Over the past year, local indie pop group, Shortstraw, premiered a brand new track on the first Friday of every single month. Today, the band celebrates the official release of their new studio album ‘Those Meddling Kids’ as the entire project releases.
Because of the unique undertaking this time around, the group were pretty flexible when it came to the genre and themes they opted to sing about. “Lyrically there was definitely a theme, and that theme was basically 2016-2017! Each month, as we wrote the songs, I’d just be singing about what I was going through at the time. A struggling relationship, a break up and the subsequent reforming of said relationship, along with the death of my first dog. It’s actually a pretty personal album,” the group’s Alastair Thomas shares.
The group adds that committing to release one song a month meant that strict timelines needed to be set and although this was one of the most challenging tasks the group has ever done – the hard work most certainly paid off. While writing the songs each month, some came more easily than others. A few of them came from old ideas reimagined: ‘Ignorance is Bliss’ was born out of idea of Alastair that is almost 10 years old, whereas ‘Our Simple Minds’ and ‘The Less We’re Together’ came about in less than an hour.
One of the toughest obstacles the group faced during this lesson was that a new song quickly overshadowed the one released before it – hampering it’s growth on radio. “If it was a strong single, we had to move on to the next one after a month, and couldn’t give it all the marketing and PR attention it maybe deserved in order to be heard by more people at the time,” Alastair explains.
However, the process definitely pushed Shortstraw out of their comfort zone and the growth seen in the group is astounding. The band cared less about what people may have expected, and were more content to do what they think is great and exciting. They tried something new on almost every song and played with time signatures, genres, production elements and collaborations.
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