Deep Dive: Another Frequency

Find out more about my NEW single, coming out on Feb 29th!!

Hello friends! It’s been a pretty BIG, nerve-wracking and exciting kind of month. In case you missed it, the news is out - my new single Another Frequency will be released at midnight TONIGHT, Thursday 29th February!! It’s the first taste of my brand new album ‘Safe Hands’ and the first dose of new music from me in THREE YEARS - yowzers.

I thought I’d do a deep-dive of each single on the run-up to the record’s release to share a little more about how each of these songs came to life - inspiration, maybe what I changed along the way, how it was recorded and give you readable/visual/audible snippets of the song’s progression. SO, let’s talk Another Frequency:

First thing’s first, in my announcement newsletter I alluded to a guest vocal! This song was written with esteemed songwriter (and someone I feel very lucky to call a pal), Sam Griffiths, more well-known as the frontman of York-based band The Howl & The Hum. We had a writing session together in TH&TH’s old studio in Summer 2021 during a brief period where lockdown restrictions lifted. We chatted, ate home-made daal for lunch that Sam very kindly offered me, experimented with sounds on keys and bass, and the bones of a song was born.

In a bout of curiosity, I had a scroll through all the voice memos on my phone to see if I captured anything from our writing session that day. Turns out, I got LOADS!! So, in my excitement of finding this treasure-trove of audio, I’ve pulled together a little podcast-style breakdown for you of how we wrote Another Frequency with chatty bits from me in between. It’s no Tape Notes, but hopefully you find it interesting and cool to listen to!

Lyrically, we pinned it on knowing you need to leave a relationship, feeling like you and the other person are on totally different pages and night-driving in your car for headspace. To me, it’s the same story behind Why Would You (Go), reframed around the overwhelm and internal monologue that’s so prevalent in ending a relationship. Fun fact, Joni Mitchell’s album ‘Blue’ turned 50 around the time we wrote this, so we gave a nod to it in the second verse:

‘Now the music’s ‘Blue’ playing on repeat

and yet I know the words, I now know what she means’

This track is a total dark horse on the album to me, because it SO nearly didn’t make the track listing and turned out to be one of my favourites! My manager takes a lot of credit for encouraging me (on multiple occasions) to persevere with the demo and include it on album 2, it likely wouldn’t have been on it otherwise 😂 I made a deal with myself to give it one last, proper go during my time at Summer Studios residency last August.

With this podcast-style deep dive, you’ll get a zoom-in on my writing session with Sam, our decisions on lyrics and song structure, how I built the track production-wise many months later and some of my favourite elements/moments, from Sam’s MIGHTY bass riff to the perfect bloopy synth (my pride and joy). I hope you enjoy listening to this and find it interesting, it was really fun pulling this together and revisiting how this song came to life 🥲