Ahead of the release of the song story project & (Ampersand) the Bastille frontman takes Ed Nash through a deepdive behind the tales of the pivotal songs in his life.
“Talking through these songs, it turns out that I exclusively like semi-haunted music.”
When I meet Dan Smith in London’s South Bank on one of the last sunny afternoons of the year, he’s still mulling over which songs will make the final cut for his Nine Songs selections. So attached is he to the 12 songs on his long list and the stories that underpin them, Smith finds himself dovetailing each of them across his final song choices.
We’re also here to talk about &, a collection of song stories of significant characters in history, from the beginning of time to the modern day. He saw the project as an opportunity to explore his love of storytelling, and not for the last time in the hour we spend talking, Smith is humble about what he’s achieved with &. “In the advent of Ted Talks, everyone thinks they’re a storyteller”, he tells me.
Storytelling and songcraft have always been indelibly linked, and I put it to Smith that something inherent to great storytelling - whether in songwriting, presenting or writing - is the need for clarity of what the story you’re trying to tell is.
“Yes. I’ve got brain that can focus deeply on certain things, but if there's distractions then I'm all over the place", he tells me. "The idea of a busy slide that I'm trying to digest while someone's talking at the same time is nightmare for me. I can read a book, but if there's music on with lyrics, I can't do either.”
& is billed as “Bastille Presents” but tells a very different musical and lyrical story to the work of his alma mater. It’s delicate and intimate, deliberately stripped back musically to allow his characters stories room to breathe. Smith describes & as a musical road less travelled, but one that he’s relished walking down.
“I went into & viewing it as a period of my life of wanting to find out about other people, to expand my mind, and use the excuse of this album to do something musically that was completely unselfconscious. It felt like exactly the thing I wanted to do at that point.”
Smith tells me that as proud as he is of what Bastille have achieved, he reached a point where he questioned whether his unplanned career as a musician was what he really wanted to do.
“A few years ago, I was thinking about touring, music, releasing albums and how it was maybe not that fulfilling for me. I felt my brain was rotting a bit. There's only so long you can spend on tour doing a similar thing every night”, before adding, “I thought about packing it in, requalifying and doing something else.”
Part of the reason for thinking about doing something else was that Smith never thought he’d be in a band. “I never comprehended what it would take, or what the experience would be. At the very beginning it was incredible, overwhelming, awful and bizarre - all the cliché’s and more, rolled into one”, he explains.
“The idea of anything taking over your life is a lot to get on board with. I definitely didn't imagine to still be doing it in 10 years, or even what I'd be doing in 10 years.
Following Bastille’s last tour, Smith found himself with a clear diary, and the chance to step away made him realise how much he loved writing songs and making music.
“This album was such a nice excuse to do it at home, to get the songs together and immerse myself in all these lives. It was an excuse to force myself to learn to play the guitar, to research deeply into all these people, and step outside my comfort zone in loads of ways”, he reflects.
“It’s about settling into accepting that I'm allowed to do this, and that I should enjoy it and make the most of it, and that's a really privileged place to be.”
Accompanying & is a 12-part podcast Muses: An Ampersand Podcast, a series of conversations between Smith and the historian Emma Nagouse. Taking in characters from the poet Emily Dickinson to the painter Edvard Munch, and a personal story, “Telegraph Road 1977 & 2024”, inspired by a poem his father wrote. Smith first attempted to turn into a song in his teens and has finally finished it, with his mother, who was a folk singer, on backing vocals.
“The podcast thing has been amazing. There are so many clichés about people making podcasts, that everyone alive has one, but my route into a lot of these stories was via Emma, who is really smart, thoughtful and really funny.” He describes the process as “somewhere between a history, culture, comedy, arts podcast,” where they pick apart the songs and deep dive into the characters stories.
“It’s the historiography of why they're remembered as they are, or have been forgotten or are misremembered, and what life would have been like when they were alive.
