Commentaries from Tim, Chad, Jerome, and Drew
Vice Verses
Afterlife
Drew: Afterlife is a song that starts the record and the opening guitar sound was one that just kind of happened in a moment where we caught it through the mics. Every now and then on a record there’s those happy accidents where the tone just lines up and something happens. And it sustains through the whole song, doing flips and turns, this opening guitar sound. And this song just starts to build up around it and those are special moments for me as a guitar player. This song Afterlife shows that.
Chad: There’s a sound in the song afterlife that I love as a drummer. It’s not even part of the drum kit. It’s a ladder we actually use to get up to the second level in our studio and it just had this really resonate tone and I just started banging on that and it ended up making the record! I love that there’s real everyday objects, like a ladder laying around, that suddenly becomes an instrument in the right place at the right time.
Tim: Yeah this is an album where the sounds excite me just as much as the songs do, which is saying a lot because I think these are some of the best songs Jon’s ever written. I’m so proud of the sonic landscape on this record, the drum sounds in Afterlife are some of my favorite drum sounds we’ve ever gotten. You know it’s the type of record where I just want to make my speakers bleed…
Jerome: One of the goals in recording Vice Verses is to create space within the realms of recording a CD or what’s coming out of the speakers, so Neal Avron, our producer was one of the most crucial aspects of creating the space with us. In Afterlife we wanted to make sure that every part was played at the right spots – the guitars here – the drums – and I’m really proud of how it turned out, because I think we created a great space for the song Afterlife.
The Original
Tim: The Original is one of my favorite drum tracks. That is such a fun song – the tones that we got on that… the mics just feel like they’re holding on for dear life, just kind of about to fall apart. Chad’s drumming is so motown and there’s such a cool pocket on that song. That was one of the funnest ones in the studio to play together. It came together really naturally, and live I think that’s going to be a highlight every night.
Drew: The Original to me is kind of like motown on the moon. It’s a song that has a classic sound riff and drum beat and bass line, but it’s done in a way that is modern and with a lot of fervor.
Chad: I’m a big fan of guitar solos and this records got a great on The Original. I’d like to see more of that. I think that’s new territory for this record, pushing the guitar solos a little further. I like that… Motown on the Moon, Drew. That’s a good reference.
Tim: On this record, Chad and I, with drums and bass, we were always wanting to play at the same time. Neither one of us could be playing without the other. That way we were always reacting to each other. One of my favorite things about The Original is that was the first pass through on the bass. That was the kind of the opening, “let me just throw this idea down with Chad”, and then broke for dinner, and then just started working on guitars. And we came back to listen to the bass a few weeks later to make sure it was all there, and we’re like “Oh there’s just kind of a charm to it”. It was the first pass through and it feels like it’s got a nice breath to it. Something special.
Jerome: Anything can happen, anything goes. The Original is one of those songs where when were in the studio recording it, it was one of those things where like ANYTHING goes. Here it is.
The War Inside
Tim: War Inside, one of the songs early on in the record that’s going to make people sit up and pay attention and realize that this isn’t your typical Switchfoot record. It’s very rhythmic, it’s got this kind of hip hop toughness about it and sensibility that is really something different for the band.
Drew: The War Inside pushes the envelope of what we’ve ever done. It’s got a spoken word vocal that is just new territory for Jon singing and I think he just nailed it. Like just – he’s really opening up a new chapter and a new space and some new ideas… a whole fresh sound for us. Something we’re really excited about.
Chad: I love blurring the lines between electronica and live rock drums and this song was a party for that. It’s just such an ambitious rhythm track and something that we’re new to. For Switchfoot to be putting this out, I feel like it’s a statement… it’s got some swagger.
Romey: One of my favorite parts of the song War Inside is the start of the verse to where it’s just drums and other rhythmic stuff and what we did to it is distort it like crazy and make it very bombastic.
Restless
Tim: Restless is one of my favorite songs that Jon’s ever written. I really identify with the imagery in the song that we’re like water looking for the ocean… relentless in our pursuit for purpose and meaning… and trying to figure it out. I think this song is a special song and we’ve been playing it live for a couple months now and it immediately became one of our favorite moments of the night every time we play it.
