Interview
Interview
Crows: “It’s the third album. It’s got to be something a bit different”
As the London band takes new LP Reason Enough around the UK, vocalist James Cox talks us through its creation
Towards the end of Beware Believers, the second album from London post-punks Crows, frontman James Cox’s lyrics veer from the confessional (“I left God out in the rain”) to the dark and inquisitive (“Well, does the devil know your name? Did he hear your thoughts?”)
It feels appropriate, then, that two years on Cox, Steve Goddard, Jith Amarasinghe and Sam Lister were drawn to an old Convent in the west of England to return to writing. Reason Enough was released earlier this month on Bad Vibrations, and find’s Cox’s personal and political melancholy cut through clearer than ever before, while the band’s characteristic seration and snarl puts more trust in melody.
As the band get set to take Reason Enough on the road, Cox talks us through its creation.
When it came to writing your third album, Reason Enough, you left your normal East London studio for an old convent in Stroud. That sounds very fitting for Crows, tell us more about that?
We all work full time and we share a studio with some other bands. We have one night a week that’s ours, then the days and the weekends are a free for all, but we all still work full time. So we were finding ourselves getting in from work, going to rehearsal and by the time you set up, started writing, it’s like, what, 9 or 10pm, and we’re all knackered. We’ve always found it’s better to take weekends away and write. It’s the only way we’re productive and get more done. So it just happened to be Stroud, because Jith’s mum is from Gloucester, so it meant that she could look after his three year old for the weekend, while we went and wrote. We were just searching for studios in that area and we found this one and it was affordable and lookws like something we could get into. We just liked it, so we went back a few times. It’s honestly just because that way we could write as much, take little breaks and not have to be knackered from work and think about anything else. But the convent thing, as soon as we were there, we were like, “This is gonna look great on the press release. It’s gonna look very Crows,” ha! It was midwinter, so it was even more bleak and f*cking cold and sad. So it definitely, yeah, definitely helped the writing process in that sense.
You’ve said in the statement that “Having a more relaxed approach this time around meant we could explore different stuff”. Can you elaborate on that a bit, are you suggesting that when practical pressures on the band kind of help push a different sound?
I think the expected turnaround for album campaigns just gets quicker and quicker. So when we realised we weren’t going to have it ready in a year, or whatever, we kind of just took the pressure off. In some ways I think we rushed the last album a bit: we wrote it in three months because we were trying to chase that momentum of coming off the back of the first record, even though covid hit anyway, so it kind of threw that out the window. I think this one, we were like, let’s not rush it, let’s just write as much as we can. Again, we normally only write the 10 or 11 tracks that we need for the album, whereas with this one we were like let’s write as much as we can, and then we have a nice way to pick and choose, and anything left over can be used on next one or whatever. It’s first time we’ve ever really done that and it was really nice, because it meant that we wrote a lot of different kind of songs, figured out what worked and what didn’t, and there was no pressure to keep it just because it’s a song, for the sake of keeping it away, which I think we may have done in the past a little bit.
So this was a big one for us, to be able to just write as much and actually try and make something, because it’s the third album, so it’s got to be something a bit different and somewhat of a departure. So I think that enabled us to do that nicely, which helped.
I think the new dynamics compliment the rest of your discography brilliantly, especially now in a live setting…
It’s funny you said dynamic. That was a big thing for us, we needed more dynamics in the album, because the last one, loved it, but it’s pretty flat out the whole way through. There’s not a huge let up until, right at the end. So dynamic is the keyword. We’re were like let’s just mix it up a bit in that way. But now we’ve started to rehearse for the album tour, and we’re realizing it’s quite difficult to make a set out of three albums, two EPs and a single. It’s getting tough now to figure out how you can fit all of it in to a like an hour and a half set.
Let’s talk about some of the shapes forcing the lyrics. There’s clearly a sense of both boredom, a desire for something more, and also a theme of Englishness, which I think clearly go hand in hand, right? Can you expand on that?
This album’s been quite a personal album for me. I think it’s quite half and half: really, really personal and really honest of me opening up about quite a hectic year mentally that I had. I went through a lot of life changes, and, yeah, I was not in a good place for a very long time. I was having quite bad anxiety attacks, had quite a debilitating eating disorder, which I am still coming to terms with. I never really think that we’re an overtly political band, even though I do quite like writing quite political songs, I guess. But that’s just because it’s I f*cking read the news, and they always say ‘write about what you know’ and if I’m just reading a f*cking continuous doom cycle of news, combined with me not being very good place mentally anyway, it just happened. It’s like, well, this is all I want to write about, this is all I’m being inspired by right now.