When we come to discuss his Nine Songs selections, Smith gets his phone out and works his way around the shortlist as we go. His overarching theme behind each of them is simple - “I tried to pick songs that really marked a period of my life, but also that I still think are amazing” - but as we talk through them he spots other themes weaving through them - his love of film, of unique voices, and specifically and surprisingly for Smith, a fascination with haunting music.
When we get to the end, I ask how he found it. “I sort of swerved it by talking about them all. You'll have a real fun job of trying to assimilate it all together!”
“Song for Guy” by Elton John
DAN SMITH: I was thinking, if this is to relate to my life, this was the first song I ever performed.
All the music my parents were listening to and had loved growing up was in our house when I was growing up. There was an Elton John CD on in the car all the time, probably his Greatest Hits. With “Song for Guy” I remember it was this haunting track that I didn't quite understand, this mix of piano melody and a subtle nagging hook and he’s miles behind it. I didn't know anything about the story behind the song until later
I was a very shy, awkward kid and when I was in junior school there was a concert where we all had to play something. I played “Song for Guy”, but just the piano bit, which was insane given that everyone else did these beautiful classical pieces and this was a song that was in my consciousness.
I remember playing it on a loop at the front of the school hall, probably very badly and then walking off, which thinking back is kind of mad. But for that reason, that refrain was on a loop in my head a lot as a kid.
It's funny when you come to artists after the fact - like so many of us do - when albums and albums of their music is out. Elton John's made so much music, but when I was a kid, listening to this massive album full of these huge songs, I didn't understand where they fitted in his career or in culture. But that song always really jumped out at me; the fact that he doesn't sing on it until quite late, and that it's so sad and haunting.
BEST FIT “Song for Guy” is one of the few songs he wrote the lyric for, which is a single, repeated line “Life isn't everything”. The relationship between him and lyricist Bernie Taupin is fascinating, the way that Elton John makes songs like “Tiny Dancer” sound like a story he’s written himself.
It’s fascinating to me as well. As someone who came to songwriting quite unintentionally, reading about their creative relationship is so fascinating. I've always written by myself, but weirdly there's a song on &, the last track, which is called “Telegraph Road 1977 & 2024”.
Which your Dad sort of co-wrote?
When I was 13 or 14, I wanted to write songs, but I didn't have thoughts formed in my head that I wanted to commit to. So my Dad volunteered a book of notes and poems he wrote when he and my Mum were traveling from South Africa, across America and then to the UK, and that poem really jumped out at me.
Not to remotely try and relate me and my Dad to Bernie Taupin and Elton John, but it’s interesting that one of the first songs I ever wrote was actually somebody else's words, and you’d think I would have learned more from that. (laughs)
The reality was I then wrote by myself a lot; I didn't really comprehend that people co-wrote until after our first album was out. We got to know what it was to be in a band in the music industry in reverse.
I remember that feeling like such a massive rug pull moment - ‘What? People don't just sit alone and write their songs by themselves?’, ‘No, you fucking idiot, of course they don't. That's why bands exist and why the entire mechanism of songwriting in the whole world is a thing.’ I was naïve and a bit of an idiot.
With Elton John and his songwriting and like so many of the artists my Mum and Dad listened to - and therefore that I listened to loads as a kid - it was about storytelling and inhabiting these different characters.
With storytelling in a song, as opposed to prose, it’s like there’s three elements that need to be hit, the lyric, the music and the delivery, and how they combine to tell the story together?
Yes, totally. It's really interesting reading about songwriters who've had huge pop artists take their songs and completely own them.
A good example is Dolly Parton talking about Whitney Houston and “I Will Always Love You”, where she just owned it and transformed it into something different. And to your point about delivery, it can be the thing that makes something good into something amazingly resonant. Elton John is a fascinating example of that, I love the idea of the relationship between him and Bernie Taupin and what they produced was really impressive.
It’s a very different example, but in my world there's a song I wrote years ago, which was one of my first experiences writing with a songwriter and it was actually about the guy I wrote it with, about a breakup that he was going through. We wrote it as a piano ballad, but it ended up being this big EDM song that I gave to a DJ.
