SXSW 2005 Showcasing Artists
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Embrace
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EMBRACE - BIOGRAPHY
The three months that Embrace spent in the studio with Youth making Out Of Nothing were, says Danny McNamara, a nightmare. “It was very, very, very hard”. Even now, four months after the album sessions, the normally combatative McNamara is still visibly gob smacked by the experience. Embrace had wanted to work with Youth ever since he produced early singles All You Good Good People and Come Back To What You Know, from their Number One debut album The Good Will Out. After those 1997 and 1998 releases, they’d more or less produced themselves. But for their fourth album - and their first for Independiente - Embrace needed to shake things up a bit. Embrace had ended their relationship with Hut in 2002, after the release of their third album, If You’ve Never Been. They were immediately signed by Independiente. The label’s boss Andy Macdonald was a long-time fan of the band. He’d seen them headline the second stage at T In The Park, had seen first hand the passionate live following the band had built over five years. Embrace went away and started writing. Finally, last December, out of over 500 “songs and half-songs”, MacDonald pronounced himself happy with an album’s-worth of material. Embrace could begin recording. Later that month, the band played three secret gigs at Leeds’ Cockpit. At 3am on 22 December 2003, in the wee hours after the last gig, McNamara wrote on the band’s website: “We've spent the last two years doing nothing but writing songs. Even on my birthday, which was New Year’s Eve, I was at home all night writing. The bar's been raised to a level that's so high you can't see it from the ground. Now at last we've got ten songs that clear the bar. Everyone seems to be saying that we've got something back that we lost along the way. For me each album has got progressively more honest. The difference with this one is that the big tunes are back. We want to write songs that make people stick out their arms in a T shape and shout "TUNE". Then came the recording…..After 7 years of basically producing themselves they knew they needed an outsider, a visionary, an enforcer. None of them knew how hard this was going to be. “I’m a bit of a control freak and the idea that I’m not in control scares the shit out of me. January, February and March this year were the hardest time of my life. I was getting four hours sleep a night.” McNamara shakes his head and winces. “It was really intense.” The rest of the band were buzzing on the excitement of being whipped in new ways by a new boss. But from the off McNamara thought the sessions were proceeding too fast, were too full on. He was made to change lyrics that he’d been poring over for three years. Be brutal to the ballads. Singer louder, quieter, with more passion. Repeatedly, he’d be midway through a song and be assailed by an exasperated shout from Youth and a quick, galvanising, mocking rendition of John Lennon’s Mother. “Like that! More fucking soul, man! Pretend your girlfriend’s died and you’ve only just found out she’s having an affair with half the congregation at the funeral! Again, again!” So McNamara’d start again. “No! It’s out of tune! Start again” McNamara admits, “There were times I hated him. I’d ring my manger and have meetings with the label, where I’d say, "look can you tell him who’s boss? ‘Cause he’s not listening to me."‚ So they told him: Youth was in charge. And Youth was right. By hook and by crook he licked Embrace into shape. He wanted Embrace to make the truly great album he thought they were capable of. Finally, in the closing weeks of the recording sessions, everything clicked for Danny McNamara. The older songs he and younger brother Richard had been stockpiling over two years‚ solid writing began to grow wings - Someday, the verse of which McNamara had written eight years ago, the same week as Come Back To What You Know, was rounded out into a rafter-rattling soul explosion. The brand new ones turned into four-to-the-floor monsters - Ashes is a huge song, epic without being windy, loud without being “stadium”. The title track was one of those emotional, cathartic ballads that Embrace do so well. Embrace had pulled themselves up by the bootstraps, and turned their band inside out. “I think I’ve grown as a person”‚ says McNamara of his recent experiences. “The idea of relinquishing control and just having a bit of belief and faith in someone else is new to me in my 33 years. And it’s paid off. I’ve left my ego at the door”. The first song to be released from this new Embrace is Gravity. It was written by Coldplay’s Chris Martin. He and Danny McNamara have been good friends since Coldplay supported Embrace in Blackpool in 2000. They keep in touch, and sound each other out on new songs they’ve written. Gravity was one such song. Martin felt it sounded more like an Embrace song than a Coldplay one. Martin asked McNamara if he’d like to have it, to record it as an Embrace song. McNamara had loved the song ever since Martin had first played it to him in 2002. He took Martin up on the offer. And sure enough, once they’d had recorded the song, it sounded like another Embrace classic. And the perfect taster for the rest of Out Of Nothing. Out of hard creative slog, out of friendship, from starting all over again and remembering what they were about in the first place, Embrace have made a cracker. McNamara got his ‘big tunes’, and Youth got his ‘more fucking soul’. “I don’t wanna be one of these bands that lives off touring for a few months then just fizzles away”, declares all-or-nothing Danny McNamara. “The band has to be everything. Otherwise I wanna do something else. But if you’ve got a strong sense of purpose and reason and soul about what you do, your band will always be alright. I believe that anyway”. And how are relations between him and Youth now? “Oh, we’re really good friends”. November 2004 and one can assume that friendship is now stronger than ever. After playing a sell out show to an ecstatic reception at Shepherd’s Bush Empire on September 3rd, Embrace’s comeback single Gravity entered the chart at No. 7 that same week giving the band their biggest hit since Come Back To What You Know in 1998. Danny and co were clearly back on track, prompting more than one critic to note, “it’s shaping up to be the greatest comeback since Lazarus”. Two weeks later, and after a week of nail biting tension, Embrace could finally pop those champagne corks and really start celebrating. Out of Nothing takes the top spot in the UK album chart, selling nearly twice as many the band’s debut album The Good Will Out in it’s first week and going gold on the first day of sales. By way of celebration, and never ones to rest on their laurels, the band embark on a secret gig tour of the UK taking in London, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham and Newcastle, playing at some of the UK’s most famous landmarks and joined by fans who travelled all over the country to see them. A clearly gobsmacked Danny just couldn’t hide his delight and surprise at his band’s unexpected return to the top. With Ashes, the title track to the album and the follow up to Gravity, released on Nov 15th, a sell out of the UK in November, and a Spring tour just announced, 2005 could prove to be Embrace’s most exciting year yet….. |
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