In Her Own Words
Issue #34
Vocalist Adele Bethel and bassist Ailidh Lennon tell us how Sons and Daughters found their pop sensibility for their new record, The Gift
By Kristina Francisco
Published: December 1st, 2007 | 4:03pm
This year we made a new record. Although this is technically our third album, it was dramatically different from our past two, both in terms of writing and recording. We started writing in the spring of 2006, after three years of solid touring. The last two records were written so quickly that they were almost unconsidered — certainly not dwelt upon—but suddenly this time around, we were given the luxury of time.
So we began to write in our practice space in Glasgow and realized quite quickly that we needed to be taken out of our comfortable environment. We found a little house in the highlands of Scotland with a barn where we could set up our gear. No television, no phone, no contact with the outside world. The day would begin around midday, occasional power cuts would force us to cook our breakfast on a camping stove. When we had enough coffee to get started, we would play together all day, sometimes swapping instruments and recording whatever ideas we had.
We took these songs back to our rehearsal room in Glasgow and started thinking about possible producers. One of the names suggested by Laurence Bell from Domino was Bernard Butler, a name we were all familiar with from our youth. We had heard he was now a producer but were only familiar with his recording of the first two Libertines singles, which didn’t bode well. However, he came to Glasgow, listened to us play our new material, and told us exactly what he thought about it. Until this point, we had been very much autonomous — we wrote, we played, we recorded the songs — and up until now, no one had come in and questioned us.
All of a sudden our songs were being dissected in front of eyes. The first thing Bernard told us was that we “had no confidence.” After the initial shock of this statement, we realized he was right and that we had been spending too much time in our comfort zone of what we did and how we played. What we needed to do was break out of our “style” and how we thought we sounded. This was daunting, as we had spent so much time carving out a niche, but it was liberating to have someone else take responsibility for our ideas.
He basically wanted us to embrace the “pop sensibility” that he thought we had. For us this was foreign, and it caused much conflict within the band. He really pushed to our limits individually as musicians, which was really tough, but who was it that said, “Debate is not about who wins or loses, it’s about progress”? So, there was much debate, but, thankfully, actual progress.
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