Whenever I sing that song it's slightly surreal - it’s like inhabiting the mind of the guy I’d just met for the first time, and the bizarreness of getting up on big stages and singing this song that really resonates with people.
What song was it?
It’s called “Happier”, which I wrote with Steve Mac as an experiment for me to write for other people. I probably had quite a naïve perception of what writing was. When I was a teenager, I wasn't thinking about being a band, it was about being an artist. I was obsessed with film and I really wanted to write for Empire.
Hence the T-Shirt you’re wearing today that has the line “A Stanley Kubrick Production” on it!
Can you tell I like my films?! The naivety with which we wandered into music really can't be overstated. It was fascinating to learn - fascinating and horrifying at the same time.
“To Zion” by Lauryn Hill
DAN SMITH: Remaining in my childhood, my sister loved Fugees and Hip hop. I remember the first song I owned was “Killing Me Softly” by Fugees, which I loved, and then when Lauryn Hill released Miseducation, that album was on repeat and I loved it so much. “To Zion” is really haunting and beautiful, and I think it's my favorite song from that album.
BEST FIT: The story of “To Zion” is bittersweet, about her having a child with Rohan Marley, Bob Marley's son, and what becoming a mother could mean for her career.
It was doing the maybe unexpected thing but doing the thing she truly wanted to do. It’s a really powerful song and the fact that she wrote about is really powerful as well. It's funny how your relationship with songs changes over time. When I first heard it, I loved the minor chords and the melodies, it was really beautiful and again, slightly haunting.
There's that word 'haunting' again!
What is it with ‘haunting’ and the songs I’ve picked?!
Again, it was instinctively loving it as a kid, but as an adult, reading about her experiences, going into more depth about what it would have been like for her to be in Fugees, to be in the relationship she was in and then to not be in the relationship she was in, to be grappling with fame, youth and pregnancy and trying to make a solo record from all of that. Having known the song as a kid, it's crushingly powerful to hear that, it brings a whole new dimension to it.
Obviously, as you go through life, you experience all the different things that everyone else experiences at different times, and things hit you like a truck in different ways. I guess something appealed to my naïve, Emo-hearted teenage self with this song. I was like, ‘This is sad. I like it!’, but I had absolutely no comprehension of what it would be like to have any of her experiences in life, or going through what she was, but it always resonated with me.
The lyrics are so powerful and it's such raw storytelling. It paints the picture really brilliantly. Music, or pop music, is a very, very broad church in my mind, and a song that tells something from a slightly different angle, or challenges the listener, is definitely a thing that resonates with me, and I'm really drawn to.
When we played at Glastonbury on the Pyramid Stage a few years ago, she was on after us. That was two of the most bizarre, surreal, exciting moments of my entire life, getting to play that stage at my favorite festival and then to stand at the side of the stage and watch her.
Did she come on stage on time?
She was on time, and weirdly, I met her. I have a rule of never, ever wanting to meet anyone I admire, because I can't trust how I'm going behave or what I’m going to say, or they might be an asshole because I'm being weird, but she was really nice. As someone who was always a fan in the crowd at gigs, the demystification of those circumstances is always kind of funny to me.
Seeing Lauryn Hill kicking about, having a smoke out of the back of a tent at Glastonbury, in and amongst a bunch of cars and tour buses definitely wasn't ever on my hit list of things that might happen to me.
But it did happen, and it was really nice. It's nice to be pleasantly surprised by the people that you admire.
“Requiem For A Dream” by Kronos Quartet
DAN SMITH: Do I go for “Requiem for a Dream” or “Adagio for Strings?”... I’m going to go with “Requiem for a Dream.”
“Lux Aeterna” is the famous theme, it’s a grindingly repetitive, minor key churn. As a young person and a big film fan, that film leapt out at me because it's so visually arresting.
