The beauty of art is the diversity of content that can be created throughout different times of individuals lives. Each time an artist gears up for another painting, novel, album or performance they are at a different state of mind than they were since their last effort. This leads to finding new ways to express themselves. With each release, A Lot Like Birds have done exactly this; crafting records that are timepieces to the band’s ever explorative sound. The band’s honest approach to their career allows for each record to have emotional points to center on and that is found upon their newest release, DIVISI.
A Lot Like Birds released their fourth full length record DIVISI through Equal Vision Records on May 5th, 2017. Since the time of the last record, No Place, the band has faced a lineup change and different emotional circumstances that all went into the creative processes of the album. Needless to say, DIVISI has a bit of a different sound. At the root of the record are five musicians that came together to write the most honest and transformative score of their lives. “The Sound Of Us” packs an emotive explosion come each refrain, with the same mind blowing rhythmic patterns from the drums that have been a grace of every release. “Atoms In Evening” is a fluid piece of reflection, packed with instrumentals that dance with vigor. “Further Below” has an unsettling bass tip toeing throughout the song. This record finds A Lot Like Birds challenging their own existence, focusing on writing songs that have a reason to be structured and at the same break their foundation.
DIVISI, if anything, showcases yet again the musical diversity of A Lot Like Birds. The California quintet’s attention for detail is embedded in their soundscape, with each track having an expansive amount of layers to uncover. Vocalist Cory Lockwood and guitarist/composer Michael Franzino opened up about their latest creation, giving an insight to every song’s lyrics, the music and the heart and soul that went into make the record. This is the best A Lot Like Birds yet. There is a howling dog/part wolf on the record, think you know where? Find out below.
Photo by Jade Ehlers
“Always Burning, Always Dark”
Michael: “Always Burning, Always Dark” sort of wrote itself. We knew that it was going to connect to the final lyrics of the album, making the whole thing a circle that plays into itself infinitely / putting a literal spin on the lyric itself: “Don’t we all arrive in the same place where we began.” The entirety of the track was written in one day, and we intended for it to be the minimalistic version of “Divisi”. It was initially going to be entirely a cappella and we debated whether it should be uplifting or somber, because we did not intend for the line to be either. We went with the darker mood because the end of “Divisi” felt more cathartic, giving a yin to its yang so to speak. The beat was inspired by the Bjork song “Hyperballad”
Cory: Lyrically just meant to loop the album together in a circle.
“The Sound of Us”
Michael: I like to employ weird methods to inspire songwriting (I.e. live jam/writing sessions attempting to score films on silent, isolating myself in the woods for two months to write a solo record, writing music that embodies the feeling a room gives you, etc). “The Sound of Us” we decided to write around an alarm sample I took from the movie Gravity (please don’t sue me), and also was one where we wrote the music over a collection of grooves Joe had written around a cohesive rhythmic theme. This song was intended to be one of the tracks on the album that gave a nod to our previous work but still fell under our mission statement.
Neat sidetone: The really low subby synth sound in this song is from a bowed vibraphone and bowed acoustic guitar string. Who would guess those things combined sound like a dragon growling.
Cory: Narrative taking place in space, around the idea of a person misinterpreting the silence between him and a lover to be peace or comfort when it’s really just a disconnect.
“For Shelley (Unheard)”
Michael: “For Shelley (Unheard)” was the most intense writing experience A Lot Like Birds has had as a band. Working with Cory on a such about something so freshly painful and devistating was uniquely powerful. I am personally the most emotionally connected to this song having also lost my mother young, and consoling cory during the writing process / the duty I felt in contributing to this tribute to someone so important just felt very momentous and delicate. The emotion he put into the track is palpable and real and we knew it was something special the minute we called the song complete.
Cory: Wrote the song as something private while my mom was in the hospital but it became something else after she died, let me put closure to seeing her pain.