Romey: Restless is a song that’s wide open. It starts out very slow and soft but there’s a great build to it and it just builds and builds to the very end and by the end you’re standing up. It’s a very powerful song, one of the best songs I think that Jon has ever written. One of my favorite songs on this album.
Chad: My favorite part about the song Restless is the section after the chorus – the super chorus if you will – it’s just a jubilant, triumphant moment musically. I think it’s really a story, it’s a journey. This song is a word picture and it really takes you somewhere emotional.
Blinding Light
Tim: Blinding Light has some of the funnest sounds on the record. It sounds like Chad has ten arms and he’s playing everything in sight, you know, boxes, ladders… I’m pretty sure he was hitting Jerome in the head at one point with various percussive devices. It’s a real bright spot on the record, it’s a real hopeful song… while at the same time expressing that yearning for finding something beyond what we know and see.
Jerome: Blinding Light is another one of those songs that showcase the drums and the bass for me… especially in the verses. It has such a great groove to it. I remember when we were recording it and Tim and Chad were in the sound room, they locked in really fast and that song came together – at least those parts. It’s one of my favorite parts, as far as like drums and bass on the album.
Chad: Yeah I think Blinding Light was the easiest song to record for me… as a drummer there’s just something about that pocket that’s just so natural and just a really fun party in the song.
Selling the News
Tim: Selling the News is gonna surprise a lot of people. It’s definitely the most adventurous track on the record. It’s kind of like San Diego meets Brooklyn – Switchfoot meets Beastie Boys. It’s got this spoken word aggressive nature to it and it’s definitely new territory for us. You know it was one of our goals on this record to build new rooms in the house for us to go as a band. You have to – as a band you have to think of ways to build onto the house so you have new places to explore musically, and this is one of those new additions that I think turned out really good. I think it looks good on the house. It definitely feels like an extension of who we are… that we haven’t really explored until this record and it’s really rhythmic, it’s really aggressive. I like what it’s saying. Nice job on the drums on this one Chad.
Chad: I remember when Jon was tracking the vocals for Selling the News and he was just spitting on the mic – it was just intense to watch, you know, he’s so passionate about the lyrics. He fits in a lot of words in this song and it’s definitely going to shock people.
Romey: Selling the News when I first heard snippets of this song in demo form, I was like “WOW. This is something that we really have never tried. Territory that we’ve never even like tread foot on.” And I’m wondering like “How are we going to get this… how are we going to record this and how is it going to sound like in the final product?” While we were recording it, it felt really natural, it was like whoa, these are songs, these are melodies that we’ve done many times. And when you piece it together in a song and add in Jon’s spoken type vocals… it came out really great. We’re really proud of how it turned out.
Tim: Selling the News is one of the songs that was actually around during the Hurricane sessions. Sometimes it takes a little longer to let a song incubate, marinate, and to figure out what you want to do with a song. I think had we rushed it and put it out on Hurricane it would of… first of all, it would have been the odd man out on the record and I don’t think it would of found it’s pocket like it did on this record. But there’s a lot of cool versions floating around in the studio, alternate takes, different approaches to that song that are fun. Probably 10 different versions, tempos, etc., of that song. We really took our time with that one to get it right.
Thrive
Tim: The song Thrive was in the running from the very beginning, it was written just after we finished Hurricane and you know in all the song discussions, everyone’s kind of listing their favorite songs and why they should be on the record, and that one I just kept saying, “Well. I don’t know if it’s going to make the record or not, but it is the best song on the record.” I still think it might be the best song on the record. I love this song Thrive. I want to thrive not just survive – that line really resonates with me and where I’m at right now. I think it has some of the most interesting musical textures on the record, a lot of programming, and Jerome really killed it on this one, just great sonic textures that he brought and that we just instantly fell in love with.
