EXCLUSIVE: Urthboy - Long Loud Hours (The Story Behind The Song)
13 November 2015 | 11:21 am
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Staff Writer
Just under a month after he released the film clip for his first single in three years, Long Loud Hours, Aussie hip hop artist Urthboy is today dropping an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the new song right here at theMusic.com.au.
In the clip, the Sydney born rapper, real name Tim Levinson, tells the true story behind the song, in what he describes as "maybe one of the most remarkable stories of romance in modern Australian history."
Meanwhile, check out the below anecdote written by Urthboy as to how Long Loud Hours came to be.
"I'm on a plane listening to the glorious sounds of a baby crying but it's ok because I'm going somewhere. And I have internet and there's no one sitting next to me cramping my space so life is good. One of the most difficult things that followed the excitement of starting my new record was that even though I resolutely knew I didn't want to retrace old creative steps, I had little idea what the hell that new ground would be."
"Along comes the beat that eventually became Long Loud Hours. Initially my good friend/trusty collaborator Pip Norman spent a week with me at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra plundering their resources. They gave us the house next door for the duration - amazing. Pip stitched up a break and sample from an old choir recording Bathurst High School did in the 1950s. Or was it Mudgee? It's irrelevant except for the fact they pressed it on vinyl (!), complete with artwork, and probably without a pozible campaign! I'm trying to imagine Katoomba High School, where I studied and failed, pressing the school choir onto wax. We would've been lucky to copy it onto blank cassette."
"I toyed with the idea of doing a song about Countdown. It was so wrong but I only understood this after slaving over two verses and numerous chorus ideas. Two months later I took the song to Sydney and into a session with Hermitude. I'm pretty sure Gusto was about to quit the song after hours of creative cul de sacs but, as I refreshed my twitter feed, something about the song made me spur him on. It was Dubs that broke the deadlock, laying down the chords that formed the foundation of the chorus. But it was Gusto who processed those chords into something completely different (herein lies genius) by way of a procedure that randomly selected and played the notes of the chords. That's the wah wah weerrr werrrrr bass sound that took the song from being cool to something I knew I really couldn't fuck up or me and only me would be to blame. We recorded the damn thing and on a whim asked Bertie if she'd sing my hook. She ended up sealing the deal. She's the best."
"During that week at the NFSA I wrote pages of notes, one of them being the story of Lucy Dudko and John Killick. Surely there was a song in a 40 year old female librarian with no criminal record hijacking a chopper at gunpoint and flying into maximum security Silverwater gaol to rescue her lover from one of the numerous stints he'd served for countless armed robberies since 1967? Maybe not."
"This song encapsulated the challenge of trying to manifest the album's conceptual vision: how to take historical events and coerce them into songs without being dry and academic. That was answered by simplifying this absurd but entirely real event into the context of an extraordinary romance, where the hero is a softly spoken 40 year old librarian who spoke English as a second language.
This album has been a wild stallion I've gone to (relative) hell and back to tame and bring into my stable of songs (thanks Nick Cave for the metaphor) and Long Loud Hours was the breakthrough. Finishing it made me feel like this conceptual headfuck was at last going somewhere, and irrespective of its success, I don't feel like anyone is sitting next to me and doing the same thing. And I have internet. Life is good."
To keep up to date with all of Urthboy's future movements, check out his official Facebook page.
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