wrote the lyrics on this song – specifically this song – is the epitome of a Nashville songwriting session. You had this concept of a girl finding out that maybe there is hope, that not all people are like her experience with the person before. She has been through some stuff. It’s not even ‘he hit me’, it’s ‘I think it's strange that you think I'm funny, because he never did.'
What a feeling – the way she thinks about bringing things up with him towards the end of the song, but he’s too busy being enveloped in the moment with her. It distracts her from her own thoughts and allows her to have this hope. It’s so small of a setting – it’s just this date, this one date, but the way that song plays out has always stuck with me for over 10 years now.
That’s such a beautiful analysis of it. I have completely been missing the point with Taylor Swift. I’m going back to this. You’ve given me homework.
I don’t want to go too deep into this type of thing, but as a man, you’re less likely to have had these experiences – of having someone treat you that way. It opened my eyes to the baggage that people can carry, and the way that people react isn’t always necessarily the way they want to react. It’s more a product of what they’ve been through.
That was life getting bigger. That’s what music is. You want to tap into the music that’s providing the emotional template for what the words are telling you. You really get transported in a song like that – to understanding how your own actions can affect people. It blows everything wide open.
This is also the song that made you realise it was okay to like country again. Is that right?
Yes. This record did that for me. You could clearly tell she was trying to transition to pop music. But there was so much of that – I almost used the word ‘traditional’, but traditional country music is not this – the instrumentation of the acoustic guitar, the banjo, the drum kit mic’d up the Nashville way. It felt like pop music applied to country instruments, which is foreshadowing for another of my Nine Songs.
There’s such a wide breadth of country music, so that was definitely a big moment for me, where I knew I needed more diversity in my ears – ‘I can’t listen to Four Year Strong again. For my own enrichment, I need to start finding more stuff that I identify with.’ Thankfully, I very much did.
“Rings” by Pinegrove
BEST FIT: And that’s where Pinegrove comes in? Again, a band I’m not too familiar with. But I know they blend emo and country, they’ve got really clever lyrics, they do some cool conceptual stuff like the film in the farmhouse. I’d love to know why you chose this.
Amperland, NY? However many views that video has on YouTube, at least half of them are me. I know that in my soul. I cannot get enough of that band. They are all so damn good. Every single one of them.
Zack, the drummer – I’ve never seen somebody play the drums with that much emotion. The way he rides the dynamics and the interesting parts he comes up with make that band, just as much as Evan does.
Speaking of Evan, Jesus Christ – I don’t understand how he writes the way he does. It does not follow a format of pop music, or any genre. It’s this meandering, almost formless thought-explosion that takes you exactly where he’s wanting it to go, but it does so in such a surprising way. The phrasing that’s paired so tightly with what he’s doing on guitar – you can tell they were written together. He’s pouring his soul out with this guitar in front of you. I’ve never heard another artist do it like that.
Then they’ll do an interlude that lasts for probably too long, but I love that, because it lets you sit in the emotion and try to parse out what they’re talking about. It gives you time to appreciate every lyric.
In “Rings”, in those verses, he’ll say a line and then wait a beat and then say another line. I want to write like that. I want to make art that feels so outside of tradition in a weird way, but then you look at the chords and they’re so not weird. The harmonics of it all are not strange. He’s singing the same eight notes that are in a major scale and just playing the diatonic chords in the key.
It’s not about the music; it’s not about the notes; it’s about what he’s doing with them and how he’s able to sound so unique while using the exact same chords as every folk/emo artist. He’s an artist – a capital-A artist. I so admire that he found a way to present his art with the people that he found, because it’s magic.
There’s no other band where I prefer the live versions. They constantly change their arrangements live – you’ll hear the guitar lick on the piano one time. Or he’ll play drums in a verse that didn’t have drums in it before. It’s constantly evolving. It reminds me of how people talk about jam bands, where there’s this culture around certain concerts, you-had-to-be-there moments. I’ve had the privilege of seeing Pinegrove live once, in Asheville, North Carolina. Everything I already felt, it was 100 times more in the room.
My favourite thing about this song in particular is the outro. I’ve never heard another song do this, where the chords are slowing down and he’s singing over top of it, but the drums don’t slow down with them. He just gets quieter until he eventually fades out. He was completely out of time with them when he finally faded out, but it felt so intentional and so cool of an idea to even think of.
The way that it plays into the emotion of those last lines, the way he’s barely singing them, barely playing, and it ends in this nice, big lingering chord – it’s so beautiful.
I love that you’re picking out in each of these songs the way it’s all put together. You’re clearly drawn to songs that are cleverly put together and it really aligns with what I think makes your music unique.
It’s been a struggle for me to accept that about myself, because I’ll see other people copy verse two like it was in verse one. That’s standard practice – there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve never felt like I could do that. I need constant evolution. Not constant as in jerking you around in different ways, but much like the Pinegrove thing, where they’re feeling it in the moment and he’s going to add this little drum beat where it normally wasn’t. I want to be able to hear that when I’m writing and arranging and implement that.
I don’t want to ever feel restricted by the form of a song, like, ‘Oh no, I have to do the verse part again. I can’t do the wild thing I wanted.’ No, I don’t have to do that. But obviously more work means more time, and time is a resource. There’s that balance of how efficient I need to be as a business, versus how inefficient I can afford to be as an artist. That is my eternal struggle as a solo artist.
I think you’re offering something unique by not being super-efficient.
I’d love to think that that’s true, and I think that is what drives me to do what I do. It’s incredibly rewarding for me and for the people who get it, who understand what that time means.
“Slow Burn” by Kacey Musgraves
I feel like Kacey made country music mainstream and cool again, perhaps picking up the torch from Taylor a little bit. How did you come across her?
