Liverpudlians, like the devil, have the best tunes. From The Beatles and The La’s, we come up to date with Karl William Lund.
And not before time, either. Like quite a few people, I have a bit of a problem with the current state of pop music. One look at the charts and a lot of the songs on there have placed production for songwriting, placed tacky hooks over melody.
Luckily, I’ve been privileged to work with some artists that still write great pop songs. And that’s pop as it’s meant to be: infectious, catchy, atmospheric and highly brilliant.
Since I met Karl, I’ve not heard a bad song from him and his current EP is no exception; and it includes Lionheart (The Chariot) which is one of the catchiest songs I have heard ever, by anyone.
Karl normally self produces but he needed an extra hand on two tracks.
For Lionheart, my job was comparatively straight forward. Karl had already put an simple arrangement together, featuring drums, piano and all manner of weird samples, so it was a case of re-recording the drums and piano, adding percussion, guitars and bass and decide which of the samples to keep.
Then, it was just a case of coaxing the best vocal performance from Karl. The demo vocals that Karl had recorded were superb; part of their charm was that they were recorded on a really cheap microphone into a really cheap soundcard, bounced onto one track and then a full amount of compression slapped on them. This made them sound really exciting, if not exactly flawless.
So we decided to do some nice quality takes in the studio but keep Karl’s cheap takes underneath in the mix. It seems to work and gives the chorus one hell of a chant.
Touch The Ground is an altogether more tense and moody beast; this one was demoed simply on electric guitar and vocals. This one took a while to develop (in conjunction with Karl, over email) with acoustic and ambient guitar, carefully orchestrated strings, two sets of drums, bass, piano and some atmospheric synth parts.
Karl nailed his vocal in just a couple of takes; he’s a great, natural singer with a distinctive voice and a Liverpool twang.
The rest of the EP is spot-on too. From the 80s electronica of Fires to the warm pop of Signs, this is what I mean about how pop music should be.
You can get Karl’s EP Triumphs II on Bandcamp in whatever format you like and on iTunes in whatever format Apple gives you.
