Track By Track: Flowers on Everybody's Dying To Meet You

The group worked with Brian O'Shaughnessey (The Clientele, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine) on Everybody's Dying To Meet You, their second long-player, and distill jangly guitars, punchy percussion, throbbing bass, and clarion vox into bitesized nuggets of pure joy.

Listen to "Pull My Arm" below, and then check out the Track By Track guide after.

Pull My Arm

This song wasn't originally going to be on the album, it didn't even exist when we were in the studio recording the other songs. We had a gap between recording the album and mixing it, and Brian (O'Shaughnessy) quite rightly said it was a good idea to have a break to listen to the tracks and have a think about anything that needed doing before the mixing process began. In that time we had a few UK dates with one of our favourite bands, Luna, and that's when we wrote "Pull My Arm". We couldn't wait for a whole other album to record it so we spent our first mixing day recording the new song instead.

Bitter Pill

­ We wrote this song on another tour with Luna around Spain (clearly being around them is inspiring!). There's that Ronettes­y drum beat in the lead­up to the chorus... we love how those old recordings have a tambourine sound mixed with the snare for an extra bit of shimmer so we did the same thing for this song.

Ego Loss

­ This song was originally a punk song, believe it or not. Sam got an amazing vintage fuzzy overdrive pedal off eBay, and the day it arrived he was playing with it and played this really great sounding, super distorted punk thing (basically the chords to "Ego Loss" but a LOT louder and a LOT faster). I started singing over it because I was enjoying listening to it so much, but unfortunately I don't have the voice for punk so as we were playing the song together it slowly morphed into how it sounds now. That's basically the story of our band, we try to be The Misfits and then I come along with my unsuitable voice and spoil everything!

All At Once

­ This was the first song we wrote for this new album (apart from "Russian Doll" which is a really old one). It was also one of the first songs we ever wrote all together in a practice room, rather than me and Sam writing at home and bringing a finished song to practice. It was a big step forward for us, because it meant we could always perform our new songs live. We still write loads the two of us at home, but often those songs don't sound like 'Flowers', or they're just impossible to make sound good as a three-­piece in a live setting, because when we're writing we have any number of instruments and sounds at our disposal, whereas live we're limited to guitar, bass, drums, and one vocal. The new album is written to be performed live, which is much, much easier!

Intrusive Thoughts

This is an epic song for us, length­wise. We rarely go into three­-minute territory with our songs, let alone FOUR! I think even with it the album is barely over half-an-hour long... if you have the vinyl version of the album this is the end of side A. We were conscious of each side of the album being its own sort of phrase, and we felt this song concluded the first half of the album very well.

How Do You Do

­ We originally wanted to call this new album How Do You Do, but then we thought it would be a very similar title to Hi, How Are You by Daniel Johnston and we didn't want anyone to draw any comparisons we couldn't live up to! This is one of the first songs we wrote after I started playing a bass with four strings (I used to play a one-­stringed bass), and it's such a fun song to play. There's a very different feeling I get from playing bass with Sam and Jordan as opposed to just singing with them. When you're singing a melody, you're doing something that compliments what the other instruments are doing, and weaves around them, whereas playing bass you're really playing with the other instruments, the same rhythm, the same groove, and it's very fun. I get to do both which is even better.

Tammy

­ This is a very fun song to play live. The drums start going with this tribal sort of beat and then Sam's guitar and amp start wailing feedback, and then we come in together really LOUD and it feels great. We were a bit worried how it'd work on record, because without that huge live sound we thought it might be a bit boring. We ended up having the idea of putting in a bit of synth, but it ended up being a nightmare to get right... the part was incredibly simple and easy to play, but the whole idea of it was to use the pitch bender very slightly so the note warbled. Without it, it was just a really boring part. But the pitch bender was stiff and had a big 'dead zone' in the middle, so we spent hours doing takes where you couldn't hear it doing anything at all and takes where it'd do a Dr. Who level, sound­effect bend down and ruin the take. This simple idea we had took hours to get right, we did it in the end and it did improve the song a lot even though you can hardly hear it but none of us wanted to go near a pitch bender again for a while.

Russian Doll

­ This is a very old song, one of the first home demos we ever made as Flowers. We wrote it when we were all still living pretty far apart. Sam happened to send me a guitar/drum machine instrumental on the day I picked up a synth I found on Gumtree (at that time I didn't play bass, we were actually thinking of using synth live instead which is why I got it). I was messing around with it seeing what sounds I could get out of it over the demo Sam sent over and ended up with a very eerie sound that fit well over Sam's parts. It ended up being a very unsettling, ominous demo, the drums and guitar were very held back and the synth was doing a strange high string sound over the top. This album version doesn't have such a weirdness about it as the home demo did but it's much more of a pop song.

My Only Friend

­ We wrote and recorded this song so quickly and easily I can't really think of any anecdotes about it at all, I can't even remember when we wrote it. I do remember writing the words and just thinking I should definitely just repeat them for the second verse because they'd already said everything they should say. It's such a simple song, but that's always what we try to do with Flowers - write really simple pop songs. If there's anything extra that doesn't need to be there we take it out. This song is the epitome of that sort of songwriting I suppose!

Bathroom Sink

­ All I remember about recording this song was looking through the glass from the control room into the sound-proofed recording room and seeing Sam trying to get his guitar as close to the amps as he could and his ears as far away as possible at the same time. He was running his Blackface Super Reverb amp through an old Marshall 4x12 cab, and he wanted to be in there with them rather than in the control room to get that lovely wailing feedback you can hear in the song. But it was SO LOUD. He was sweating just from how loud it was. Sounded great though.

Everybody's Dying To Meet You is out via Fortuna Pop! on 12 February. You can stream the whole thing below.