Regardless of your opinion of his films, I think Darren Aronofsky’s style really slaps you around the face. That score was such an interesting education in the fact that a ‘quote, unquote’ classical score can have incredibly memorable melodies that really leap out, really latch onto your brain and stay there. It's so stitched in my mind, the visuals and the horrifying trajectory of the stories of that film.
BEST FIT: It’s definitely not easy viewing.
No, it's not! It feels like a film that’s made for student filmmakers, in that there's loads of really interesting cinematography techniques, split screens and micro shots of eyes dilating. I think it's amazing and when I dug into it, I was interested to learn about the Kronos Quartet.
A couple of years ago - and this sounds like a lie because the story I told before about not wanting to people I admire - I went for lunch with the composer Clint Mansell to chat about working on something, and he was really cool and super open to all my annoying questions.
It was so interesting hearing it was both his and Darren Aronofsky’s second film. They did Pi and that wasn't intended to be a full score, they were going to do one little bit, and then as the film developed, he did more and more.
They entered into Requiem for a Dream together as sophomore film project and it sounded mad. They were able to book the best string quartet in America, and they got to record it at Skywalker Sound, which is fucking insane, given that they were both early in their careers, to be like, ‘What the fuck is happening? This is a dream’.
It's funny when things leap out to you and you like them, but for anyone else that hears that music, if they've seen the film, they almost want to switch it off, because it's intentionally borderline unbearable. To be so economic with notes, but to arrange them in a way that stays there in your mind, and that spoke to me.
How has that inspired your own writing?
I never wanted Bastille to be the idea of four blokes in a band, that seems really tired and a cliché. It was always more of a project and a way to use the songs that I wrote in my bedroom to transport me away somewhere while I was making them.
Part of the early stages of the band were not only the albums but the mixtapes as well, which were love letters to scores and film soundtracks. “Lux Aeterna” resonated with me as one of the most of original scores and I dragged that and Barber's “Adagio for Strings” into our mixtapes, which fused sampling, film soundtracks, re-recording film soundtracks, pop music from the ‘90s and ‘80s, contemporary pop music and quotes from films into this big, uncleared, unlicensed, illegal mess.
Nowadays, it'd be different, but nothing differentiated from the process of making the ‘quote unquote’ real album, other than the fact that our record label was terrified of how uncleared everything was and wanted nothing to do with them.
I hosted the website, I bought the memory to upload the mixtapes on, and did it separately whilst signed to a label. It was really odd, but as is my want sometimes, as terrible as it might be, I dragged that song into our world a little bit.
Requiem for a Dream starts with the Kronos Quartet tuning up, which is really unnerving.
It's really brilliant, it feels tense from the off because of that, you can feel the strings being tightened and that tension is rising in it, it fully goes to the places that are as awful as you imagine. It's so funny with that film, I only ever really think of the first hour, I think I've deleted and blocked off the last third because it's so awful and dramatic, but in my mind, this slightly rosy version of it exists.
When Bastille started, I wanted to make a music video, but I had no money. I re-edited Terrence Malick’s Badlands into a music video for “Flaws”, but I only used the beautiful, windswept horizon moments, and edited out all the darkness.
I feel I’d do that very differently now, but it was an interesting lesson in editing and how powerful it can be, and that it completely guides the viewer or the listener.
“Hope There’s Someone” by Anohni
DAN SMITH: I'm a massive Anhoni fan and it's been really interesting to see her career unfold. The first Anhoni album Hopelessness, with "Drone Bomb Me" and “4 Degrees”, was such a brilliant example of the reinvention of an artist, but I still love “Hope There's Someone”. I don't put it on all the time because it's very sad, but it's insanely beautiful.
BEST FIT: What drew you to her music?
I remember being really struck by the simplicity of the piano and the complete uniqueness of Anhoni’s voice. It didn't sound like anything I'd ever heard before. And to have a song about the potential loneliness of dying, it's pretty punchy, and as I'm learning from doing this, it speaks to my apparent love of very sad, haunting songs.
As someone growing up and starting to play music, hearing things that sounded like nobody else - not because they were using production skills to try anything wildly different - but because of the uniqueness of a voice and what they were trying to say, was really helpful to me and really inspiring.