“Trace the Lines”
Michael: “Trace the Lines” features our very first and only guest vocalist every in our 8 year career. We generally have always been against the idea of guest singers because our songs are usually very personal and would normally feel strange with someone else randomly coming in. This song was unique because at the time Matt and I were jamming Dealer a fair amount, and when we finished it we both sort of had the same idea at the same time and said “…man I feel like Conor would serve this part really well.” We happened to have a mutual friend who connected us, and somehow we all made it work and he gave a beautiful performance.
Sidenote: The “I made you sick where I had meant to make you mine” pre-chorus is possibly my favorite ALLB moment on any record.
Cory: A different look at a previous song from another album (Orange Time Machines Care), where people romanticize the past, despite it being imperfect and no better than the present.
“Atoms in Evening”
Michael: I don’t have synesthesia, but sometimes this track makes me feel like I do because it made me see shades of blue when I wrote it and still does I do every time I listen. I love that cory set the story in autumn, because it really feels like early winter/late autumn. I also love that when this song came about initially I had concerns about it riding a line of sounding like a christian rock song, even before Cory wrote lyrics for it. His decision to make the song discuss the age old religious debate brings the song full circle for me. Sometimes I think songs are ineffably about something even before lyrics are applied to them, in the way that Michelangelo believed his sculptures were already within the stone he worked with and he just revealed it. The fact that Cory and I felt some kind of religious debate within the notes of this track makes it somehow serendipitous to me. Musically, this song happened among the quickest of the record for me. Maybe throwing some sleigh bells on the quarter note just brings out the best in me, but this vibe is where I feel the least resistance in creativity.
Fun Fact: this song includes the first female presence in ALLB since Plan B in the background vocals. They feature Danika McClure (female voice on Somewhere in the Sierras) and Autumn Sky (Local sacramento music scene signer songwriter staple/partner of Ben Wiacek) in the supporting gang vocals.
Cory: A look at how death, when its close to us, changes our view of the afterlife and nudges us towards spirituality as comfort. If that spirituality’s embraced, is it natural to condemn our past actions and even the person who’s death brought us to a spiritual conclusion?
“The Smoother the Stone”
Michael: “The Smoother the Stone” was written musically and vocally to be an extension of “Infinite Chances.” I remember trying to envision the beat as if Drake asked me to write a beat in his production style… but wanted to go prog. I took the idea for the background super high vocals from 90’s R&B samples. We weren’t really sure about what to do with it vocally initially, but we knew we wanted to still have a couple spoken word passages on DIVISI and this felt like a natural place to incorporate that. Cory has always felt weird about performing really personal spoken word parts, so we intentionally saved this and the spoken word part in “Divisi” to be the last things we tracked because we knew A) his voice would be kind of torn up and worn out sounding B) He would be too exhausted to have inhibitions C) Whiskey played a pretty key role in getting the super vulnerable performances out of Cory, and by the time we finished tracking it was 3 am and he would be thoroughly drunk haha.
Cory: Spoken word for someone personal in my life that I worry about and always feel I couldn’t help.
“Infinite Chances”
Michael: “Infinite Chances” was one of those magical results of high pressure situations that this band seems to thrive on. Somehow with every album we put out, one of the singles ends up being a song that nearly did not happen. With Conversation Piece we nearly scrapped “Sesame Street is No Place for Me” but somehow reworked it the night before tracking it, with No Place we wrote almost all of “Next To Ungodliness” basically the night before Joe tracked it on drums, and with DIVISI we nearly scrapped this one but somehow rewrote the majority of the song in a 24 hr hour writing frenzy the night before drum tracking. When Joe played the verses of this song, it was basically the first time he had ever played them. The original version of the song had a really poppy/upbeat sounding chorus that we just felt was too uncharacteristic of the rest of the record. The chorus of this song is probably the strongest on the record for me, I’m so happy with Matt’s performance on it.
Cory: A continuation of “Smoother…”, the idea that you can put somebody on hold and think they’ll just be there waiting when you need them. How selfish and unplanned that can be.
