Good For You - Artificial Light, 2008

Good For You, being the opening track of 'Artificial Light', was always a statement of intent for the new album. I wanted to get away from love songs at the time of writing - I'd had enough of the 'I love you' and 'isn't live awesome?' mentality, so to counteract I wrote a song about f*cking.

Or, rather, the prelude to it. The song is pretty open and shut, I think (although I'm prepared to eat my words on that): it's about seduction, cold and calculating, and, crucially, unashamed. In particularly I love the bridge, musically and lyrically:

"And I wonder how long I can pretend to know your name.
And I wonder, how long will this walk to slaughterhouse take?"

It's not completely sans hope, though. I wrote this song the night before getting together with someone who I grew to love intensely, and while the song was not specifically about her (or about her at all, really), I suppose it's hard to avoid any connection between the two events.

The song is an odd cross between lonerness and loneliness. At that point of my life I was aggressively proud of being lonely, in fact that's a trait I've found difficult to shake, to the point where I'm just now starting to learn how to live with it. Then, my method of dealing with it was to attack it face on, and to write songs like this. Confrontationally sexual. A lot of the time, playing it live, I felt like I was daring someone to say 'that isn't you'.

Live it was an odd beast. I'd had it for ages, since late 2005, and I loved it. I really loved it, but no one else seemed to get it. I'm not sure why. Back then it was a bit more free, without the rhythm that drives it now, but I could never understand why no one else took to it. Perhaps it was because, as I said above, I made playing it live a very personal thing, like an attack on the audience. Maybe that put a fair few people off in retrospect. All the same, I think that anger and sadness made the song what it eventually became.

Recording it was difficult, although I'm quite happy with what we came up with. It accidentally took on a form I like - the claps and spanish-mexican rock sound, the sparse percussion in particular, remind me of the excellent soundtracks to early Robert Rodrigeuz films (Desperado and From Dusk Til Dawn). Dusty and dirty, like a filthy bar. We wanted to get a spanish dancer in, the ones that sort of tap-dance on wood, to be part of the percussion, but we couldn't find anyone who would do it for nothing.

By far my favourite part of this song is the surf-guitar-style distorted slide, just before the bridge. It was kind of lost in mix-down in post-production, but it's still there. I used to play that part over and over in the studio. It has such balls, when the electric guitars kick in, I couldn't get enough of that.

Anyway, I'm going to do this with all three songs on here over the next few days. I want to get across how much was happening with the album, how much was going on in my life and in the recording process itself. I probably won't focus on the specific tracks all the time, because a lot of what I think I want to say crosses over a few tracks, or the entire work.