Ben reflects on the musical artists that influenced the sound of ‘I Built You A Tower’.
"I don't know if there were records that we were discussing in the studio per se, but I had been on a pretty heavy fugazi kick for a couple years while I was writing a lot of songs for this record. And I felt it wasn't that I wanted the record to sound like fugazi because it doesn't sound like fugazi, but one of the things I really love about their records is that the arrangements are just really tight and if there's a guitar doing a riff it's just one guitar doing that riff and that is interlocking really well with the other guitar and with Joe's bass and with Brendan's drums. Everything just has its own lane and it feels, it's kind of a trite thing to say but it really feels like a band in a room playing music. And to me that's, I really wanted us to have that spirit on this record where we were, everybody was finding a lane and just playing through the song rather than having the record devolve into just a series of overdubs that sounded like it was, sounded as if the record was being constructed rather than played. And I think for those fugazi records that I was listening to a ton at the time I was writing the record, those records just feel really played. They feel like people in a room playing music. And I think that in an era of unlimited tracks I think it's very easy and I feel like we've at times had gotten pulled into the overdub game where we just were adding and adding and adding assuming we would subtract later and then we didn't end up subtracting as much as maybe we'd initially thought we would."
💬 Discussion
Ben reflects on the musical artists that influenced the sound of ‘I Built You A Tower’.