Romey: Thrive was one of those songs I remember Tim and Jon recorded the vocal base and guitar in it, and I came into the studio one day and I said, “hey let me take this song home and put some stuff on it for a couple of days.” And so for like the next two or three days, I was just hold up at home putting these song pieces together, and then I came back and presented it to the guys, like “here are thirty tracks of music and ideas that I’ve pieced together, and what do you guys think?” and it was awesome, they loved it, and it made it into the song and Thrive is what came out of it.
Dark Horses
Tim: Dark Horses – my favorite rock drum sounds EVER. I love the way your drums sound on this one man. It’s an aggressive rock track, it goes out to the homeless kids in San Diego – that’s the inspiration for this song. We hold an event every year, in our hometown of San Diego, called the Switchfoot Bro-Am that benefits homeless kids on the streets of San Diego. They’re the true Dark Horses, they’re the kids that society has counted out, they haven’t chosen homelessness, there’s a lot of misconception about that. They’ve been dealt a tough deck of cards and they haven’t given up. They’re fighting it. It’s inspiring. It inspired this song. It’s a really great thing to be able to think about these kids every night that we’re on stage playing this song.
Romey: Dark Horses has probably my favorite drum sounds and bass sounds that we’ve ever recorded. It’s really cool because a cool section is in the bridge where at one time it was just drums and bass, and then Neal Avron came up to me and said, “hey, can you put some stuff over the drums and the bass, to fill up this space?” And I fought that. I fought that because the drums and bass sounded so good and so I came up with just small snippets, so that the drums and bass were still showcased. It turned out awesome.
Chad: Yeah I think what you were saying Tim is true, the heart beat of the song, being about the kids on the streets in San Diego, was the motivation for working so hard on this song for so long. This was actually the first song from the record that we played live on tour, about a year before we finished recording it. We did actually several versions of this song in the studio and we’re going to release an alternate version with the record as well.
Souvenirs
Tim: I remember working on Souvenirs with Jon three, four years ago, at his house. There’s some – there’s a few different versions, demos, of that song. One of them is kind of like Beatle-y, and has a Beatle swing to it, a lot of kind of different approaches that we took. I think that’s one of the great things about music, is that you can really dress a song up a number of different ways, and the goal is you still have clarity of mind to pick which one is the better version. I think we were really able to find that on this song… we kind of circled it a little bit and really took our time before we locked in. It ended up being one of those epic songs that really builds, you know it starts out really tender and it doesn’t loose that innocence, but it definitely captures the emotion as the song builds. Some of kind of my favorite atmospheric sounds on the record – really atmospheric background vocals and keyboard sounds. This song packs a lot of emotion. It’s very nostalgic.
Romey: Souvenirs is one of those songs when we were recording it, at least for me playing it, we did this live as a band… we recorded all five of us at one time, straight through, and it was hard to picture the end result of it at the time, but you don’t realize the space that was given on this song. There was a lot of space I felt, and there’s a melody line in there that Drew came up with that goes throughout most of the last half of the song and to me, that’s one of my favorite lines we’ve ever recorded.
[From JFH]
Jerome: When I listen to the lyrics, it’s always more of reflection, remembering where you came from – for me. Remember the path that you’ve taken. When I listen to it, that’s where I’m at. But Jon may have a different viewpoint on it.
Drew: Yeah. It’s a little bit nostalgic. Very nostalgic.
Jerome: Yeah, I mean, lyrically – we should ask him sometime *laughs*. It’s funny, because whenever I ask him about lyrics, he always asks me, “Well, what do you think it? (Drew: I know! That’s always what he says.) What’s your interpretation?” (Drew: He’s like, “Yeah, well that’s good. That’s – that’s – that’s…”) *laughter*.