“No Attention For Solved Puzzles”
Michael: “No Attention For Solved Puzzles” was written around a Bossa Nova drum loop on an old organ. My favorite little tidbit about this track was what we roughly titled it/still refer to it as when we rehearse. When we first wrote the demo we kind of excitedly showed it to ones of our friends who came to hang out in our studio for a bit and he affectionately described his listening experience as “Riding a dolphin through the cosmos,” and from then on the song was secretly titled “Cosmic Dolphinova” (dolphin + bossa nova). The bass line for the chorus is the most groovy of the album to me, second only maybe to “Further Below.”
The public response for this song really surprised us. We all thought it was a good song of course, but the style/mood/tone of it felt waayyy different than anything we have put out as A Lot Like Birds, almost too different. It was interesting/cool to see so many people dig the track I felt the weirdest about.
Sidetone: I bought a $300 instrument from the 1980’s called an Omnichord simply because I wanted it on the first 30 seconds of the song smdh.
Cory: Just a callout to how boring it can be to act like a mystery. How I always find myself attracted to people who are too cool for the place they’re in and how surface level that attraction is.
“Further Below”
Michael: “Further Below” was another one of the track’s on this album that came about from Joe making a song skeleton of just grooves he wrote around a central rhythmic theme. However, it very quickly came to be all about Matt’s bass line. It was the first thing written for the song, and it was/continued to be the coolest thing in the song. I wrote all the other parts in an attempt to serve that bass line/not get in its way. That combined with the gospel choir of Matt’s voice in the verses sort of makes this track Matt’s shining moment on DIVISI. We tried having Cory sing the response lines in the chorus in the same sort of soulful style as the pre-chorus “To salt turn the envious let them, to blood they will melt if they look in our eyes” but we felt like it was just a little too over the top and went for a dreamier falsetto feel. This song features my first recorded slide guitar performance.
This was another weird magical high pressure miracle track that would have been cut had not it been rewritten the night before tracking drums for it. We loved the bass line, but before re-working it we struggled finding anything else we liked over it. I remember driving from the rehearsal space to the actual stadio, having not slept in quite some time completely delirious / unsure if I’d improved it or made it worse and wanting to kiss Dryw on the mouth when he told me earnestly that I’d saved the song.
Cory: Wrote this about Antony and Cleopatra, pretty literally. Just about power and lust and how both are wild in the heat of it and how fast they can both decay or crumble.
“Good Soil, Bad Seeds”
Michael: “Good Soil, Bad Seeds” was the first song written for DIVISI, and also the most heavily revised. There are probably 12 different demo versions of this track on my work computer right now. The rough title of the song was “Spooky Funk,” and I think that basically embodies the song entirely. I think a lot of the heart of the song musically was inspired by the song “Symbol Song” by Dredge, and then the bridge was pretty Death Cab influenced. The bridge is definitely one of the catchiest parts of the record.
Cory: A song about manipulation and making yourself part of somebody’s life and how much it means when you uproot that connection.
“From Moon to Son”
Michael: I think musically this song was initially me trying to pull from Hans Zimmer’s score for Dark Knight rises, specifically the “Deshi Basara” chant in “Why Do We Fall.” You can basically sing that chant over the entire song haha. The first and last parts of the song are essentially two different incarnations of the same progression/idea, where one is heavier and one is dreamy/somber. I love that Cory managed to reflect that lyrically, where the first part represents life before losing a child, and the last part is post.
Fun fact: Most of the imagery/symbolism in this song is centered around wolves, and at one point during the recording process our engineer Dryw was taking care of a dog that was part wolf. At some point a siren was going by and she started howling, and we all were just like “Get the mic going!” If you listen carefully in the acoustic passage you can hear it.
Fun Fact Two: We ran the drums in the last half of the song through a guitar amp. That was already super moody, but that little touch really puts that section in outer space for me.
Cory: Inverse to “For Shelley,” a song about two parents who lose a child, wanted to do the whole song from the point of view of wolves.
