‘She’s Bad’ is the third full length offering from the intercontinental (Swiss-American) trio known as Lapcat. The album conjures a grainy and dusty feeling – the images flicker and shine as if reflected from a silver screen and give shape to rich emotional landscapes –vivid, yet dusky snapshots of enchanted, faraway places. ‘She’s Bad’ is an intimately told, subtly written love story about life. Jonas, producer and one third of Lapcat, shares these stories behind the gorgeous album along with original photography by the band.
Baus
Baus is a mood song. Deep, rolling, dark yet intimate and dreamy. This song started out with this floor tom drum roll played by Hans. We looped like a 8bar piece of that and added that deep bass synth sound. I believe we built this bass sound by sampling a low C from my Fender Rhodes. We added the nervous hh and some snaps and layered these guitars on top which are all played through a Roland Space Echo. We did a little bit of arrangement and filled in that breakdown with some horn samples. It is part of our workflow that Cate doesn’t hear any of the tracks before she is in front of a microphone. So we pile 40 Tracks in one Session and let her just channel and improvise the first things that come to her mind. In the case of Baus this first vocal take is what you hear on the final cut. It was a really easy song to come together, maybe even the easiest one ever. We all agreed that it would be amazing if all songs would just come into existence with such flow and ease.
Here We Go Again
This song seems to be one the “poppier” things we ever did, and really it still just flirting.. The kick and bass drive hard, the vocals dry, the snare drum hissy. We did quite some arranging a rearranging on this one.. it was hard to find the right structure and when Hans left to go back to Switzerland after our 4 weeks in Spring we didn’t have a working version of that track. It was frustrating since we saw potential. We started working on it again late spring trying things out and although we all liked the initial vocal melodies we felt that maybe changing those could be a way to approach the song. It was Cate that pushed to rewrite the melodies and the lyrics and it was exactly what the track needed. Our friend Max came over to help us and after a long afternoon of wordsmithing and we finally made the song work. Recording the final vocals later that night felt like accomplishing something big.
The words “Friday” and “Love” in the chorus always make us think of “the Cure” .. “The cure song” became the nickname for a while.
Walk Away
Walk Away is the closing song of the album. It builds up and breaks down in waves fading in and out of many different textures and sounds. Dense. Its halftime and double time. There is singing and humming, boys and girls, live drums and nasty Korg Volca beat samples. It feels playful musically, up and positive. It think the track started out with me playing that layered bass that you hear in the beginning. Hans then put some slap echo on it and that was our starting point. We then added some distorty drums with Hans working the Volca. From then on out we just started adding and adding and adding with Hans finally playing the drums that you hear on the outro. Naturally this song was not in the pile of favourites at first because there was just too much going on. We cleaned it heavily only to then add more stuff.. haha .. but hey, it turned out great! Maybe this song embodies a little bit of the dualism that connects the songs all through the album, musically, lyrically and sonically.
She’s Bad is out November 18th via Mouthwatering Records
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