I especially love that lyric from ‘Land Of The Rose’: “How can I love you and feel shame upon my pride? / When you’ll mistreat your daughters and your sons divide.”
It came out of the Sarah Everard stuff, of abuse against women and then that being so systematic within the police system and all this stuff. Again, it’s just the news cycle. Maybe a lyric will come to my head when I’m reading a news article and I’ll bank it, and put it in my phone’s notes app, which is just full of random one liners. When it comes to writing, I’ll usually write melody first and then fit lyrics to it afterwards. So I’ll dip into the bank of lyrics and be like, what works here? And I’ll shape a song around that. It’s kind of different every time, but that’s the main formula. I’m actually Welsh, but I’ve lived in England, I’ve lived in London, for 16 years now and both my parents English. So it is a general thing about the whole of the United Kingdom, but mainly England, I would say. But then I haven’t lived in Wales for a long time, so I’m sure people in Wales are feeling the same way in certain aspects.
You mentioned earlier the purely practical reason for going to write in a convent in Stroud, but you acknowledge that it kind of fit into this folky bleakness that’s part of Crows’s aesthetic. From the lyrics and the music and of course the artwork, there is a kind of darkness that’s always around the band, and I was wondered if the act of doing Crows, the act of doing what you’re doing, does that help purge some of that from your life?
F*cking definitely, yeah. I think everyone who actually meets any of us or talks to us after shows or anything, they just realised we’re a bunch of idiots having a nice time laughing and joking. We’re not very serious people at all. Especially playing live, I get all the crazy, angry and energetic stuff out on stage. I guess that is kind of therapy and release, and it means that I don’t ever get super angry or pissed off in my day-to-day, because, again, my life’s pretty good. I can’t really complain much about my life. But then, yeah, there’s definitely an outlet to get rid of the dark, negative shit.
What was the process of bringing Andy Savours in? The sound on Reason Enough is slicker and clearer, and it definitely suits some of the dynamics that we talked about earlier. Was that a decision that came in after you’d written everything, knowing you’d need the right person to bring that out?
I think it was a pretty conscious decision earlier on, because we were doing a lot of touring, driving around late at night, really pissed putting on old, mid-2000s indie records, like The Rakes and stuff that. We were like, this sounds so clean but also really loud and really energetic. We should find someone. We should find an indie producer, basically, to do a Crows record. We already knew that we weren’t going to have like a fast, heavier album and that it was going to be a bit more melodic. What can we do to emphasize that? Okay, let’s look for indie producers. We ended up looking at records and who did what. And I think Andy was probably one of the first ones that we thought of and and we contacted him, he was up for it. And yeah, it was really interesting working with him, because he works quite differently to how we’re used to working. He’s very methodical, he likes to do 15 to 20 takes of a song, whereas we normally like to do five maximum. So once we got used to his way of working, and hearing back the results were like, cool, we’ve made the right decision.
At the start you talked about how balancing the band with full time work and starting families. How does your perspective change three albums in, and do your hopes and desires get stronger, or does it require a kind of checking your expectations?
Yeah, it definitely changes, and doing this campaign has made me realise that a bit more. With every album, you’re always like, Oh, maybe this is the one! Maybe this is gonna blow up and we’re gonna be able to do this all time! Blah, blah, blah. But as more of this campaign’s gone on, it’s just made me appreciate and take stock of what we have achieved and what we do do on regular basis, which is like, travel loads, play really good shows, have a really nice, solid hardcore fan base who love everything we put out. I love that. I prefer that to having a fan base that love one song and don’t give a f*ck about anything else you play. We’ve got a really nice hardcore fan base, which I really love.
I think it’s just made me reassess what the word success means, because the yardstick for success changes and is not the same for everyone. I’ve already achieved so much, so much more than I ever thought I would as a musician. From when I learned to play guitar when I was 13 and thought I want to be musician, I’ve travelled America, travelled Europe, released three albums, supported and played some of those amazing venues in the world. It’s funny when people say, like, “Oh, why aren’t you guys bigger than you are?” I don’t know, but I’ve already f*cking achieved loads of sick shit that I’m really proud of, so yeah. I’m having a good time. We’re here for the ride. When it stops being fun and we stop doing interesting shit, then we’ll stop. But for the time being, it’s pretty good.
