Thomston goes deep on the stories that fuelled the songs from his just-released debut record.
Photo: Facebook
This is part of a regular series called Verse Chorus Verse which sees local artists break down the stories behind their music. For more, click here.
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Survey (Preface)
Survey is my overture. I picked out individual elements from a bunch of songs on the record and rolled them into this really haunting instrumental piece that feels so cavernous. I liked the idea of hinting at what was to come.
Float
This was one of the first songs I wrote for the record. I’d been listening to Multi-Love from Unknown Mortal Orchestra and kept hearing lyrics that weren’t actually in the song. One word that jumped out at me was “landlocked”; I stopped and thought about that word for a while. Living on an island, the idea of being landlocked was so sad to me. It’s almost synonymous with being sheltered, trapped, and isolated. The rest of the song came very easily. I’d finished almost all the lyrics in the 10 minute walk from an empty playground to my house at 1am.
Rocketfuel
I enjoy a lot of blatant pop music, but when it comes to writing, I struggle to set the boundary of how far into that world I’m willing to go. The verse is dipping my toe in the water and the chorus is jumping right in; I indulged in a pop moment and it’s one of my favourite points on the record. I rationalised it by going very conceptual with the basic idea of an awkward crush. The verse vocals are hushed and distant, I pause on words in strange places, and it all centres around the internal dialogue of meeting someone who affects you. I crowd the entire song with science references which basically shows how into my own head I get when someone “makes me nervous”.
Headspace
This is one of my favourites. I wrote it in LA with my friend Nick Leng assisting on production. All the textures were really dark with these warped percussive elements, and the concept came very easily within the context of this incredibly emotive production backdrop. I was intrigued by the idea of humanising indecisiveness in a way that you don’t hear very often. Simply put, it’s a song about treating someone badly in a relationship because you aren’t sure of what you really want.
Window Seat feat. Wafia
Wafia and I wrote this together on the day we met. It’s the only song on the record that I didn’t write completely on my own (lyrically and melodically) and it’s also the first song I self-produced from scratch. Finishing Window Seat gave me so much confidence in my ability as a producer and a songwriter. Knowing I could work so well with another writer in the room made me realise how much I had grown since the first EP I released, where opening my process up was terrifying and difficult. This was easy.
Birthmark
The day I wrote this, I ate so much KFC I felt like vomming and I ran through hail back to the studio where we smashed this out. I wrote it with the saddest guitar prince, Fyfe, in London. I think this was also the day I got ID’ed buying very non-alcoholic ginger beer. All this is completely irrelevant and had no contribution to this being the saddest song on the record.
Heart Is Cement
This one is very heavy and punches you right in gut with the lyric “don’t you dare tell me that you never felt anything”. I wrote this right before I joined my family on holiday for a couple days in Fiji and I spent most of the time listening back to it and being sad. I’m really fun to take to a tropical island.
The Shortchange
The verse was written in March 2015 in sunny Los Angeles and I finished the track in March 2016 back in New Zealand. It was such a labour of love to write that it has a special place in my heart. The B section of this song is probably my ultimate favourite moment on the album.
The Outskirts
Songwriting has a weird way of helping you cope with life. The Outskirts was written for a friend of mine who I had kind of lost touch with. They were really driven in high school, but in their last year went a bit off the rails and I watched them compromise all their ambition. It was quite upsetting, because being around ambitious people selfishly makes me a better person. We all talk about goals, we congratulate each other on achievements, there’s this healthy competitiveness that spurs everyone on. Watching her lose that was really sad, but this song really became special to me when I had a crisis of confidence earlier this year and the lyrics that I’d written for someone else suddenly applied to me so much. Bizarre.
Broken Skin (Outlines)
I wrote this back in mid-2014 and it was the moment I knew what I wanted the album to sound like. It was the first time I had written something that I think 100% sounded like me and no one else.
Collarbones
I went into the album not wanting to include any songs from previous EPs. I thought that it was a bit of a slap in the face to early fans, to lump old material together to “fill gaps”. But after getting nominated for a Silver Scroll and having countless messages from listeners regarding how important this song was to them, I made the decision to include it. It’s a special track and I think it has the power to help people who are stuck in a dark place who feel like no one around them is noticing.
You’re Not A Man
This one sort of started as a joke. Josh and I made the most obnoxious, ridiculous, monstrous ‘80s stadium instrumental. It had a lot of machismo and we even sampled a European football crowd chanting. You know that weird drone that happens every time you cram 50,000 drunk dudes into an arena and it sounds the same no matter where you go? Suddenly this hook – “you’re not a man until you’re bleeding” – jumped into my head and I ran with it. The rest of the song is painting this caricature of masculinity, talking about the worth that is drawn from physical strength, apathy, violence, and wealth. It’s very tongue-in-cheek.
Expiry Date
When I released my first EP, I was a nervous wreck. I couldn’t sleep and I didn’t eat much. So my manager booked me a day in studio, told me to turn off my wi-fi and focus on making a song to take my mind off things. Expiry Date is all the things about this job that terrifies me. It’s the idea that pop stars have a shelf-life and the prospect of losing everything you worked for. But it’s also a promise to everyone on my team (and the people living vicariously through my career successes) that I will work as hard as I can and try my best not to let them down.
Topograph is out now.