Oh, this one’s fuuuuuuuuun.

Let It Go started off as a spectacularly cheesy 70s keyboard thing that David concocted, and we’ve tried to keep its fundamental cheesiness throughout the song. That explains the brass section stabs in the chorus. Musically we’ve kept it really simple – one bass, one lazy guitar, some drum loops and a few vocals – and vocally I’m trying to be Michael Stipe, which seemed appropriate for a song urging everyone to get naked and do rude things to one another. The backing vocals are inspired by Aerosmith’s Love In An Elevator.

The lyric on the same kind of lines as our song Youth Is Wasted On The Young, me pointing out that life is far too precious and short to spend any of it worrying about what other people think.

I wrote this in the middle of Scotland’s gay marriage panic. For a while you couldn’t open a newspaper, turn on a TV or listen to the radio without hearing all kinds of pinch-faced puritans preaching a gospel of No Fun For Anyone Ever, based on some middle ages nonsense wrongly credited to a beardy man who lives in the sky. But it wasn’t just the usual suspects that annoyed me, it was the phone-in callers and the newspaper website commenters too, all these miserable people demanding a say in something that’s none of their damn business. They’re the “insufferable fools in their pubs and their pews” of the lyric.

The clouds here are metaphorical, of course. The lyric’s about the constant internal critic that we all have, and which really ought to shut the fuck up.

I read an interview a long time ago that suggested songs just float through the air and you have to catch them “before some bastard like Mick Hucknall gets ’em”. I think this is one of those songs, not so much written as captured and recorded before it could escape.

Listening back to it, the vocal melody’s very reminiscent of something Brendan Murphy from The 4 Of Us might do. That’s accidental – I love the band but haven’t ever tried to emulate them – but the Cocteau Twins guitar sound in the final half is absolutely deliberate. The song I’m nodding to there is Pitch The Baby from Heaven or Las Vegas.

David reckons the drums are Ultravox’s Vienna played at half speed. David is wrong. I don’t like Ultravox.

This one’s a good example of why musicians need to collaborate with one another: I wrote this on an acoustic guitar, and it’s a perfectly decent acoustic guitar song – but it’s a much, much better song if you put the guitars away and get the keyboards out.

The lyric is about casual cruelties, the throwaway comments that can really cut deep: we often say things without really thinking about them, and sometimes even well-intentioned words can have a negative effect. The example I had in mind when I was writing this one was a couple who were desperate to have children but couldn’t, the papercuts the assumptions of friends and family and the enquiries of acquaintances, but it could apply equally to any difficult situation or circumstances.

This is our Elbow song. Elbow have been a big influence on me: their Seldom Seen Kid is a tremendous record. It’s music for grown-ups that isn’t a pale imitation of former glories, that isn’t trying to be down with the kids, that isn’t ashamed to be about grown-up subjects. It’s music that’s lived a little and wants to tell you about it. Broken Bottles is me attempting to do something similar.

Broken Bottles is one of my favourite songs, and it was going to be the lead track off the album before we decided that Grip Is Slipping was a better attention-getter. Musically it’s pretty straightforward, although we’ve changed it quite a bit from the first demos: we’d started off playing the riff on lots of very distorted guitars and turning everything up to eleven, but while that was suitably rocky we decided that a heavenly choir of fuzzy Fenders was too bombastic for what’s actually quite a gentle and sad song. There’s only one guitar in it now, playing a single note in the breakdown. The song still rocks. It just rocks in a different way.

This is Fall From Grace, a song we did when we were in the band Kasino, although back then it was a U2-esque bit of stadium rock. Now it’s been retooled with some deliberate nods to some of my guilty pleasures: the bass nods to Happy Mondays’ Wrote For Luck, and the heavily compressed electric guitars wouldn’t sound out of place on an INXS record. There’s some deliberate autotune abuse going on too: it adds a nice ethereal quality to the backing vocals that I think fits really well with the words, and it’s a good contrast to the 8-bit video game crunch David’s got going on in the verses.

I think this song also contains the only guitar solo on the album: I’ve deliberately re-used the original’s two-notes-and-distortion solo because it makes me laugh. The track name in Logic says it all: Stupid Guitar Solo.

There’s a fascinating discussion on The New Yorker about the future for musicians in a world of widespread piracy and tiny payments from streaming music services.

The working question is not about the life of a band like Wilco but of smaller outfits, where making a living is sometimes not even a question, when a day job is the only option. How do we think of music when the chances of it providing a living salary are incredibly small? What is the positive viable future for marginal (not a bad word) and independent artists?

