LUCY GAFFNEY shares new single 'Just Friends'
Lucy Gaffney is today sharing new single 'Just Friends', the latest to be taken from her forthcoming EP Daydream In Tokyo.
'Just Friends' follows the pure-cut indie-pop of recent single and EP title track 'Daydream In Tokyo'
‘Just Friends’ explores the curious, often unpredictable relationship between love and belonging, connection and becoming. “Starry-eyed and mystified,” Gaffney masterfully filters the delicate dance between uncertainty and excitement that tends to come with new beginnings
“I was quite sad when I wrote this,” she says. “I had moved to Liverpool on my own to a new apartment. I didn’t know anyone there at the time so I felt completely isolated. So this song is about allowing yourself the time to understand where you are and actually connect with it.”
It could easily have seeped in melancholy but hard-earned optimism anchors the song’s burrowing indie-pop. It’s a defining quality that runs parallel with an almost touchable sense of Gaffney’s lived experience in Liverpool. Here, Prince's Park and Hope Street carry as much evocative power as the neon-lit utopia of the Japanese capital.
“‘Just Friends’ started out as a kind of dreamy love song before becoming a love song to a city,” says Gaffney. “I was walking around Hope Street and I remembered what I loved about Liverpool and its character. It feels like an innocent song to me when I listen to it. There is this excitement to a new place in the pit of your stomach when you’re on your own. But there can be an excitement to the anonymity of it all.”
Hear ‘Just Friends’ on streaming services here and share the visualizer on YouTube below.
More about Lucy Gaffney
“There's a side of me that really likes writing in a darker way,” says Gaffney. “but there's also a side to me that absolutely loves pop music and that feeling of elation when you are having a moment where you're really up for a dance, and really rocking out to a tune. I was so heavily into the Cure and the Smiths, where every song is catastrophizing your own life, so that’s definitely worked its way into some of my writing. At the same time, making it pop is so much fun. It’s always been the big track that has turned me onto bands and got me hooked. It’s the lesser-known tracks that I fall in love with. The sad stuff is what you’ll give time to once you’re hooked on the tracks that make you feel elated. ‘Daydream In Tokyo’ is a song I want people to hear, then they can dig deeper."
To record ‘Daydream In Tokyo,’ Gaffney flew to the Isle Of Lewis in The Hebrides, Scotland to record a bunch of her new tracks at Black Bay Studios with her brother Thom Southern and London-based producer Duncan Mills. “We had a lot of fun working on this track in particular and I think we captured a lot of that energy from the studio in the final mix,” she says. “I usually tend to construct songs with three tracks, meshing melodies and hooks together. Like on this song, I can usually just hear it in my head. I love deconstructing a track and blending things together, almost like a DJ would.”
Alongside Duncan Mills and Thom Southern, Gaffney tapped into the simple yet powerful majesty of the moment when she holed up in the secluded Black Bay recording studio on the Isle of Lewis last year. For two weeks, the trio worked around the clock to realise her vision for widescreen indie-pop that makes space for big hooks every bit as sonic points of reference such as Pixies and Pavement.
“The studio looked out onto the Atlantic ocean and hills of heather,” says Gaffney. “It was that kind of wild beauty you can’t really capture on your phone camera but you know you don’t want to forget. We’d wake up in the morning and record until 3 or 4 am some nights, so we quickly became a well-oiled machine where everyone had a part to play. Sure enough, we were like zombies by the end of it but I was always obsessed with that Exile on Main Street documentary as a kid so I was there for it. It was the best experience I’ve ever had in a studio, we all felt totally detached from society out there, no shops, no people, just the odd sheep or fisherman passing by. It was the “back of beyond."
“My life this last decade has been so weird,” she says. “I’ve had really random experiences travelling with my music, like going to play in South Korea and stuff, I never thought I’d do that. I don’t know if my life will ever be as crazy as the last ten years but I love that it’s brought me to the point where I can finally understand more about myself. I’ve always sort of known the genres of music I’ve wanted to make from day one and I’m at the point where I can properly ask myself, ‘What can you physically do yourself and where can you go sonically?’”
“For me, the answer is telling yourself you actually need to embrace curiosity and do it now because there’s no better time than the present. As David Bowie once said: ‘If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting. I think I’m finally ready to embrace that.”
Lucy Gaffney - Daydream In Tokyo EP tracklisting:
1. Daydream In Tokyo
2. Just Friends
3. Make Me Smile
4. Boy Go
5. In A Sense
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