Not to remotely put myself in the same sentence as Anhoni, but I have a very odd voice that doesn't really sound like other people, and in a lot of circumstances you maybe shy away from that. But hearing artists who sang in their own voice, in their own accent, in their individualized way, was really helpful in settling into what I wanted to do.
As well as unique voices, hearing artists Anhoni, Regina Spektor, Elton John and Rufus Wainwright, who would happily be at the keys and kind of reject the idea of guitar, was also really helpful, because piano was all I could play. I didn't pick up a guitar until a couple of years ago.
Our first album didn't have any guitars on it, and I was really proud of that fact, because people always assumed we were going to make indie music. Most of the songs were written on a keyboard on a laptop.
We got around a lot of those problems by using strings, synths and rhythms, and once we started making the album properly and realised that was the way that it was, it was nice to lean into it. There are sounds on the album that people think are guitars, and they're not.
BEST FIT: There's an incredible line in “Hope There's Someone” that’s hard to listen to, “Oh, I'm scared of the middle place / Between light and nowhere / I don't want to be the one / Left in there.
It’s pretty bleak, isn't it? You imagine someone on their deathbed. In our society we often really shy away from sadness and death. I don't know if it's a British thing, but we don't want to talk about it. You travel to different places in the world, watch films or read books about different cultures, and it's way more normalized. So no wonder grief hits you like a train when you first experience it, because it’s completely otherized and pushed to the side.
Growing up as a Brit, you absorb that through the loss of a grandparent or a friend losing someone close to them. That's where you absorb it, and you learn it, but this song does a good job of stirring the existential insecurities of what’s coming down the line.
BEST FIT There's no escaping the sorrow in the song, on the artwork, the video, it hits the listener from every angle.
It really does. Even if you don't speak English, you know what she's talking about. It's so there, in like what you said about a story being the lyrics, the melodies and how they're delivered. It's a really perfect example of all those things and it feels totally aligned in that.
This is a real happy playlist I’ve together isn’t it?!
“Hounds of Love” by Kate Bush
BEST FIT: What was your entry point to Kate Bush’s music?
I remember my Dad was traveling, he was on a flight and got chatting to the guy next to him who worked at a record label, and he gave Dad a bunch of records. This was before I was born, I guess this would been back in the day where he'd have been going to take meetings and plug stuff records.
One of them was Kate Bush's Hounds of Love. That was a vinyl that lived in our house when I grew up, but I never listened to it when I was a kid, because my parents didn't listen to Kate Bush.
But when I was in my 20s, I had a real deep dive phase with her music and that album. And, fucking hell, again, in terms of evocative, transported music, I didn't know what was going on, but there's this completely unique voice, with these heavily reverbed drums and these strings, and it's like those are all things in making music and listening to music that really jump out to me.
It's such a brilliantly weird song. I used to listen to it loads at uni, and then living in London afterwards and in the making of our albums as well.
I think there’s another reason you like this song.
What’s that?
Because it brings film into a song, the opening line - "It's in the trees, it's coming!" - is from the horror film Night of the Demon.
Exactly! When we made our second album, I got obsessed with the idea of bringing in our mixtapes to use film quotes, which we've done a lot and which Kate Bush does on “The Hounds of Love.” So a lot of the songs on our second album open with quotes from old obscure B movies and horror films and stuff.
So yes, I completely thought of that myself! It was very inspiring.
“BTSTU” by Jai Paul
DAN SMITH: Massively switching gears from Kate Bush to Jai Paul, who for a large amount of musicians was massively influential.
To hear something that was mysterious, that sounded really different and used production in such a big way within the song, where he was writing amazing, melodically repetitive, but brilliant pop songs, and then obscuring the vocal using Sidechaining, felt really new. Living in the time that we’ve lived in, it’s quite rare to hear stuff that feels completely new.
