From let to right: Arthur, Michael, Shawn, Amanda
How much do you think you know about yourself? SUPERSWEET gives our most beloved Stellastarr* a little test to see how much they actually know about their beautiful new album 'Harmonies For The Haunted'. Apparently, there are a few surprises even for some band members themselves. Read on!
1) LOST IN TIME
Michael Jurin (guitar, vocals): 'Lost in Time' was like.. we wrote all these songs and just before we actually went into studio for the album there was this piano piece that we kinda like based this new song around it. It feels like a track to start off. So it changes us from having a collection of songs to like having an album.
2) DAMN THIS FOOLISH HEART
Shawn Christensen (vocals, guitar): 'Damn This Foolish Heart' feels like 'Somewhere Across Forever' sometimes. I myself would feel like we have too many slow songs, too many mid-tempo songs, "I’ll come in and let’s do this fast one right here," you know. This is where the idea comes from. Also… after a song like 'Lost In Time' you just want to speed things up a little bit to give it a bit of contrast.
3) THE DIVER
Amanda Tannen (bass, vocals): It came from this thing that Arthur and I did… Arthur and I would usually come in before everyone for rehearsals to work specifically on the drums and bass. We jammed and we came up with this piece and the band kind of came in and we wrote The Diver around that.
Arthur Kremer (drums): What did we call before 'The Diver'? (smiles)
Amanda: Oh yeah, we called it 'Walk The Line'! (laughs)
Shawn: Walk The Line, Walk The Line, yeah!
Michael: Wow! That’s awesome! (laughs) Look how it’s turned into 'The Diver' now!
4) SWEET TROUBLED SOUL
Arthur: Michael had this riff in the beginning 'dee dee deee deee…'
Michael: Write that out please! (laughs)
Shawn: Yeah, transcribe that!
Arthur: He played to us, I think he played to us a long time ago and he kind of brought it back to this album and Shawn had these great aggressive lyrics that are quite evil like 'I’m a jealous man' that he wanted to change but we all made him keep…
5) BORN IN A FLEAMARKET
Shawn: I was on a subway train, I was trying to write about the people I know that were born without parents or guardians, by accident and I feel like they’re very different from everyone I know because they act differently and they want more attention than most people and there was this homeless man on the subway train asking for money, I said no and he said, "Come on! I was born in a fleamarket," so I was like, "Whoa! I’ll give you a dollar 'cause it’s such a wicked line!" (laughs)
6) ON MY OWN
Michael: This one Shawn had this little song in a way, he walked into the studio with just the lyrics, right?
Shawn: I walked into the studio with lyrics, no chords, no music...
Michael: Except for different ways of going about it... I don't know...
Amanda: Older ones are difficult to remember and harder to describe…
Shawn: It was really fun to do recording compared to most other tracks.
Michael: Yeah, that was pretty fun to do in the studio as well. There’s a lot of subtle trickery that we did that eventually evolved. For example, that weird high-pitched thing that Arthur really liked… Good job! (laughs)
7) WHEN I DISAPPEAR
Shawn: I heard the bass line and Mandy tried to make us fit the lines into it and she worked us through it because she fell in love with it. Mandy made us put it on the album. We wrote it just before 'On My Own'… actually it was right after. It was an early one, it was kind of a ride.
8) LOVE AND LONGING
Shawn: Oh boy!
Michael: Oh boy! That one changes its form every single time we started to play, it’s kind of little Spector/60’s song. We had so many different variations.
Amanda: Because of the quirks of recording in the studio.
Michael: We had it and we were like, "We’re not settled yet, we’re not settled yet." And everything kept changing, I don’t know, you [Shawn] and I were sitting in the rehearsal frustrated over this song and we were kind of doing this tweaky thing to go over it and we were talking about doing a second version - like when you have the song and you have the reprise right after it which is done in a different format and we were like, "You know what… forget it!" (laughs) That one changed for a while and we were recording after and it was alright!
9) STAY ENTERTAINED
Arthur: That’s an older one.
Amanda: We wrote that one in Arthur’s bedroom (laughs).
Shawn: That’s an older song from our old record that made it on the new record. We wrote it literally right after we’ve finished recording for the first record. I think it’s the oldest song of this record that we really toured out a lot.
Michael: Actually the guy who did the first record for us Tim O’Heir, he saw our show after we recorded the record and we played 'Stay Entertained' in Brooklyn and he was like, "We got to go in and record that song!" And we were like, "No, dude. It’s done!" (laughs)
Shawn: What happened was the guy wanted us to record the song but we had this other song 'In The Walls'.
Michael: Oh that’s right!
Shawn: So we went with that one instead.
Michael: And actually I kind of regretted 'In The Walls' a bit. (laughs)
10) ISLAND LOST AT SEA
Arthur: Oh, I love that song a lot, it was written in the weird era between the albums. It’s always been an odd one but I don’t know it had a melancholy… It’s kind of emotional about it but I love it very much.
Michael: It kind of disappeared for a while. We kind of wrote it and forgot about it and we had to re-learn to play it again. We kind of like, "Hey remember that thing we wrote, remember that one? Let’s try that again…" So it made the record in the end.
BLOATED WIFE (BONUS TRACK)
Michael: 'Bloated Wife' was the first song we ever wrote, we just wanted to record it 'cause it’s such a rad song. It’s so weird. It’s such a weird little love song and we were like, "Let’s record 'Bloated Wife’."
Amanda: It was such a hard song to record too because it had weird timing and we had to do it live.
Arthur: It was really hard to re-capture the feeling when we first wrote it as well being such a long time ago since we wrote it and we had to relive that feeling which we couldn’t remember any more.
Michael: It wasn’t going to be on anything at all and after a while we were like, "Let’s shove it on the record!"
Photography: Kriangkrai Srithongthai