Artist: New Starts
Title: What I Specifically Love
Format: digital single
Cat#: Fika102SG4
Release date: 4th September 2024
Bandcamp | Spotify
What I Specifically Love is the latest track to be taken from the debut New Starts album [More Break-Up Songs, out in August 2024].
As I get older the balance between my art and my music becomes more balanced, they each take up 50% of my time and my mind. As such I’m often looking for ways to make them integrate and compliment each other.
About a year ago I started painted pictures in the length of time of a song. i would paint George Harrison’s guitar during one listen of Taxman.
The video for ‘What I Specifically Love’ is an attempt to draw the band and instruments with a kinetic energy that matches the song, using sharp angular lines to match the sounds and energy of Joely’s spiky guitar. Making the ragged curls of Giles hair bounce In sympathy with his bass line.
I hope you enjoy this video, it was lots of fun and cost 0p to make.
The language of love can be vague and general for a reason, we are not necessarily blessed with a precise and accurate language for all to these situations.
In this song someone has said ‘I Love You’ but been met with ‘yes, but what? What specifically do you love?’ And so this song is the result.
It’s been a long time since i wrote a truly two chord song. I wanted the relative complex and wordy narrative to have an express train running underneath it. Me and Joely play harmony guitars. It’s very hard and you have to be very exact. This song is hard to play.
New Starts are a spikey, fresh sounding band recalling the poppier ends of new wave and angular guitar rock. Their influences include The Cars, Breeders, Bay City Rollers, The Velvet Underground and ZZ Top.
Lead singer Darren Hayman has his own long career running from the late 90s with John Peel faves Hefner to his more recent thematic and historical albums dealing with the English Civil War, William Morris and forgotten rural idylls.
“I wanted a band again,” says Hayman, “and not a band that just backed me up and played my old songs. When we form our first bands in our teens we just find some friends and work through the musical differences. I usually look for players who play in a way I’m used to. This time I looked for variance and was led by people’s personality.”
Guitarist Joely Smith [of South London’s noise-pop adults and recently DIY-punks Fresh] was recommended by a mutual friend who said, ‘She makes everything better’. Hayman and Smith shared a coffee and agreed on the correct number of guitar pedals and decided to proceed without an audition.
“There is a tendency for me to make my chords too pretty. Joely cuts against that and plays in the opposite direction.” Hayman is a fan of rules and constraints and employed a new, oblique strategy on this record. “Even though I wrote all the songs, I wanted the songs to belong to everyone during arrangement. I decided that I would say ‘yes’ to every suggestion from the band, regardless of my instinct.”
This made the songs warp and bend into new shapes and ensured that the record was the product of four individuals. Bassist Giles Barrett and drummer Will Connor come from funky afro beat influenced band Tigercats. “Pretty much the only rhythm I use, left to my own devices, is the ‘road runner’ rhythm. Will takes to care to find where the drum beat can be and we always end up somewhere I didn’t expect.”