

#2022 never summer harpoon windows
“The back of it had a couch, an upright piano and windows that looked out over some fields, and in the front we had the desk. “The living room was actually a very perfect size for a control room, nice and tight but kinda long,” notes Tyler Johnson. Perhaps the relaxed vibe of As It Was stems from the fact that it was recorded in the living room in the home of A&R man Rob Stringer’s house, a place conducive to chilling out, you would have thought. "You get to the end and you hear it and you go, oh, it’s got the sort of A-ha references and the Strokes references and maybe there’s a bit of Talking Heads in there and then it becomes something bigger than the sum of its parts.” However, while he acknowledges the debt that As It Was owes to other artists and songs, he also firmly believes that it has its own identity. Speaking to Rolling Stone, Kid Harpoon threw another influence on As It Was into the mix: “I’m sitting there on the drums and I was like, oh, this could have a Strokes kind of vibe,” he said. Our engineer Jeremy Hatcher really helped shape that, those drum tones are unique in pop.” That’s what people in that era were doing to make things sound big, but not too programmed.

We want to be referential and for the music to sound familiar, but our process is that we don’t do as much drum programming as live drums. “For As It Was, we were thinking 2008-2012 indie rock, MGMT, Phoenix, Passion Pit. Having a real drummer, it turns out, is important for Johnson, Harpoon and Styles. The best thing about As It Was is just how effortless it is, how it just flows over you and gives you a good energy. We chopped those up for the ending to give it a more bombastic feeling.” We had Mitch Rowland come in to do some live drums. Then we got the tubular bells - another Harry idea - and I’ve got a video of him playing those.

I had a guitarist friend, Doug Showalter, add electric guitars and some transition sounds. “It didn’t go through a lot of, there was never anything drastic. The song came together quickly, then: “Really, the record was about where it’s at now after three or four days,” Johnson recalls.
