Track By Track: San Fermin on Belong

Open

I wanted to write a kind of Siren song that set an intoxicating mood for the rest of the album. On this track I settled on a palette that shaped everything I wrote afterward - textures made from vocal samples, harp harmonics, and dulcitone. It’s from the perspective of that little voice telling you that you might be a bad person, or at least want bad things.

Bride

Usually the best songs come really quickly, but that was not the case at all with this one. I think there are like 70 different versions of it on my computer. I completely overhauled the lyrics twice, as well as the chorus melody, structure, and drum beat. But that harp and vocal sample intro always felt right, and so I kept at it until I landed on something that felt natural. It’s about an experience I had at a wedding with an anxiety attack, but imagined from the perspective of the bride.

Oceanica

This is another example of a song that went through a lot of major changes. It started as a different song, but I scrapped everything except the line "sea change into pain but also something rich and strange". Then I set out to make a texture that would hold up musically after a setup like that. Stephen (our saxophonist) came in and demoed that crazy triplet line (an echo of the violin line in "Open") and after that I knew I had the backbone of the thing. It was just a matter of keeping the music simple enough until the sax part drops.

August

This was the first song I wrote for this record. I had been reading The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst, and I tried to capture some of the dreaminess of the first few pages, where this girl is lying by the woods in the twilight. It’s a weird song in that it lives in that mid-tempo land where you don’t know if it’s an upper or a downer, but I think that’s kind of the point.

Better Company

I had the chorus of this for a while, but I waited to write the verses until the very end. It’s pretty autobiographical. It’s about spending all my time in the basement, never leaving the house except for take out, and feeling dumb for being such a whiner.

No Promises

This was the last song I wrote for this record. It’s addressed directly to the band, and it’s about understanding the sacrifices they’ve all put into this. A band is weird - it starts as this fun thing where you’re like "come play a few shows with me, no big deal" and then it takes up huge chunks of people’s lives and livelihoods. This was about processing that reality and also trying to alleviate myself from some of the responsibility: 'no promises'.

Belong

This started as a sad song that became a love song and finally settled somewhere in between. It’s about loving somebody but also not always feeling present when you’re with them. I like this song because it embraces its contradictions: it’s both warm and cold simultaneously, like a lot of relationships.

Bones

We worked a lot on this record on warming up Allen’s voice, and I think singing a heavily R&B-influenced song like this was a cool entry into a different kind of delivery for him. I had a lot of fun with the spaces on this song… it’s so slow and there’s so much time between beats that there’s a lot of room for sonic experimentation.

Dead

This one is kind of a sister song to "The Count", from our first record. It’s all Id and wild energy. It’s super fun to play live because it harnesses the power of a large band like ours in a way that some of the more restrained ones don’t.

Perfume

A happy-sad pop song. Whenever I write lyrics that push too far one direction, I’ll undercut it by pushing the music another way. It’s a sad song about a self-destructive friend, but it sounds like a festival banger.

Palisades/Storm

The first half sounds like an old San Fermin song, with the piano backbone and the epic instrumental interruptions. But I let it take a left turn about halfway through, and instead it descends into an off-kilter jam that gets swept away in a storm of crashing drums and reverb. It ends in a more measured 6/8 world with a texture that echoes the beginning of the album - a safe haven from the storm.

Happiness Will Ruin This Place

The first story song that I’ve ever written. It’s about a man who falls in love and realizes that he can’t live two lives at once. He moves to the country with his wife but laments that he’s "not the beast he used to be". It follows him as he grows up and has kids, and ends with him babbling to a chimpanzee at a zoo. It felt like a fitting epilogue for the themes on this record.