I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I’ve been writing about the Pirate Bay and going to talks by people like Love and Money’s James Grant, who rightly says that the internet has taken the money out of recorded music. As I wrote on techradar the other day, there is now an entire generation that’s grown up unwilling to pay for music. “Sell t-shirts and tour!” is usually the response to that, or if you’re big you can always get Samsung to sponsor you. But what happens to the artists who don’t have a big enough fanbase to live off merch revenues, the ones whose music has to be made in the short spaces between the day job and sleep?

Even touring isn’t the cash cow it’s often claimed to be. DJ Jace Clayton:

The Internet overvalues newness, and live-show attendance follows suit. The deluge of music in our digital lives means that discovery is sped up alongside digestion—Oh, I streamed their single, saw their video clip, can extrapolate the live show. Scenes become useful insofar as they are patient organisms, interested in slow changes and small differences, less enmeshed in online attention cycles—but you need to reach across them to be able to tour.

I’m not coming at this from the perspective of someone who misses the old days – as I sorta-joked the other day, the £5 I made from the first sale of Good Times, High Times and Hard Times is £5 more profit than I ever made from being in bands – but I do think it’s harder than ever for musicians to get paid for what they do.

Maybe Mick Jagger is right:

When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone! Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

 

This was the first song we actually finished, and we treated it rather like an expensive ornament made from the finest china, terrified to go near it in case we broke it and couldn’t fix it again. Finishing songs is often a bit like Father Ted trying to get a little dent out of a car, a process that ends up destroying every bit of metal on the vehicle. Luckily Halfway House managed to avoid that particular fate.

This one is quite an old song: I wrote it as a simple acoustic track years ago, and David had a go at it because he fancied messing around with the e-bow. Where Grip Is Slipping contained a wee homage to Frankie Goes To Hollywood, this one’s saying hello to The Specials: David’s e-bow really reminded me of the spooky sounds in Ghost Town, so there was no way I’d be able to resist sticking a brass section in there.

Finishing this song was a real Eureka moment for me: I’d actually made something that sounded exactly as it did in my head.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, allow me to introduce DMGM: poppy rock music and rocky pop music from Scotland. Yep, it’s me and David, and we’ve been working on this stuff for ages. I mean it: some of the vocals are older than my daughter.

The embedded audio in this post is from Bandcamp, where you can buy individual tracks or the entire album for whatever price you choose (including free if you so wish, although Bandcamp only offers a limited number of downloads per month so you might need to move quickly if you want freebies). We’re on Soundcloud too, and the music should appear in your favourite streaming music service and/or MP3 download shop over the next few days.

This is the opening track, Grip is Slipping. It started off with me messing around and sticking unlikely things together – in this case, human beatboxing and pedal steel guitar (sorry to disappoint, but the beatbox isn’t me: that’s just one reason why we don’t have any plans to play live) – and turned into something quite odd. Musically we’re having quite a lot of fun here: the massed backing vocals make me think of old Hollywood musicals, the half-spoken backing vocals are a deliberate homage to Frankie Goes To Hollywood (specifically their massively underrated Liverpool album), and the bass line makes me think of an enormous elastic band. It’s a big bouncy beast of a song, sad lyrics set to a Godzilla stomp.

Get the impression I like this one?

I know I’m usually self-deprecating to the point where I’ll claim everything I’ve ever done is rubbish, but I’m really proud of these songs: David and I have worked really hard on them and put our hearts and souls into the music, and I’d be very grateful to anyone who can help get the music to more people. If you like what you hear I’d appreciate it if you could share the songs with others.

Incidentally, if anybody’s looking for instrumental music for a video they’re doing, a podcast they’re making, a radio show or whatever, I’m quite happy to get instrumental versions of the songs to you – drop me an email, gary at this website address. And I’d love to hear from anyone with visual ideas to go with the songs, because our video budget is exactly zero.

In terms of who did what, David did guitars, ebow, keyboards and computers, I did singing, guitars, bass and more computers, and the loops we used came from Apple, Beta Monkey Music and The Loop Loft. The songs are all by the two of us, with the exception of the two Kasino songs we redid: those were co-written with Chris Warden, Mark Clinton and Calum Angus MacArthur, although our versions are very, very different from the ones we did back then.

If you’d like to read our biography and a bit of background, it’s after the link. Unless you’ve come directly to this post, in which case it’s after this sentence.

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