Track By Track: The Law of the Playground by The Boy Least Likely To

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Their second album, The Law of The Playground, was released on Monday. What better time to hear all about the inspiration behind each of the tracks! We caught up with The Boy Least Likely To and asked them to give the low-down on each of the tracks.

Saddle Up – Lyrically I knew I wanted the first track on the album to begin where the last album ended, so I purposefully included echoes of and references to the themes of the first album. There’s this brilliant moment right at the beginning of the first episode of season two of buffy the vampire slayer where buffy turns to the camera and asks if willow and xander missed her, but because she says it to camera it’s as if she’s asking the audience watching. I wanted this song to work a little bit like that. I like the lyrics about not being a success but still making someone happy.

A Balloon On A Broken String – This is the second A side of the double A side with Every Goliath Has Its David. It was almost called A Balloon On A Borken String, because whenever I try to type the word “broken” I always type “borken” instead. I remember reading in Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland about a complex computer program called misspellcheck, or msp, which is used by the secret service to identify people. The basic premise of msp is that everyone consistently misspells the same words when they’re typing, regardless of how good a typist they are, and that these patterns of misspelling are unique to every individual. It’s a bit like spellcheck I suppose, but if it finds a word that is spelt wrong it doesn’t correct it, and it takes account of punctuation and typing speeds too. According to the book it only takes about two hundred and fifty words of typing before it can identify you. As well as misspelling “broken”, my other typing idiosyncrasies are that i consistently mistype “always” as “alwasy” and i often put an “e” on the end of the word “both”. I also often type the word “interesting” without the second “e” as “intersting”. Which is intersting. The song itself is just about what it would be like to be a balloon. It was written quite a long time ago and it was one of the first songs we finished for the new record.

I Box Up All The Butterflies – I think we knew how to record things a bit better by the time we came to make this album, and we were co producing the record with a friend of ours called Jamie Johnson, and he seemed to know what he was doing too. So I think our sound is slightly more refined, although I think it’s still sits very comfortably alongside all the songs off the first album. This is one of my favourite songs when we play it live. It just seems to come alive and I can’t help myself. It sounds so full but it has a lot of space in it at the same time. Also it’s got a recorder solo on it, played by amanda applewood. I wish all our songs had recorder on, but I suppose that would be a bit much. The song is just about loving something in the wrong way, being overprotective and possessive and squeezing all the life and energy out of someone. It did have lyrics for a third chorus too but i didn’t think we needed a third one so I deleted it, and then when we came to record it pete decided it did need one after all but I couldn’t remember them, and I’ve never been able to since.

The Boy With Two Hearts – This is probably my favourite song off the new album. We recorded all the brass parts with the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, which was such an amazing thing to be able to do. When we first decided that we were going to use brass on this new album I knew I wanted them and I was so excited when we found out they were going to do it. We didn’t want the brass to be bombastic or polished, we wanted it sound like quite a traditional brass band. I remember when pete played me the demo, it was quite mournful in a really sweet way and I ended up writing relatively simple words for it. It sounds quite sad and Christmassy, and it reminds me of the theme tune to The Flumps but I don’t expect anyone else will think it does.

Stringing Up Conkers – I remember sitting upstairs in the studio, in a room where we used to store all our equipment writing this while Pete was recording the demo for Saddle Up in the studio downstairs. It’s about feeling out of control and powerless in the world and how sometimes the only way to feel anything is by controlling the tiny little things that immediately surround you.

The Boy Least Likely To Is A Machine – Instrumentally this is probably the most complicated song on the album. There’s just layers and layers of things going on. Our friend Andy came in to play the drums on it and I think they’re absolutely amazing too. It actually sounds like an out of control robot is playing them. I wrote the lyrics while we were stuck signed to our old label. I was completely disillusioned with everything. I always thought a record deal was everything I’d ever wanted. It was as if I’d spent my whole life dreaming about something, and now that it was actually happening I couldn’t believe how unhappy it made me. I didn’t ever regret signing with the label, because there isn’t any point in regretting things, but every day I would wake up and wonder how my life would be different if we hadn’t done all the things we did. The title was originally earmarked for a remix album we were thinking of putting together.

Whiskers – It’s just a song about having a friend when you’re young and growing apart from them as you get older, and about lots of other things too. It’s one of Pete’s favourite songs on the album.

Every Goliath Has Its David – This was one of the last songs we recorded for the album. We added it on at the last minute and then it ended up being the first single taken from it as well. There aren’t really any drums on it. It’s all radiators and stamping on the floor, as well as some of our best clapping ever. It’s a song about fighting, but then most of our songs are.

When Life Gives Me Lemons I Make Lemonade – It’s a song about making the most of what you’ve got, and I wanted the lyrics to be slightly over the top and silly, because for me it has the saddest line from the whole album in it halfway through the second verse when it mentions going to places in your dreams that are hard to get back from, and I really wanted it to jump out from the rest of the words around it. When pete first played me the demo I thought it sounded like a song in three parts and I loved the riff, because it reminded me of something that Queens Of The Stone Age might do if they used banjos, and I always imagined a barn dance being danced to it when I listened back to it.

The Nature Of The Boy Least Likely To – This turned out to be the very last song we recorded for the album. It was a song we’d been thinking about doing for a while but it took me ages to be happy with the lyrics. When I listen to our songs I always have a specific picture in my mind of exactly what or where I’m singing about, and I always think it’s odd that nobody listening will ever imagine the same images when they hear it. I have a very specific idea of what the cricket pitch and the swing seat and everything else look like when I listen to this song. When we first started recording we were planning on calling the album The Nature Of The Boy Least Likely To, but by the time we’d finished it the title didn’t really fit with the way the rest of the album turned out. If we hadn’t taken so long to make the record it would probably have still been called it.

I Keep Myself To Myself – It’s just a song about clamming up and never allowing yourself to feel anything in case you feel too much and end up getting hurt, but it’s also a song about being stubborn about the things you believe in even if it cuts you off from other people. I think this song is the best example of the lyrics and the music doing completely the opposite thing, which is kind of what we do quite a lot. The lyrics are quite bleak and miserable but the music is really upbeat and cheerful, almost idiotically so. We didn’t finish recording this until just before Christmas two years ago, because I kept changing the words and it was only when I’d written these ones that I could finally listen to the song and be some way towards being happy with it. I always wish I didn’t change lyrics after I’ve sung them all, but I always do and it ends up being really painful and annoying for everyone.

The Worm Forgives The Plough – I love the guitars on this, which is lucky because there aren’t many other instruments. This was another song that was mostly written quite quickly after the first album had come out, and then I spent a long time rewriting the whole of the first verse, but then pete persuaded me that it had actually been better as it was so I changed it all back again. I’m pleased I did that now. This is probably my other favourite off the new album, if I’m allowed to have two. It’s about being made more vulnerable by the very thing that’s supposed to be protecting you and it’s about taking revenge on the world.

A Fairytale Ending – I still find this song too sad to listen to sometimes just because it reminds me of when I was incredibly unhappy with everything that was going on around us with the label. I always knew it would be the last song on the album. I guess no other song could end it really.