Thread by @shura

Press play on #forevher now and I'll tell you some stories about it as we go. Any questions just throw them my way and I'll try to answer some of those too. Big Love. 💙

shura.ffm.to/forevher

I recorded the intro to this track in one take at RAK studios live to 2” tape. We had spent the day laying down the bass and drums (and a few other elements to tape) and at the very end we had a little time to record this.

I really wanted to start the album this way, live, one take, no editing, no tuning. So much of my first record was polished. Everything was to the grid and it was so important to me that this album felt more vulnerable and free!

This song sets the album up with the lyrics ‘I’ll write a song for you’ and of course the joke is it’s not just one song, it’s an entire record about my experience of falling in love. One day I’ll share the version where I cackled midway through. #forevher

This song is about a couple of things. It’s about saying goodbye to a more anxious iteration of myself. It’s a farewell to the Nothing’s Real era told through anecdotes of the start of my long distance relationship. It starts with the lyric ‘I can touch the ceiling with my feet’.

That’s about an airbnb I stayed in in Paris with a mezzanine bed. I was so close to the ceiling that I could literally touch it with my feet. I love how it felt like a way of saying anything is possible. I knew that these were the lyrics I wanted to start the record with.

The lyrics in the m8 reference a date I went on to upstate New York. We stayed in an airstream and it was -13 degrees celsius. I remember using a bowl of water to brush my teeth because the taps had frozen. By the morning that bowl of water was also a block of ice. #forevher

This song started as a joke. My guitarist Luke and I were in Minneapolis drinking White Russians and writing a lot of songs in a basement. I remember him playing the main synth line and thinking it sounded like something from a 70s french porn film.

I’ve never watched a 70s french porn film so I could be very wrong on this. When I got back to London Joel Pott (who co produced and wrote most of Nothing’s Real and forevher with me) fell in love with it.

We decided to finish work on it, which coincided with me beginning to talk to my now girlfriend on a more regular basis. We tried re recording the synth that Luke had done in Minneapolis because there were a couple of bum notes in that take.

Every time we tried it just never sounded as good. The energy wasn’t there. Part of the magic of that part were the mistakes and so we ended up using the synth from the demo version. Sometimes better is worse. I love that about recording music. #forevher

I wrote this about my first 3D date with my gf. It was at a MUNA concert. I started writing this track in LA with @TEEDinosaurs. I was listening to a lot of 60s psychedelia at the time and wanted to capture that energy.

I remember Orlando playing me the Dennis Wilson album Pacific Ocean Blue. I hadn’t ever heard it before and it blew my mind. The lyric about not being able to see the stage is in part a reference to being short.

I can never see the band at gigs - but it’s also obviously about the focus being on the person you’re on a date with.

When I finished recording this back in London I used to always shout the word ‘fuck’ after ‘we just wanna…’ but obviously never recorded it because I know my parents listen to my songs.

Also I felt it was fun to just leave a moment’s silence and let people fill in the gap in their heads. The bass solo at the end was played by Axel (@snaxelbas). We converted the notes to midi and doubled up on a Moog. It’s on of my favourite moments on the record. #forevher

This song has probably gone through the biggest transformation from the demo. The beat used to be programmed and so it always felt quite different to a lot of the other demos on the record. Then Liam Hutton (Drums) and Axel (@snaxelbas) came in to track the rhythm section.

@snaxelbas I remember sitting in silence on the sofa in London with my mouth open wide in amazement as they played. I really wanted the first part of this song to sound like desire and the coda at the end to sound like love and they helped capture this perfectly.

The first part of this tracked is so restrained. It’s a couple of chords with a changing bass note. The strings remind me of the scene in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet where they meet through an aquarium. I’ve always loved that scene.

It feels like a representation on a smaller scale of my long distance relationship. Two people separated by a body of water.

In the coda the song shifts, the chords open up and I wanted it to feel free. The vocals needed to be rough around the edges. I didn’t want to tune anything. I also love the saxophone that Peter Gordon (@pglogo) recorded for this.

I played around with the takes he sent me from New York in my bedroom in London. Pitching it and putting it through delay pedals then distorting it. I wanted people listening to feel like they were in New York with me.

It sounds distant in the way you might hear it filtering through a subway station. #forevher

This is one of the most special songs on the record for me because it could so easily not have happened as it was inspired by a chance meeting. I met ‘Tommy’ in a Dairy Queen in Marfa Texas. He came over to talk to me as I was eating ice cream.

He was 89 years old and had lived in Marfa most of his life. He began asking about me and what I was doing in Marfa and later began to tell me his life story.

He told me that he lost his wife 10 years ago, but that she had come to him in a dream to give her blessing on his new relationship with a childhood sweetheart.

I wanted to write about him as it struck me as a different kind of distance. His new relationship was long distance, but so was the relationship with his wife, who had passed away - they were separated by life and death.

I was also struck by the concept of foreverness - that he had loved his wife for her forever. I recorded the conversation on a phone and I managed to get in touch with him again over facebook so that I could ask his permission to use the recording.

It was difficult getting the song to him as in his words he said 'I have an email but I don't know where it is'. In the end I had the idea to call the radio station in Marfa (@marfaradio) and sent them an email with the song and lyrics.

