Last week Spanish Love Songs unveiled their brand new album No Joy, while they're currently touring around Australia and to celebrate, we grabbed vocalist/guitarist Dylan Slocum to give us some personal insights into the making of the new record, which despite the name, was the complete opposite journey for the Los Angeles group.
Please enjoy!
1. New Wave
Number one, I think, would be new wave music as a whole. During the pandemic, I went back and discovered a lot of songs that I loved from my early childhood that had come out during the generation before me. I put together these epic playlists and just sort of only listened to mid-to-late 80s dance music for at least a year. That’s definitely a big one.
2. Nashville
For number two, it would be living in the suburbs of Nashville. For better or worse, the environment sort of played in on what we were doing and just working in that environment. And it was also a benefit too, because our record producer, Colin, lived in the suburbs of South Nashville, and we ended up recording the entire album in his home studio. So, it was kind of a unique benefit being able to do that instead of going into a studio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H-MqA04144
3. Ambience
Ambient music and the sort of techniques in ambient/electronic music played a big part, stuff like tape loops or phase looping like Steve Reich, sort of experimental electronic music with drones and ambient sounds.
4. Film
I think to go along with that last one, something that's inescapable is just my love of film in general. But especially, we watched a lot of John Carpenter’s movies while we were working on this album. Inadvertently, it was not intentional, but we listened to a podcast that was going through the movies of John Carpenter, and we started watching it along with the podcast. And I think that also kind of makes sense, just the early heavy synth stuff and scoring your own movies, we always joke that we're trying to score a movie that hasn't been made yet, that’s always something I'm trying to do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFB4lVRETsc
5. Life
For the last one, oh gosh, it's so lame, but just the changes in my life, getting married again and going back to work with the pandemic, just this whole sort of entire upheaval of what I thought my life was going to be like. I think it is always good fodder for a record when your life as you know it changes overnight, for better or worse. And that happened for everybody collectively. I think that kind of thing is just a great thing, and I think early on I was going to try to avoid it. I thought the idea of writing something so heavily influenced by this global thing would be kind of annoying, but I think everybody's kind of coping with it in their own ways. And this is just our interpretation of what we did, which isn't necessarily deep or interesting - but it is just a slice of life.
Written by Dylan Slocum @dylanslocum
Follow Spanish Love Songs on Instagram
Stream No Joy here
Spanish Love Songs – No Joy tracklisting
1. Lifers
2. Pendulum
3. Haunted
4. Clean-Up Crew
5. Middle of Nine
6. Marvel
7. I’m Gonna Miss Everything
8. Rapture Chaser
9. Mutable
10. Here You Are
11. Exit Bags
12. Re-Emerging Signs of the Apocalypse
