CHASING PROMISES


Compulsion
Here By Chance
Better Late Than Never
Heartburst
Moment By Moment
Smash Palace
Sometimes On Sunday
Glow

Recorded and mixed at Blackwing
Produced by Breathless Engineered by John Fryer
Cover photograph by Ari Neufeld
BREATHLP7 & BREATHCD7

When we started work on Chasing Promises we had this definite thing that we wanted to start writing more structured songs, an idea that in retrospect we find pretty incomprehensible as all our favourite early Breathless songs are things like Across The Water and Monkey Talk, and I think the problem with a lot of the songs on Chasing Promises is that although they’re structured they’re also really long as well, which kind of defeats the object of trying to write pop songs. Also in terms of production it’s definitely our most slick sounding album. By this time John Fryer had moved away from the very dense sound with layers of effects typified by Song To The Siren onto a more mainstream Eighties sound, no doubt influenced by bands like Love And Rockets with whom he was working at the time. As on previous occasions we again recorded Chasing Promises in two separate sessions, at the first we recorded; Smash Palace, Sometimes On Sunday, Here By Chance and Moment By Moment. By the time we went in to record the second session we were in a more raucous frame of mind, both Compulsion and Heartburst were much rawer than the songs we’d recorded at the first session, with rumbling drums and strummed twangy bass, and we knew that the ideas we had for mixing Heartburst in particular, would go against all John Fryer’s ideas about tasteful production, so we purposely left it till last. When it came to mixing it we told John we wanted all the instruments to start at the same level and that we wanted the guitar to build and build until it swamped the whole track, so one could barely hear the drums in the background, which is what Heartburst sounds like when we play it live, but John flatly refused saying having one instrument drowning out another was bad production and he wasn’t prepared to do it. So he got all the instruments sounding how we wanted them individually, balanced the track for the start of the song when all the instruments were to be at equal levels and just said these are the faders that control the volume of the guitars, do what you like, which was pretty cool of him. In retrospect I wish we’d done the same with Smash Palace as that’s how I imagined it when I first came up with the bass line.

Taken from interview with Ari.