THE STORY AND MEANING BEHIND THE SONGS ON 'LIGHTSPEED'
by Robin L


5. Where Are You Now

After recording the first six songs of the album in Florida in February/March 2009, we already planned the second recording sessions for September/October 2009. We already had some new song ideas, but not nearly enough. Time went very fast and we started getting scared that we wouldn’t be on time for our deadline. That’s when I decided to block an entire month and find a little house in the middle of nowhere to write as much new songs in as possible. I actually lived there for a month and was a real hermit: I really didn’t see any people except for doing groceries in town or during one of my trips to the beautiful city of Aachen in Germany. There are probably people that would freak out after a couple of days living like this, but I actually enjoyed it. Even though I started to miss my friends a little bit after a few weeks, when I’m writing songs I forget everything around me and it can be all I need.
While I was working on a song (that eventually didn’t make it to the album), suddenly the melody of this chorus came to me. I made sure that I recorded it so I wouldn’t forget. It took a pretty long time to finish up the whole thing and turned out to be one of the harder songs to write, mainly because of the really low vocals in the verse and the high vocals in the chorus. It was hard to make the verse melody sound good in low key.
While writing lyrics for the song I had an image in my mind of a dark, rainy forest in autumn. Probably because I used to take long walks in the forest close to the house. I tried to deliver the image of trying to find someone that you lost; either because that person abandoned you, or you just got out of touch as time passed. Visions keep popping up in your head at night and you can’t help but miss him/her. The song is about the journey you take to find the person back and all the difficulties you encounter during it: it almost seems like he/she tries to makes it hard to be found.


6. Spiders

On most occasions when writing songs the vocal melody comes first but this time it was somewhat different. For this song the title Spiders and the ‘concept’ came first. After that I came up with the guitar riff, and built the intro and chorus around that. This is actually the only song on the record that I would consider as a song with a riff-driven chorus, as opposed to a chorus driven by vocal melody. When jamming out on the verse and chorus, suddenly the entire bridge came up. That was one of the times that you write an entire part in a couple of seconds and instantly know that it doesn’t need any changes whatsoever. It definitely felt like the right part at the right place. In the demo version that part is in the song only one time, it wasn’t until we were in the studio in Florida that we let it come back on the end of song too.
In this song I see the word Spiders as a symbol for people that try to parasite off of others. The first verse is about the apathy that’s in so many people’s lives, and how we try to be the exact opposite of that. The chorus is about the fear of being bugged by those people. The second verse is about the problems that can come from it and the determination to fight it. The bridge asks the question whether it’s not some sort of paranoia and it’s all just in your head. Like maybe the problem isn’t the outside world, but it’s yourself. The questions leaves an open end.
We considered this song as probably the loudest one we ever played, and that’s why we didn’t expected our A&R manager to come up with the idea of releasing this as a single. But after having released the more pop-sounding single Stars, it definitely made a lot of sense for us to blow it out of the water with a powerful track like this.


7. Forget About Me

After we released our first EP called A Dozen Dreams, we started writing a lot of new songs, in a lot of different directions: loud and fast ones, ballads, songs that explored a different direction and songs like this with that good old feel-good vibe. Forget About Me is the first song that I wrote that eventually made it to this album, probably in 2007. All new songs written before it we basically threw away, because we eventually wrote better ones. I remember the demo for this song sounded really bad production-wise, but everybody heard something in it and we decided to play this one a lot during our shows in 2008. This song is a story about someone that’s being chased down by someone or something that he just can not find the time or motivation for. Be it a lover, a stalker, a co-worker or a teacher. Even though the intentions are perfectly well; being claimed by somebody else is sometimes a little too hard to bear. He needs his freedom more than anything else, even if it comes to people he loves.


8. Wake Me

This song was pretty quickly written and I guess this one needed some work after finishing the rough demo. When deciding which tracks we would record in February 2009, there was some doubt whether to record this one or another ballad kinda song called Night Skies. Our A&R manager of our record label was pretty sure that the anthem-like part in Wake Me made the song stand out over Night Skies and we agreed. During preproduction for Wake Me, our producer James Paul Wisner made some really good suggestions that improved the song a lot. Most notable is the fact that the chorus initially had about the same rhythm as the verse, but he made us try to play the chorus halftime. It was definitely a ‘eureka moment’.
The song is about the feeling that you can have when looking back on the last few months and you feel like the excitement is gone. There’s way too little happening that makes your heart beat faster. You feel like you’re in desperate need of something that could start a fire or bring you back to the past. The chorus is about finally finding back the excitement, like being reborn. For example by finding new love, like the first hint of spring after winter.
This was the last song that we finished during the recording session in March 2009. I remember having to catch the plane at 6 AM, to shoot our first music video in Sacramento, CA. Finishing all details on this song took an unbelievable amount of time. Things like keyboards, percussion, backing vocals and additional guitars. That night it was a race against time and the hours went by way too fast. We were scared that we would screw up at the last moment and just continued until there was no second to lose anymore. Times like that in studio can be pretty brutal. But I guess we made it, we quickly said goodbye to producer James, made two group pictures with him, and raced to Orlando airport.

More to come the next days.