HIGHWAY EXIT

In the first part of this blog about the Just A Crash album facts and trivia, I mentioned a few films that were in our heads when we wrote the songs. One more song that is somehow related to a movie is the album’s second song, ‘Electron’. In the first few seconds of the track a female voice speaks the words “I wanna live a real life”. This is a line taken from American Beauty by Sam Mendes (leading actor Kevin Spacey’s line in particular), an incredible script with a strong statement about contemporary America and the Western -decaying- society in general. The soundtrack was magnificient too. Another fact about ‘Electron’ is that it was originally written in greek back in 2006. Maybe someday we will release that version too. Or maybe not.

Enough with the films. Some more non-film trivia about the songs of JAC:

About ‘On And On’.. now this is a fact few people know or have realised about this track.. the whole drum beat is based on a single sample (about 10 secs) of Faith No More’s “Midlife Crisis”. Not only is this band a huge influence and very high in our lists of favourite bands ever, but this particular song and especially the intro drum solo is one of those moments in music that you grow up with and stay with you. When we were writing this song we wanted a funky break kind of beat.. and I had this loop from FNM already sliced waiting to be served. After a few plugins, editing and mixing the sample blended with our synths and beats and so the distinctive rhythm section of ‘On And On’ was made.

Talking about samples and loops, there is one more drum loop (edited beyond recognition :P) in ‘Like Fire’. The incredible drumming of mr Lenny Kravitz in “Where Are We Running” was perfect for the intense rhythm section we wanted for ‘Like Fire’. I sliced the intro drumming of that rocker and kept 2-3 kick and snare samples, enough to make a new drum loop out of it that became the base of the whole rhythm section for our cover of The Dubrovniks’ classic. Some more facts about Like Fire can be found here.

There is another story to be told, about ‘Shine’ this time, nothing to do with loops or samples though. The original title for this song (that eventually became the album’s trademark single) was “A Fairytale Of One”. I wrote those lyrics -actually most of them- back in the summer of 2002, when we were recording our first real demo (a whole other deal back then). That first draft of the lyrics, was about a story of a man finally walking on his own path after spending years chasing after a woman – that concept changed a bit when we finally made a song out of it. It was actually more of a poem than a song back then, in fact I wrote it while talking to a friend, Amy, through daily emails. She would reply to my lines with her own lines and the original poem-dialog that came out can be found here.

‘TV Nation’, together with On And On, Electron and Done Be were the first songs we completed and decided that would be in the album back when we were still in the preproduction process of JAC. ‘TV Nation’ was originally a 6 minute epic, a progressive/dance/electro rock kind of tune, and not only that.. It was only pt.3 of a trilogy titled “Lil Story” a very ambitius project that was never completed, and to be honest I don’t regret that at all . In the first test recordings for JAC in August 2006 we actually recorded pt.2 and pt.3 of “Lil Story” but pt.2 never made it into the album, although it was a regular in our live setlist for more than a year. So, “Lil Story pt.3″ was renamed to ‘TV Nation’ and became the opening song for our live show ever since.

I think this is all there is about the stories behind JAC.
But again not really

JAC – TRIVIA #1