With “BTSTU”, in a time and in a culture where we're used to being given so much, there’s something about leaving you wanting more that I think people can't quite handle. There was something about the mythos around him that was really exciting as a music fan when that came out. You listen to that song even now and it still sounds really new and really fresh, and you can hear so much music that has been influenced by that.
To have an artist that was really enigmatic but really influential to a lot of other songwriters, musicians and producers was really influential, and who maybe a lot of people outside that community might not have even heard of, is really interesting. The story is almost as fascinating as the music is brilliant.
I used to have that song on loop forever and I can so relate to not wanting to let go of stuff when you're so embedded in it. With our music and with everything we've made, I've either produced it or co-produced it, and you can immerse yourself in a project so much and never want to let go of it.
It's only finished when someone else tells you it is sometimes - if you're me - but with Jai Paul's records, some of them even say ‘demo’ after them, and yet they sound so finished. You can read into it that the idea is he's not committed to saying something's done, and I can relate to that lot.
It's really fun song, and it's also kind of sad, but it's euphoric.
BEST FIT: Is this another haunted one?
Yes! Talking through these songs it turns out that I exclusively like semi-haunted music. But I love that song, and as a longtime fan of his music, seeing his career unfold when it comes to writing and producing for other people and now doing live shows is really rewarding.
“BTSTU” is an acronym of “Back to save the universe” a line from “Airbag” by Radiohead. It’s interesting how fans can geek out about references within songs.
I think there's something about the restraint and the mystery of somebody putting something out there that’s both really, really good and respected, but also not over explained, that speaks to the nerds in us and makes us want to read into absolutely everything.
I was maybe never quite that full on. I was making music at the time, and it was really, really cool and really inspiring. Be it him or Sophie, to hear people pushing boundaries within the technology we have is always really fun to experience as a fan.
“Self Control” by Frank Ocean
DAN SMITH: I’ve been a massive Frank Ocean fan from the very beginning. When Odd Future released all their mixtapes for free on the internet that felt new and radical at the time.
Channel Orange was the one that really jumped out to me, that and The Weeknd's first mixtape. The idea of putting all this work into the music and then putting it out as a free download was very exciting and different, and that's what made me want to do mixtapes.
I think at the time, the idea of a British indie band doing quite weird mixtapes didn't really fit. So in our own world we had this weird parallel existence, between being a band that were touring little pub indie venues, sleeping on floors or in a little van, and playing hype-machine-y, weird covers with cinema music. There were two almost separate avenues that we were on.
With Frank Ocean, again, it was watching someone just be uniquely himself. When Blonde came out it was very exciting and the release of it was really interesting. I love “Self Control” and I love it that the album had loads of amazing moments that don't repeat, they only happen once.
BEST FIT: It’s so confident for an artist to do that. There’s always the temptation to come up with a brilliant idea and then flog the life out of it.
Yes, it’s really confident. It’s an album that rewards repeat listening, it's really raw and open, but also mysterious at the same time. You can hear that it's an album that's been lived with and lived in, poured over and produced maximally and then reduced back down to its core elements. I think it's really brilliant.
What made you choose “Self Control”?
As someone that’s lucky enough to travel a lot with work, it's a real traveling companion of a song. When we were touring for a long time, I would have that song on all the time, because it's kind of sad, but also optimistic and comforting.
There's a moment where his vocal goes up into the stratosphere with these strings around it, and like you said, the confidence of having these moments that just exist once was something I found amazingly powerful.
But also, with & - not that it’s my Blonde - I think of this song, and I think of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy in New York”, the choral harmonies and how haunting and beautiful they are. & was a way to pull together all of these musical moments that I really love, to sit in them and completely put aside anything we produced before, or anyone's expectations of that. I wanted to make a record that is really, really intimate and hopefully really raw.
The whole point was to challenge myself musically, to sit in a space that felt appealing but different, recording vocals differently, leaving in the creaks of chairs, the rain on the roof, the sound of fingers on guitar strings. I wanted it to feel like someone's whispering these stories into your ears, or like an inner monologue. If you're going to try and inhabit Eve within a song or various other people, that felt like the right approach.