I asked them to play it to ‘Tommy’ so that he could give his approval and luckily he did. The song ends abruptly because I wanted it to be a sonic representation of death. I wanted it to end like our lives sometimes do, unexpected and unresolved. #forevher

This is probably one of my favourite songs I’ve ever written. It’s a rumination on my own death told through a series of experiences I have had whilst flying. First and foremost learning about Carrie Fisher’s death during a layover in Dubai en route to Australia from London.

Secondly about landing in El Paso, Texas to learn that the Delta Airlines flight I’d taken had been carrying the body of a fallen soldier. Carrie Fisher has been a hero of mine since childhood and her death affected me greatly.

I suppose there are some people in life, your parents, your childhood heroes who as a child you feel are invincible. The older you get you realise they will die and so in turn you begin to come to terms with the idea that you will too.

My favourite lyric on the album appears here ‘death is served just like a soda - coca cola - didn’t even want it but it’s complimentary’.

I liked the idea of likening death to saying yes to a soda from a drink cart on a plane, that we accept it because it’s free and that in some strange way death works in the same way.

I can’t talk about this song without also mentioning @willmillerrr’s (@whitneytheband, Resavoir) contribution. In the second verse I talk about the fallen soldier.

When we landed there was a brass band playing as the body of the soldier was carried out of our plane onto the tarmac and I knew that I wanted that to happen sonically in this song.

Will wrote and recorded this beautiful horn arrangement and sent it to me. It remember crying when I first heard it. It was so exciting to be able to work with these textures on the record.

The final lyrics ‘coming down’ are a reference to physically landing back on earth after a flight but also accepting that I will die, that just because I am in love and think that ‘we are higher’ or above death doesn’t mean I am invincible. #forevher

This is a song about overcoming fears to be with someone you love. As you might have guessed from ‘princess leia’, I’m prone to catastrophising on flights because I have a phobia of flying.

I remember writing the verse very late at night in my room and playing the lyrics ‘scared of flying, but I’ll fly for you’ to Joel and he fell in love with that idea so we began exploring the rest of the track together.

I remember being struck as a child about how some homophobic people use The Bible as a justification of their views and yet there are so many other stories in the bible that seem absurd. The idea of the perfect woman being a virgin and a baby, which is a physical impossibility!

The ‘d’ya hate me?’ works in two ways. It’s in part a question I’m asking the person I love, are you annoyed by my constant texting, are you annoyed by the fact that I love you but also I’m asking people who are perhaps religious and homophobic.

Do you hate me just because I love a woman? I remember recording the last few lines, which are just ‘I’m scared of flying, I’m scared of dying’ in London with Joel and really struggling to finish the take because for some reason it kept making me cry. #forevher

This song was inspired by a date I went on to Coney Island. It starts with the ocean in part because Coney Island is by the water but also because I wanted to have a little pause after ‘flyin’. The lyrics ‘Wonder Wheel’ are a reference to the Ferris Wheel at Coney Island.

The second verse contain a reference to both Touch and Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope, which has always been a huge inspiration for me. It was such a hot day in New York and I’d never eaten a snow cone before so we shared a blue one and it made our tongues blue.

I wanted to explore the absurdity of loving someone forever. That it’s a way we often talk about love even though most evidence points us to the contrary.

The middle 8, I hope, takes this absurdity to a new extreme. I write about the sun crashing into the ocean and leaving us in the dark forever because in some ways it feels like the world is falling apart. #forevher

This song was inspired by a conversation I had with my Mum where she told me to imagine my gf being the pilot of an airplane to help me overcome my fear of flying. She said imagine she was in charge of whether you lived or died, she would of course fly really safely.

This partly worked but also partly terrified me because she does not have a license to fly a plane so if she did we would definitely die. 🥴 The sample ‘Bonne Nuit Shu Shu’ is actually a recoding of my gf she sent to me before we met that I stole and put into the song.

In the outro the lyrics reference an experience I had whilst touring in Australia, not long after my gf and I began speaking. We drove past a lake and I saw this bird soaring just above the water.

I remember thinking how strange it was that in Australia summer is in December. I was physically and emotionally upside down. I was falling in love with someone I’d never met on the other side of the world. #forevher

I always knew this song would end the record. In many ways it’s about surrendering yourself to desire, to the pull of a romantic relationship. It was important that this song felt like a peaceful euphoric explosion.

I’m not sure if those things are even possible. But that’s what I wanted to achieve. The track fades out the way I imagine a vapour trail from a plane might. I’m also very proud of my ‘expert’ tambourine playing there. 🤣

I started writing this song with my guitarist Luke. I later played it to my friend Jono Ma (@JagwarMa) in Andrew Weatherall’s studio in London. He immediately came up with lots of ideas for synth parts and that’s how the build up for this track really came together.

Jono also chopped up my vocals and put it through the AMS digital delay used on Primal Scream’s record Screamadelica. #forevher

La fin! Thank you for listening/reading.💙

Listen to 'forevher' here: shura.ffm.to/forevher
Tickets to come see me play it live here: shura.lnk.to/FallTour2019