Single Focus: Red Ink

What's the song about?
Aaron Sim, drums: The song's about a girl named Bella, and this is the story of how she stole my heart. A childish portrayal of a girl so captivating, “she draws me in with her fetching stare”.

Is this track from a forthcoming/existing release?
Yeah, the song is the second track off our forthcoming EP. It's being released worldwide via iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, etc, etc.

How long did it take to write/record?
The track was written pretty quickly, over the space of a few hours from memory. We came up with the music for the verse one night and John [Jakubenko, vocals] somehow managed to find this verse melody that we came up with years ago to put over the top of it. I don't know how he remembered that melody; he has a very intricate brain. The song pretty much wrote itself that night. We spent a fair amount of time working on this track after we wrote it in our little ghetto studio, just coming up with little production things. We probably spent a few days doing that, getting it to a point where we were pretty stoked with it. The recording process was reasonably quick once we were actually in Hothouse though, mainly due to figuring out all our parts before we went in there. There were a few things that we added once in the studio though. Stuff like the cello, we wouldn't have thought of putting in elements like that.

What was inspiring you during the song's writing and recording?
Freshness. We just wanted to create something that was fresh and different to our ears. We'd spent the past few years writing a certain genre of music, so we wanted to change it up a bit and take our stuff in a new direction. We were really inspired by writing music that came naturally to us. There was a massive emphasis on that when we wrote the whole EP.

We'll like this song if we like…
Hmmm, that's a tricky question. Maybe Bloc Party, some of the Klaxons' mellower stuff. We took a lot of inspiration from guys like New Order and The Cure when recording this stuff… not that it ended up sounding like that!

Do you play it differently live?
Yeah, ever so slightly. We actually like to mime when we're on stage. In the miming version, we do add a bit of a hectic outro.

Will you be launching it?
Indeed we shall be! We're launching in Melbourne at the Ding Dong Lounge, Friday 17 August. It's gonna be sweet sticks, we haven't been to Ding Dong since it re-opened. We're stoked to be getting it out there!

For more info see: facebook.com/redinkmusic