The Right Drop

The industry wisdom is that you have your whole life to write your first album and a cursory few months to write your second, which is why it so often becomes the “difficult” one for so many acts. For San Francisco’s Train, turns out it’s their seventh, Bulletproof Picasso, which proved their “difficult” album.

“It was a lot of rewriting,” singer, songwriter and guitarist Pat Monahan explains. “Authors do a lot of revision but songwriters don’t always do that, especially guys like me who are like, ‘If it’s not good enough the way it is, let’s go write a new song – that’ll be less difficult’. But there were too many parts of these songs that were too good to lose, so there was a lot of rewriting of choruses or verses or, there’s a song called I Will Remember which is actually two different songs that we put together because both were so good but not great and then when we put the songs together, it made a lot of sense.

“There was lot of that kind of thing and that’s disheartening at times because when you rewrite a chorus once or twice or even three times, you hope that you find the answer and then everybody can walk away happy, but some of these were 30 rewrites – and that’s brutal; that’s not fun at all. That’s kind of like, fuck it, I don’t want to do this anymore. Not just the song but I don’t wanna write songs anymore, this is ridiculous. But getting through that is very rewarding as well and I think it makes you a better artist. That’s really the reward for the difficulty of this record, I think, that I’m a better songwriter now because of it.”

"Pop hits are incredible to write, but a record that people care about is almost impossible"

Train have been making music 20 years together and their biggest international hit, 2001’s multi-platinum Drops Of Jupiter, has become a staple of “gold” radio, so the fact that Monahan and co are still totally committed to excellence when it comes to the songs they record and perform suggests they’re not content to sit on their substantial laurels. That attitude has certainly contributed to their selling more than ten million albums and picking up three Grammys among other things.

“You know, we had some conscious discussions and decisions to make going into this record, which was like, ‘Hey, if you make a pop record, it gets you on the radio and makes hit songs for you, what’s the reward? You get more money, you get more airplay.’ But a great album, one that connects with people, one that you care about – think of how rewarding that would be, even just to yourself.

“Those were very important conversation to have, and you don’t even realise maybe at the time that writing a record that connects with people is much more difficult than writing a pop ‘hit’ record. Like, pop hits are incredible to write, but a record that people care about is almost impossible, and I feel like if we’ve ever done it, this is the one.”