WHIPLASH - What The Band Said

Tomorrow:

Tim: Tomorrow was originally on "Wah Wah," our experimental, improvised LP that got a bit lost in the wash, and we felt that the song was a great song and it had gone missing in action. So, we resurrected it and made it a bit more sprightly for this record.

Lost a Friend:

Tim: Lost a Friend is probably one of the most successful songs on the record. We felt like we totally got it. Stephen Hague kept trying to make me give it a more romantic lyric. Because the lyric is "Lost a friend to the sea" - that was the first lyric - he thought that was wonderful and the rest of the song should be about losing a friend to he sea. I turned it into a song about someone falling asleep in front of the TV and their dreams become part of the television.

Waltzing Along:

Tim: That was a joyous song. It felt like it was like Sit Down in that it was a really warm, friendly, happy song. Those are usually the hardest to write, and most musicians will tell you.

She's A Star:

Tim: It's about a woman coming out into her power and not hiding anymore. Particularly people that I know who were people who suffered from low self esteem, and one day just decided they'd had enough of that.

Greenpeace:

Tim: We've actually given that song to Greenpeace. That came out of a weird jam we did which was almost a folk jam.

Go To The Bank:

Tim: I improvised the lyric in one take which I've never done before. That was virtually the whole lyric with a few little touch-ups.

Play Dead:

Tim: Play Dead is just a kind of electronic ballad. I'm crooning. 

Saul: It's almost like an industrial Walker Brothers. 

Avalanche:

Saul: We had the idea of the song and we had worked on it with Mr. Eno. We felt like it was going to be alright. Then Dave took it and set it up in his little house. We just threw ideas at it and went off on a bizarre sample and hold, cut and paste trip, and pieced together this really complex piece of music.

Homeboy:

Tim: There was this song originally called Fish Knives from the "Laid" session and it had this great lyric, but we never got any music together, so what I did was take the lyrics from Fish Knives and tried to stick most of them in Homeboy.

Watering Hole:

Saul: This is the sound of our keyboard player's mind. This is the interaction between little bits of energy flying around his synapses. That's why it's weird.

Blue Pastures:

Tim: When we did "Laid" we jammed this song and I just improvised the lyric. Then we came back to it about two years later. We did one take again and I improvised the rest of the lyric. I wrote it all out and it was clearly about somebody walking off into the mountains to commit suicide, to lie down in the snow. About a week before we came to record it, my best friend's mentor went off into the snow, into the mountains in the Lake District, laid down in the snow and committed suicide that way. He'd never heard the song, but it happened that way four years later, which was weird.