Rise Above It
Tim: It was fun to watch Chad lay down the drums on this one because we trapped him in the smallest room in our studio and we didn’t let him out until he was done. That room is SMALL. I’m trying to paint a picture of it here… it’s… picture like not a large closet… but not a small closet. Kind of like your just middle sized closet. You can fit a kick drum and a snare and maybe a little bit of a drum stole. I don’t know how he quite pulled it all off. And there’s like one mic hanging over him. So just imagine just the deadest, tightest drum sounds. There’s no ambience at all. But then we left the door kind of cracked open slightly I think mostly for oxygen for the drummer. No dead drummers on my watch. And also we had a mic kind of on the very end of the big room, so a little of the drums leaked out into the big room for a little bit of space. It’s a really cool drum sound, it’s just really punchy. Definitely get some of that parliament action going – he’s just laying it down. It’s a song that’s probably the most danceable on the record. Super fun. Yeah can’t wait to play this one live.
Romey: Rise Above It was a fun song to record. While we were recording the song our producer was saying “Hey this song – think Thriller, Michael Jackson.” It was like… very danceable. There’s a great beat to it… it’s just a fun song to play. It turned out great.
Tim: Sometimes the sounds influence the parts that are played. When you’re kind of fishing for a direction… so with the bass on this one, I dialed up a real synth-y kind of tone, and that definitely changed the way I thought about the song and it made it a really kind of fun synth-y bass part to kind of allow space for the drums and kind of come in and out.
Chad: Yeah I remember when Jon came in to the studio with an acoustic guitar and played Rise Above It, just the original idea for it. We’re all sitting around in the control room and he’s sort of presenting the idea that “Imagine it’s big… imagine it’s huge and it’s rocking!” and we’re sitting there sort of banging on the counter, pretending there’s big drums and kind of humming guitar parts and just imaging this bombastic song. It’s funny to think that songs like this can start on a simple instrument, just like an acoustic guitar, and then grow into what it is on the record.
Vice Verses
Tim: Vice Verses was written at the end of Hello Hurricane. We knew it was a special song, we talked about putting it on Hello Hurricane, and decided against it, because we didn’t want to rush it. We wanted it to kind of have space of it’s own and that allowed us to – well first of all, we knew we had an album title before we even released Hello Hurricane and that kind of allowed us to have a theme to kind of piece the rest of the songs around. It’s one of the more special songs Jon’s ever written. It really was a unique thing to be able to kind of watch him create that and that song is all about delicacy – the recording. We were really particular about the acoustic guitar sound, which is really everything on that song, and then what Jerome brought with kind of this filtered piano that he played. And Drew was in the studio, filtering Jon’s voice while he’s singing it, through a chaos pad, and different things. Just really reacting to a live performance… you know it really has a unique spot on the record.
Where I Belong
Chad: Where I Belong is sort of the grand finale to the recording Vice Verses. We went up to LA to Neal Avron’s studio and we tracked this song all together in the same room. Really sort of an emotional day for us, being the end of a really enjoyable recording season. To have this to be the last song, the grand finale, felt so right. I remember late at night, all of us singing together, singing the background vocals and just having such a great time, all together in the same room. It was sort of a last hurrah for the album.
Romey: Where I Belong is one of those songs that for me, I just never want to end. The song is almost 7 minutes long and it felt like we could have gone an hour, singing the same thing, over and over. It’s one of my favorite songs on the album and it’s a song about hope, it’s a song about the finish line and beyond. It’ll be one of those songs that I will cherish.
Tim: I like to think that in some alternate universe, there’s an alternate Switchfoot band that’s still playing that song, and they just never stop. I can’t imagine any other song ending the night. Now that we’ve recorded that it just feels like that’s got to be the closer of every show. I really identify with the longing that it expresses, I love the ryhtmic heart beat of it. It was actually the last song we wrote on the record – last song written, last song recorded, last song on the album and it may be my favorite song on the record when it’s all said and done. I’ve got a lot of favorites, I know I’m saying that a lot, but this one is definitely a special one. Another interesting thing is that we kind of get nerdy about the details on a record and we wanted to end this song with the same chord that the album starts. Lyrically, it kind of starts to reprise a little bit with the first song Afterlife. If you play it, just on loop, the record, the song – Where I Belong ends seamlessly into the beginning of Afterlife. We get nerdy with the details because we care. These songs mean a lot to us. Thanks for listening. This record was a really special album to make for us. And we hope you guys dig it.