So with “Self Control” and a lot of Frank Ocean’s songs, what's really interesting for me with is having an artist who did big pop music - and quite slick pop music - and hearing what his version of the most pared back, raw, and yet still really modern version of himself was, which was very cool.
“Real Love” by Big Thief
DAN SMITH: It was very hard to pick just one Big Thief song that I love, because as a band they are just incredible.
I've seen them play live a bunch of times, and to see how the other members of the band hang off every word and movement of Adrianne Lenker is such an amazing thing to watch. I love the messy rawness of it, but it's also that the songs are brilliant. It's really beautiful.
They can really fucking rock out as well, and actually, ‘Rock out’ is a phrase I've never used before, but they let rip. There's a beautiful delicacy to their songs, but you feel like you're on a knife edge all the time and you don't quite know where the songs are going to go.
“Real Love” is using a big statement, but it's done in a really interesting way, the crash of the guitars and the drums are great, and I wanted a bit of that on this album. I set out to make & as a completely acoustic, one vocal, one guitar album, and then other influences seeped during the recording process, bringing in friends to help and add their own creativity and bits to it.
Some of the songs on & were definitely worked through, but I wanted some of that grittiness and scale, not in a slick way, but in a rough around the edge’s way, and that song was a big influence.
BEST FIT: The music to this song starts off so gently, but the lyrics are about violence in a relationship. “Having your face hit / Having your lip split / By the one who loves you.”
It's horrendous and that’s another thing that's really powerful with Big Thief, and with the pop music that I love, the Trojan horse element. The thing that repeats in your head is ‘real love, real love’ and some people don't necessarily dig into the lyrics, or understand them, or even take them on board.
But that's when I think a song can be really powerful. When it gets under the skin and then if you have the time or the inclination to go and listen to the lyrics it’s ‘Oh. Fuck. That's what it's about.’
And that's entirely the point with & as well. I wanted to make a collection of songs that hopefully hit you and emotionally resonate, but if you were to listen to them properly, and particularly if you want to search for the titles, you can find out more about what lies behind them.
“The Only Living Boy In New York” by Simon & Garfunkel
DAN SMITH: My Mum was a folk singer in uni and that's how she paid her way through university. She ended up in a very different career, but that's how she met my Dad, at Durban uni. It sounds like a high school movie, he was a sports captain, she was a folk musician, they were doing a concert and they met backstage.
When you’re a kid you take in the music that your parents are listening to, and they listened to a lot of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Elton John and Simon & Garfunkel. When I was growing up, I thought Bridge Over Troubled Water was their Greatest Hits record, it's got so many good songs on it.
The storytelling on it is so interesting. It transported me to a place that I didn't know or understand, but you definitely feel like you're somewhere else when you're listening to it.
It sets a mood immediately. As someone that loves to layer my own vocal, hearing when the song breaks down and the big choir of them doing backing vocals kicks in with this huge reverb is really powerful. Again, it’s back to the Frank Ocean thing - of having these moments in songs that takes you somewhere else completely. I really love that and the storytelling element of it.
“The Only Living Boy in New York” and Bridge Over Troubled Water was omnipresent at a certain stage of my childhood, and then I came to it as a teenager and re-fell in love with it. It’s the idea of name-checking places, people and the specifics of a time. Americans can get away with that so much more than Brits can, because the town names are cooler, all the slang and the transport and everything.
So that was stitched into me, that it's such an amazing thing to be really transported with a song and an interesting thing to learn about, not having to write from your own perspective, or strictly from your perspective.
BEST FIT: The story behind the song is Paul Simon having a dig at Art Garfunkel, who was away filming Catch 22 in Mexico. Simon had a small role in the film that got cut by the director Mike Nichols. The song references a character called Tom, which is Art Garfunkel, as they were originally called Tom and Jerry
That's what sets some music apart from others, if you can dig into it and there's a real true-life drama behind it, it's so much more rewarding and interesting.
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