I saw the Last Blue Beacon
October 6, 2023
Trying to write about this album is kind of hard, mostly because it forces me to basically diarise a 2 year period of my life (if not longer) and explain how that condenses into a 52 minute album. In interviews, musicians tend to wince at the "what influenced this album?" questions and answer with "well, everything - my entire life" - it's hard to explain how true that is until you've sat and written an album. Woe is me!!!
I Saw... is basically an album about how hard it is being 21. That's effectively what the album is about. I didn't realise this until I was nearly finished producing it - for the longest time, pursuing the album was novel because it DIDN'T have an overarching concept or plot; something I'd used as a crutch in my writing up until that point. Except it did - the concept was that I was 21 - thrilling, I know...
It makes the most sense to start at the start of the record's writing and production - specifically, even before that. To frame I Saw, it's important to explain the album I made before it, which was "We Are Leaving and We Are Never Coming Back". This album sucks - this is the album I wrote when I was 19. It took roughly a year to make from conception to release, and sucks for almost the entire runtime, unfortunately.
I remember after it came out, I was walking to class thinking about making music. I wasn't happy with We Are... and i was cognizant that it was a total failure. So I decided to listen to the album, and write down every flaw I could think of while listening to the album. The list was surprisingly short, mostly because the flaws were obvious and kept showing up in every song. I haven't been able to find the original list, but it went something like this:
1. Stop singing along with the instrumentals
2. Make it sonically cohesive
3. Actually focus on writing songs rather than stepping stones between "plot points"
The last of these 3 was the most poignant - We Are... was this poorly realised concept record where I was writing songs to fill out a timeline, rather than writing songs. And as it turns out, albums are made of songs,so if the songs suck, the album sucks, regardless of the strength of the concept. So my new "rule" was just to write songs and have the song be enough on its own.
I started working on the album in earnest in early 2022. After recording We Are... I was alot more comfortable with my DAW, and I was exploring new textures - I was obsessed with this orchestral string synth, which appears all over the finished record. The first few songs I had were This is the Last..., The Murderer and 2 Towns, which all had a similar feeling to them. The album was built with these 3 as a style guide.
The moment the album was really born was when I was walking to a Tesco near campus I used to frequent - it was a long walk, and I was obsessing over this "new sound" I had come up with. I was listening to Grimes Art Angels, and then Flaming Lips Soft Bulletin, both of which I loved and still love. The album came to me almost fully formed then - this lush, string-laden lo-fi-ish indie rock record with long, drawn out atmospheric slow builds and grand, expressive climaxes. I made a list of albums I would "steal" from to realize this vision:
- Flaming Lips Soft Bulletin
- Black Country, New Road Ants From Up There + FTFT
- Belle and Sebastian If You're Feeling Sinister
- Camera Obscura Let's Get Out...
I'm sure there were a few more, however the original list is, again, lost.
I chipped away at the album for a few months, until September 2022 or so. I kept pulling in songs from various odd places - I'll expand on this later - and I had a pretty solid working tracklist by September. But i wasn't happy with the album. The 4th rule i failed to mention earlier was that i wasn't allowed to leave anything in that sucked. This may seem absurd of a rule to have, but i left in alot of glaring fuck-ups in We Are..., I guess out of apathy for having made a bad record. This new perfectionism added another 13 months onto the album's production timeline.
In September 2022, we recorded and released a music video for the song Sand - a slightly edited version that exchanged the album version's ambient soundscape outro for a more traditional ending. We recorded the video on the last sunny day of the year - the grass had all died following a heatwave the previous June/July, which turned the usually verdant green park on campus into a yellow-biege-orange dune-scape. It was a perfect backdrop for the video. I spent a few trips scouting spots around campus for places to film, most of which appear in the video.
After this point work slowed down considerably on the album. I had the basic tracks, so now it was a case of really nailing the performances and arrangements, which is by far the hardest and most tedious part of the recording process. I would walk and drive around listening to the versions I had and thinking of how they should change and grow - I remember I had the tracklist locked down pretty early, so it was just a case of nailing the songs.
I'll now break down each song individual song on the album to elucidate their respective origins.
1. This is the last staggy the band pilgrim album (Colours: Gold)
As mentioned, this was one of the first songs made FOR the album. The climatic, dramatic string section at the end was largely the point of the song, and still serves as one of the album's best moments. The lyrics came together pretty quickly - ending the band was on my mind alot at that point, and writing a song about the end of the band for the start of the album appealed to me alot too.
The song exemplifies a "golden sound" I was going for, where all the elements of the song harmonise in a way to make this beautiful wall of sound - I spent alot of time trying to replicate this across the record.
2. Anthony (Colours: Blue and Yellow)
Anthony is the most "Staggy the Band Pilgrim" song on the album. It's a very silly song, but it was mostly a writing exercise - it was written pretty late into the writing window for the album - the other songs were defined by their long instrumental passages with only brief singing verses, so I wanted to write a song where I didnt shut up for the whole thing. I wanted to make an obnoxious pop song, and then dress it up to fit the album. So, I did.
The song isn't about anyone in particular. It was actually conceptualized by Reuben's friend Megan, who was convinced we had a song called "Anthony" (we didn't at the time) so I thought it would be funny to write a song with that name.