“Divisi”
Michael: I’m most proud of this song musically. I feel like this track embodies all of my most proud A Lot Like Birds characteristics. It’s dark, it’s a little outside the box but still catchy, it’s dreamy and heavy and the same time. This is possibly the only A Lot Like Birds song where the music was written around the vocal melody. The melody for “Don’t we all arrive at the same place where we began” was a rare moment of pure inspiration for me, one where I wasn’t actively trying to write something at my computer, or jamming with the band, I was just having my first cigarette of the day and it popped in my head. There’s a voice memo in my phone from the moment it happened. I loved the part so much I based the entire second half of the song around it, and it sort of came to be the anthem of the album. That combined with Cory’s vocal line for the build up just make this track something very special for us. We wrote this song knowing it would close the record and took great care in making the end of it segued seamlessly back into the beginning of the album.
Fun Fact: This song features my voice for the first time since Plan B (I sing the “Ahhs” with the piano/glockenspiel in the first half of the song).
Cory: Tying everything together, both a love song to the idea of hoping two people can last beyond their deaths, and if not, just a plea that some part of us lasts at all, sort of a pessimistic look at the idea of legacies.
FROM MICHAEL ABOUT THE ALBUM:
We always try to have every record title reflect what the album is about, but also be a subtle nod at the overall state of the band at that point in time. Plan B was the title of our first record because it was the point in time when I had just got out of high school and decided to not take the safe go-to-college/get-a-degree/get-a-real job route and instead charge full steam ahead into music and never look back. Conversation Piece was the title of our first record with Kurt, because we knew that initially people would be more interested in talking about the fact that Kurt joined the band and everything that came with that more than even discussing the music itself (Making the album a conversation piece). We titled the next record No Place because not only was it a concept record about a house (“Theres no place like home”) but but the this point we had toured enough to realize our sound put us in a precarious / misfit position of being too heavy/weird to tour with softer bands… and too soft/ambient to tour with the heavy bands (leaving us with No Place in the music scene). The title DIVISI represents several meaningful divides, lyrically and for the band itself. We parted ways with a member, we deviated from several parts of our old sound, and the general theme of the record is about loss / difficult divides with people in your life / dividing with life itself. A divisi harmony in music is a point where two or several musicians are playing notes in unison and then split off into harmony.
This record is obviously a pretty big change for us. Our albums have always been pretty drastically different from each other, but this one had 4 years of us growing as people since the last one, and several side projects between this time. As an artist you grow a lot with every record you put out… so having two side projects in between two of your main project’s albums basically means I’ve already evolved as a musician twice in a way behind the scenes, if that makes sense. Each project scratching a different itch. With No Place and Sianvar, my band/Joe and I had explored about as far as we wanted to go down the rabbit hole of making really chaotic/weird/techy music. I look back on No Place and think “Wtf was I on?” I’m of course proud of what we accomplished with it, but in order to feel truly inspired I like to do something extremely ambitious/different with every new musical endeavor, and every album is a reaction to the last one. Seeing as we had done the insane record with No Place, and also the opposite end of the spectrum with my soft/ambient solo project alone., when it came time to write DIVISI we all spent a long time figuring out what the mission statement of it would be. We ultimately decided the statement would be to “Do more with less” and try focusing on songwriting this time around rather than trying to be weird for weird’s sake, or exclusively soft and ambient. We also decided we wanted it to be more vocally driven than ever before. Believe it or not, it’s way easier to just write a string of non-connected/non-linear parts than writing a song with parts worth repeating. We by no means wanted to write a pop record, but the challenge of writing powerful choruses and memorable hooks in more traditional structures was the challenge that we felt excited us the most. It took a lot of restraint, and a whole lot of revision, but we feel these songs are our most cohesive, honest, and heartfelt to date.
Final thought: I feel it’s worth mentioning that I, as a songwriter, feel some kind of sadistic obligation to be my own harshest critic. When I write an album, I don’t feel prepared to try starting a new one until I have successfully torn apart every aspect of my previous work. Whether the issues I discover with my previous work are valid or not valid end up not really mattering, what matters is that I end up finding a way to sound different than before every time, and to me this is the most valuable and rewarding. It’s a risk to try something new as often as we do, but that risk is so much more exciting than repeating a format we know works.
