Hallelujah the Hills Hitting the Studio, Ready to Record
Your new album is titled No One Knows What Happens Next, so if no one knows what is happening next, what is the appropriate thing to do right now?
We can all start from a point of not knowing and try to pay more attention to the present moment in front of us. It’s the spirit of this phrase that I wanted to use to invite people into these ten [new] songs.
If you had to describe the differences between this album and your last, what would those be?
adhering to limits, and his ability to use words instead of the other
I feel that our last album, Colonial Drones, was kind of a double album disguised as a single full-length. I wanted to keep this one compact and easily [digestible] to the listener. I wrote the [music] as we went along because I felt some of the Colonial Drones songs had already lived such a long life (in live shows) that they had lost something when we finally hit “record.” So, for this we could only afford X number of recording days, and we learned the songs right before going to record them. It kept us all out of our comfort zones! It was a beautiful way to make a record, in my opinion.
way around. On the Boston band’s new album, No One Knows What
Where did you record this record?
By Andrew Lapham Fersch / Photo by Timothy Renzi
Although Hallelujah the Hills’ lead singer and wordsmith has been credited with creating “music without limits” out of “absurdist word clusters,” it may actually be Ryan Walsh’s ability to create without
Happens Next, Walsh and company set forth to create something that delved deeper, lyrically, while still doing something outside the ordinary, musically. And they’ve managed to do just that in the ten tracks on the record.
We recorded to tape at the Soul Shop in Medford, MA. I’m not musically trained so I use a lot of adjectives and hand motions to describe what we’re going for. So [the band] has learned this weird work-around language I use.
Lyrically, it doesn’t seem like you’re just throwing down whatever comes to mind. What does your songwriting process look like?
There’s something to be said for a stream of consciousness writing style. I’ve done it and I’ve immensely enjoyed others doing it. But this process was the complete opposite of that. Clarity was very important to me as I wrote these songs. I didn’t want the answer to any question about the lyrics to be, ‘Well, whatever it means to you.’ ‘Get Me In A Room’ was the first song that was written and it’s a pretty straightforward assessment of the band, our current position, and what can and cannot be sung about. That triggered everything else that followed.
How about the music? Are you the primary writer or do you show up with lyrics and everyone works together at that point?
Hallelujah the Hills
No One Knows What Happens Next Out now on Discrete Pageantry Records
26 JULY 2012 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
I write the songs at home: melody, chord structure, lyrics. Then the band gets a demo recording. Then we proceed to what I call ‘the fun part.’ We arrange the song all together in a room. Everyone invents their own parts. It’s one of my favorite things. What I thought might become a fast song will end up a slow dirge and vice versa. The kind of collaborative process we use for arranging songs is something I