I laboured over the production of this song alot. Pop music gets alot of shit for being basic (which it deserves) but making it pitch perfect is actually very hard. The chorus is directly copy and pasted - partially out of laziness, and partially in pursuit of a perfect pop song.
3. Sand (Colours: orange, red and pink)
Sand was not meant to be a STBP song. I stole it from my "side project" TheRectory - it was built around this delicate guitar riff, which I built a very simple and sweet love song around. The imagery is built from alot of mixed imagery and events, as songs should be. The original TheRectory version was very sparse, which I then filled out with strings, backing vocals etc until it felt full.
I'm not sure why I felt it needed a music video. For maximum pop appeal I could've picked Anthony, but I didn't.
4. Land's End (Colours: Orange)
One of my better songs I've recorded. This was an absolute nightmare to produce, and just took forever and ever and ever. But it was worth it.
The concept for the song came from a scrapped STBP concept album - we wanted to copy Sufjan Stevens and do Illinoise but for the south of England - one song for each county, but we quickly realised how much time and effort this would be, and silently gave up. This was the only song that ever got written for the project.
The song was an actual nightmare to produce. I changed all the drums at least twice, and had countless versions of the end of the song. This was largely motivated by my new perfectionism rule - I knew I could wrap up the song in a satisfying way, I just had to work at it. I spent alot of time walking around listening to drafts of the song and trying to think of how to finish it.
5. Take Me Away! (Colours: black and brown)
Probably the oldest song on the album. I wrote the first half while drunk in first year at university, and then poorly improvised the guitar solo. I had it sitting around for maybe 18 months or so until I decided it would fit neatly on this album - it's a nice break between the 2 halves of the record. The original demo is, predictably, lost to time.
This songs also marks the divide between the two halves of the record - day and night, with this being dusk, or twilight, or whatever. The songs previous to this are warm and sunlit, whereas after are cloaked in shadow, downtrodden, under harsh full moonlight. Night lasts longer than day on this album.
6. 2 Towns over (Colours: Black, Purple and Blue)
I built this around 2 chords, which is something I’ve since moved away from. I think It’s a good two chord riff, but if I came up with it now I’d definitely add more changes. The timing is also pretty tricky and there are audible fuckups in the recording which I didn’t pick up on at the time, somehow. I remember coming up with the drums and being really proud of that too, which I only managed because I thought the song was in 4, somehow? Good otherwise
7. The Murderer (Colours: Black)
Probably one of the best songs I will ever make. I definitely stole alot from BCNR on this one, but it's still mine. Listening back it's baffling how I even made it in alot of ways - sometimes you've just got to let the music happen to you, which is what happened here.
The lyrics are about ending the band. They're deliberately obtuse and cryptic, and even some of the "meanings" behind some of the lines are lost on me at this point.
The song is recorded in a very lazy way - lots of loops, which is just how I recorded then, but it suits the song in this case.
8. Waiting for Twee Pop Records to Come in the Mail (Colours: Black and Blue)
... probably the worst song on the album? I'm joking, but it is the most stylistically different. I considered having it as an instrumental initially, but then I wrote a draft of lyrics for it that I really liked.
It nearly didn't make it on the album at all. I was recording (what would become) My New Analogue Beating Heart towards the end of 2023, and this song initially sounds like alot more appropriate for that album. I kept it on this album for the thematic resonance, and the transition to the closer.
It took me forever to come up with a satisfying conclusion. It is stolen from Tame Impala Keep On Lying and Belle and Sebastian If you're Feeling Sinister (the song) but I think my take is novel enough (?)
9. I Saw the Last Blue Beacon (Colours: Gold and Black)
Hard to talk about this song, just because it's so massive. It's a quarter of the album's runtime, and ties up every theme on the album almost perfectly.
I had to make 2 versions of this song before I came up with the final version. I was house sitting at my father's for a long evening, so I bought my laptop and recording stuff and just got on with it. This resulted in "part 1", which accounts for the first 5 mins 30 or so.
I remember walking around the lounge with an acoustic guitar playing and singing the last chorus louder and louder for half an hour until I could belt it out loud enough for what the recorded version needed, and honestly, I'm not sure if I could do those same vocal acrobatics anymore, which is odd to think....
The second and third parts were each recorded separately. The second part is pretty awful, unfortunately. I like the ending. I remember I had a really clear vision for the second and third parts - I was imagining this giant face made of light appearing in the sky late at night while I would be driving through the country (something I did alot of at that time) - I’d then realise it was my face, made of light in the sky, and it lifted my car up and took me away entirely, hence why the third part has no lyrics - I’m gone.
This is stolen a little bit from the end of Soft Bulletin - my favourite band’s best album - I wanted to evoke that same feeling of being totally crushed, emotionally, with the only salvation being this totally impossible cosmic phenomena appearing to save you. It was a very evocative concept that was really easy to write around.
That’s what the concept of the album ended up being. The “concept” is being 21, but the REAL concept is how crushing everything felt at the time. Being 21 and staring down adulthood, the end of my band, the natural end of friendships, the seemingly colossal distance between everyone and everything, all felt like alot. I had a feeling that I needed to write and record this big sounding album to try and contain or stop the flow of time, which while of course impossible, makes for compelling music.
I still love the record alot. It’s going to be really hard for me to top this one, and I’m fine with that. It’s probably the peak of what I can achieve with recorded music, unless I get alot better.