THE PAPER KITESFacebook
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ABOUT THE SHOW:
_Doors 7:30pm // Show 8:30pm_
_Tickets on sale Thursday, April 18 at 10am_
“Our hotel window in New York City looked straight into the
apartment building across the street. You could see all these windows
lighting up and people getting home from their nights out. We just
sat there and watched them. It was fascinating. It was living art
Sam Bentley, frontman for The Paper Kites spoke of the moment the
album's concept clicked together. “It's a collection of stories
about these characters all living in an apartment building; I wanted
to capture moments, feelings, it's about people and their stories,”
he says of On the Corner Where You Live (out September
21 via Nettwerk Records), the Australian band’s melancholic,
mid-tempo companion to the recently released album, On the Train Ride
Home.
Give them your tired, your lonely, your lovesick, your unsure, The
Paper Kites have a song for each of them. “I created a world based
on the idea of watching other people, but a lot of the songs are
extensions of myself or people I know,” he says.
Such artistic insight has earned The Paper Kites (which also includes
vocalist Christina Lacy, guitarist Dave Powys, drummer Josh
Bentley and bassist Sam Rasmussen) a loyal, organic fan base. In the
eight years since they formed, what’s followed is an impressive
reach of their music, with steady international touring, nearly 47
million combined YouTube views and over 260 million streams on
Spotify.
On the Corner Where You Live wafts evocatively with noir-ish
saxophones, guitars, ambient traffic, even the languid sound of rain.
Its levitating and bittersweet, heavy-hearted stories that are
resoundingly universal.
Expanding on the group’s acclaimed second full length,
2015’s twelvefour, Sam says “I’m still very much drawn to the
late nights and the sound of them: rich, honest, compassionate
music.” The group originally planned to release On the Corner Where
You Live and On the Train Ride Home as a double album, but decided
to split them up due to the difference between the tracks – “We
had these earnest, minimal, almost acoustic songs and these bigger
songs you hear in On the Corner Where You Live. Like two sides of a
coin, it’s the same feeling, just different expressions of them”.
The Paper Kites co-produced On the Corner Where You Live with
Grammy-winner Peter Katis at his studio in Connecticut – a 120
year old victorian era home that the band lived and recorded in for 5
weeks.
On the Corner Where You Live’s opening instrumental “A Gathering
on 57th” bridges the gap between the two records, the first thing
you hear is the sound of the train running along the tracks and a
street busker wailing into the night. The albums’ concept came to
Sam while on tour - “It came from watching people really, being in
unfamiliar cities, observing other people's lives. I remember the band
was staying in a hotel on 57th street in Manhattan and we'd come home
from wherever we'd been. Our hotel window in New York City looked
straight into the apartment building across the street. You could see
all these windows lighting up and people getting home from their
nights out. We just sat there and watched them. It was fascinating. It
was living art.”
“Give Me Your Fire, Give Me Your Rain” takes over from where On
The Train Ride Home left off. Josh Bentley's punching drums making a
statement that the record is a slightly different affair from the
quiet solitude of the previous offering. A lush sonic tidal wave of
midnight melancholy sets the tone of longing, loss and hope echoed
through everything that follows.
The band recorded the Manhattan street noise from the window of their
57th street hotel, adding it to the lilting meditation “Midtown
Waitress,” Sam tells the story of being alone in London bar years
ago, where an elderly woman who turned out to be a pianist for the
ballet scribbled down a melody on a piece of paper, gifting it to him,
naming it “The Encounter.” During the recording session, Sam dug
out that piece of paper, transforming it into a woozy, sax-based coda
to “Midtown Waitress.”
“Music is so much more purposeful and devastating when it makes you
feel exposed,” says Sam. Take “Deep Burn Blue,” a song about a
girl who won’t leave her room. “It’s that feeling of being so
inside your own thoughts that it’s debilitating.” (If that
weren’t gutting enough, the song even references Nick Drake with the
line, “You like the sound of a pink moon cry/Lying on the floor as
the day goes by.”) Its foil is “When It Hurts You,” a harmonic
lament about a man, locked-out of his apartment, making phone calls
and yelling apologies from the street below. Says Sam; “You’re
hoping the next morning things will smooth over, but you know it
probably won't.”
Sam wrote 30 songs across three months. “It certainly consumed me. I
was exhausted by the end of it,” he says, “I didn't stop writing
until Christina told me I had to stop.”
Christina Lacy takes lead vocals on “Mess We Made”, her first lead
song since the bands debut album. Sam says “I remember we had
planned to have her singing lead vocals on the last record
(twelvefour) – but our producer at the time felt it sounded as if
she was just singing my songs and wasn't making them her own – so we
decided that if she was singing on a record it had to be songs that
she'd written and had an emotional connection to, and she did just
that.”
Authenticity is important to Sam, who penned many of the lyrics for
both albums while on the road, composing both albums in Melbourne.
Amongst his many influences – film played a part. “I had films
playing on the wall of my studio: ‘Lost In Translation,’ ‘Rear
Window,’ ‘Lost Highway’,” he explains. In that vein, he wrote
the piano-based track “Does It Ever Cross Your Mind” while working
at a cinema.
Immersed in an aural diet of blues and jazz, “I was also listening
to these ’50s mood albums like Jackie Gleason’s 'Music to Make You
Misty’ and Frank Sinatra's 'In The Wee Small Hours.' I wanted to do
a tribute to a mood album.” In a similar style to the covers of such
albums, the artwork was painted by Los Angeles American Noir
artist Gina Higgins, who also painted the cover for On The Train
Ride Home and worked closely with the band on the concept.
While The Paper Kite’s songs explore longing and compulsions,
Sam’s own obsession lies in breaking elusive sound-emotion barriers.
“It's a delicate responsibility to try and be sincere, but I think
if there's never a lack of feeling, it's earnest to say the least”.
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16/10/2019 Last update