Sydney Eloise is at once catalyst, vessel and torchbearer. With her close friends and collaborators—co-producers Damon Moon and Chandler Galloway—she spent an entire year building and rebuilding her debut album Faces in the studio until it felt just right, with the end result drawing tastefully from every decade of recorded music since the 1950s, right up ’til the present day. Inside the record’s lush layers of daydreamy sound, you’ll find a musical spectrum encompassing almost every era of rock’s most enduring and influential eras.
Glide Magazine is proud to premiere “Too Soon” off Faces, a track that shows her proficiency for music that borders on timelessness with ingredients of alt- country, soul and rock led by a pitch perfect voice.
“Too Soon” was a song that got re-tooled quite a bit on the road to its final version, ” remarks Eloise to Glide. “I think the goals of the song and the initial idea shifted from being this sort of sloppy-but-simple meat-and-potatoes kind of vibe to something more arranged, textured and nuanced. The foundation of the song is still there, but it ended up being more of a canvas to layer on top of. A lot of parts ended up being necessary only in small doses. The whole process felt pretty orchestrated in the end, but a lot of experimentation happened before we arrived there. It was one of the first tunes we started recording for the record, but it was one of the last that actually felt finished. Originally, we just sat in a room and played the hook of the song over and over again, but it took time to figure out how to make the lows lower, and the highs higher. We wanted to create a bit of an anthem with the choruses, but figuring out how to make the rest of the song move and vibe with that was the trick. In the end, that meant making the choruses even bigger and, finally, having our friend Andrew Sutton come in and lay down the trumpet line. He knocked it out in 30 minutes and we instantly knew the song was done.”
“Also, to be honest, this song isn’t romantic at all, but I can see how it could be interpreted that way,” adds Eloise. “Many of the songs on the record are deeply personal to me, but the subject matter is broad enough, I think, that most people could relate them to some point in their life. This one in particular, I wrote it as I was having some pretty important realizations about the way I was choosing to present myself to people. I was probably seeking some kind of validation in place of legitimate friendship. I had all these delusions about people I would meet, and the bonds I might make with them. I was romanticizing the idea of these new people in my life, more than the actual connections that were made. A lot of the song is probably directed more inward than outward. It was a letter written to myself, and a reminder to pursue deeper relationships over superficial connections. Quality over quantity, as they say.”
““Too Soon” starts off feeling pretty driven, but it also seems like it’s searching at the same time. As the song builds, I think these realizations of self-awareness become more clear—they have more conviction as it moves along. The question asked in the first chorus answers itself by the time it’s all over. There’s definitely some repetition, lyrically, but I think the meaning changes based on where it fits in the song. I remember the exact moment when I started having these realizations in my life, and it felt like a marching band was going to bust through the door. It was a small victory. The overall vibe feels really triumphant to me, whereas it could totally sound self-pitying if it were played a little differently. I don’t think we ever really went for the marching-band thing, it just kind of fell into place. It accentuated the feelings that needed to be communicated. Musically, the build up of the song tells a story that begins with uncertainty, but ends in affirmation.”
Working with more or less unlimited access to Moon’s recording studio, The Cottage, Sydney Eloise had time on her side with this new record. She’d bring in the skeleton of a song, and then together with Moon and Galloway, would see how much they could not just flesh it out, but dress it up and accessorize it. “There wasn’t a real timeline so we never felt rushed,” Sydney Eloise says. “We didn’t have the pressure to just live with the first decision we made—there was time to experiment.”
“Faces is rooted in classic pop traditions, but we took it beyond that whenever possible,” Galloway says. “Each sound was a color in the palette—sparse acoustic guitar, recording with the tape at half speed then speeding it up, looping an old optical soundtrack disc in the background, arranging a subtle nine-part vocal arrangement on the fly. Working at The Cottage gave us the freedom to try these things. There’s no way this record would have turned out the same if we did it anywhere else.”
Pre-order Faces on LP/CD – http://sydneyeloiseandthepalms.bandcamp.com/releases
Pre-order Faces on cassette – http://bearkidsrecordings.com/shop/tapes/sydney-eloise/
Official site – http://www.sydneyeloiseandthepalms.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SydneyEloiseMusic (@SydneyEloiseMusic to tag)
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