Obviously, Kacey’s voice is something special. It’s so pure and effortless to hear her sing. The first single “High Horse” made me go back in her discography, when she was a little bit more independent, with the not-super-glossy production. There’s so much character and personality in her music, and just enough of that carried over to Golden Hour.
I’d never before heard a record that felt like a drug I’ve never tried. You can feel the trippiness in the whole thing. This is the first song, “Slow Burn”, and these lyrics have so much personality that you can hear throughout her work, the way she couples things together: “Grandma cried when I pierced my nose” – that kind of stuff. It was hypnotising, the way that everything slowly rolls in.
The most satisfying moment – in music, for me – is when those drums come in, in the second verse. Oh my god. The way that it just falls in: “In Tennessee the sun’s going down / But in Beijing they’re heading out to work.” Dum dum ka ka. It’s as effortless as her voice is. The drums are all of a sudden there. It was such a poof moment, that is so creatively done. It’s the most perfect track #1 since the Untitled blink record.
I love that atmosphere they created there. The vocal delay throws are just there enough to hear them without tripping over the legibility of the words. The snare drum is so raw and weighty; it feels like you’re in the room with it. If I was a front of house engineer with a band on tour, this is the song I’d play in the theatre to tune the system.
When you’re listening on good headphones, there’s like this funk to it. One of my big 2025 goals is to figure out how to record real drums and make them sound excellent. And that snare drum is my top-of-the-mountain moment.
Speaking of good headphones, when you’re noticing these little things – like delay tails and the snare – are you sitting down with music and completely focusing on just that. Are you someone who’s got music on all the time? What’s your relationship with listening to music?
Great question. I’m a podcast guy. I find that I can tune out the din of conversation on a podcast and focus more so than tuning out a song. I find myself drawn to the song, I want to give it what it deserves, but I don’t have time to give it what it deserves right now – I’m washing dishes, and I’ve got to get this thing off of my pan.
This morning – and again, this is why I found this exercise so fulfilling – I grabbed my good headphones, I went to my kitchen, pulled up the playlist, and I walked around my kitchen, listening, appreciating. I do not do that enough. I know certain producers who start their day listening to a handful of songs and really appreciating them. I don’t take time to feed my soul enough in that way, where music is so commodified and algorithmically driven.
And it’s literally your job.
Exactly. That’s the other part of it: there’s this weird relationship with music in general, because I’m constantly feeling pressure to monetise it. But it was so nice to have that time today. Some of the things I’m mentioning were heard today for the first time because I took the time to sit down and do nothing but listen. And that’s a luxury I have, I realise, that I have free time to devote to it.
I don’t have enough in my schedule, honestly, because when you have something to plan around it makes you take action. When every available moment is open to you, you tend to put things off. It’s a very first world problem.
Every time I try to go on the internet and share my experience about being a creator, I always go back a day later and I’m like, ‘The internet doesn’t need to see this,’ and I’ll delete it. I don’t know if that’s being older or having this complicated relationship with social media, where ten years ago I was gladly and freely sharing everything about my life with no feeling of regret or hesitation.
Now it feels different. I don’t know if that’s me or society or both, but I find that it is really hard to communicate about the process of being me and doing what I do. It’s very hard to want to talk about it or feel like I can talk about it.
I’m glad that this article can be a small way to do that, maybe.
Having this on the calendar, in so many ways, is enriching me.
“Love It If We Made It” by The 1975
We’ve got one more song and it’s our first British band. A fairly recent release, too. What’s the story with The 1975?
What a character. What a lyricist. It’s such a weird band, because you can vibe to it and not really understand a word he says, but then when you read some of the lyrics, they’re very evocative. I think he uses evocative imagery in an excellent way – in the most classy way you could say the weirdest, grossest things. He is able to put meaning behind it.
When you pair that with George [Daniel], who is a production genius / wizard / magician / all of the above – the sound design, the sheer sound design of this song, before you even touch the themes, it’s so quintessentially their sound. When it finally explodes into that chorus, the second chorus, everything is just full blast.
That’s the Alex Melton thing – the Alex Melton of it all.
I remember where I was when I heard that song for the first time. I was working at a theatre, and I was hanging lights in the grid, setting up for some show, listening to music. I had that record on, I got to that song, and I had to put everything down and give it what it deserved. I’m like, ‘What the hell? I’ve got to rewind that.’ I texted my professor, the guy that taught me what Pro Tools were in college. He was a huge 1975 fan. I said, “Have you heard this song?” He’s like, “Yes, it’s ridiculous.”
And the lyrics: it’s what I was describing with American Idiot but times ten, because now I understand what he’s alluding to and what it all means. He’ll take a phrase and you know exactly what he’s referencing when he says a Donald Trump quote – all that kind of stuff, the way that he puts them together.
The performance art of that vocal, the desperation in his voice, transcends music. It’s almost musical theatre, like a performance piece, the way he delivers those lines and the way they make you feel – the pure elation of that instrumental where everything is beating you over the head and he is just screaming.
It feels so visceral. And that’s everything I love about that band: the rhythmic, funky syncopation is all there; the restraint; the ups and the downs; the flow of it.
I saw them live last year. Oh my Jesus Christ. It’s insane, the way they put that show together. It’s a set. They lit it like TV and have all these practical’s on stage. I have a theatre background, so I kind of know the amount of crew and live switchers for all the camera feeds and the cues from the lighting and the production. Everything is synced up.
And he knows exactly how to work that crowd. I’ve never seen somebody work a crowd like that. When you have a set of people that are dedicated to realising the vision of an album the way that they do their live shows, it’s not just a concert. I have a huge amount of respect for them for seeing that vision and knowing they could pull it off. Maybe they might be the only band that could pull something like that off.
But it’s very special. That’s a very special song for me.
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