Lauren Tate breaks down her new solo album, Songs For Sad Girls, one track at a time
It was important for me to keep the album unapologetic and blunt, with lyrics addressing hard to swallow subjects such as self-harm, gun violence and abusive relationships in a real way – like something I’d write in a diary. I was inspired a lot by 1950s era love songs, especially those that mostly painted an image of sad lonely women in a patriarchal society. Can’t Keep My Hands Off You and He Loves Me are songs written about mental and physical abuse within a relationship where the woman is unaware that she is being mistreated. Most lyrics I write are from my own experiences but not all of them, the ones that aren’t my own experiences are experiences of my friends and fans who’ve written to me about mental health and relationships. Kids in my generation feel voiceless in a world that is too busy and chaotic to listen to them.
I decided to self-produce the rest of the album after recording three tracks (He Wanted More, Can’t Keep My Hands Off You, Monsters) with a producer (Nathan Bailey), one of which (He Wanted More) I remixed in the end to fit better with the raw sound I had in my head for the entire record. I finished recording the whole thing in less than a month, spending day and night sat in the dark recording each instrument myself, writing lyrics as I went along. I wrote both Naturally Born Bad and What About The Kids in one day just singing over drum loops. I wanted to capture a fragile realness to the recordings with no autotune or overly processed pop effects, with all acoustic tracks (Miss American Perfect Body, Rock N Roll Radio, Oh Na Na Na, Teddy) recorded in one take straight through, capturing every creak of the chair and bum note on the acoustic.
The opening track, Monday’s Make Me Feel So Awful, is a poem I wrote a few years ago in my diary. I spoke it quite monotone to a frantic acoustic guitar, mixing in recordings from old family videos, recording myself screaming and smashing plates for what seems like an endless loop ending with the phrase ‘mi fai del male ma ti amo’, which translates roughly to ‘you hurt me but I love you’ in Italian. This became a running theme throughout the album; love and pain.
Can’t Keep My Hands Off You is a song about returning time and time again to those that hurt you the most. It’s about loving a cheating partner and feeling dirty, yet are too afraid to leave them.
What About The Kids is a song I wrote about gun violence after watching children protesting and striking for stricter gun laws, following the Florida school shooting on the news. I wrote it from the perspective of a child that’d been shot, talking to her pro-gun father highlighting the importance of children’s safety, their future and the need for change. I wrote the whole song in a day and produced it within the next; that song kept me up all night just whirring around my head. I just knew it had to be worded perfectly as I’ve never written anything political before.
Miss American Perfect Body was inspired by my inundated inbox of fan messages from young girls wanting to be ‘perfect like me’. I was sat up one night in the summer just feeling miserable, jamming this chord progression when the lyrics ‘I’ve been you, spending the summer hiding in my room’ and melody came to me. The song is a conversation between one of my fans and myself, addressing self-confidence and body image. I’m saying, ‘I feel you, I am you, I feel this too’. I planned to add drums and make it into a big anthem with strings and all, but decided on stripping it back very dry and acoustic. I just wanted it to sound like I was singing directly to the listener, by their side, stroking their tears away.
He Wanted More is a rebellious anthem of self love and self worth. I wrote it about one of my first ever summer romances, a relationship that left me feeling ugly and not good enough, leaving me thinking I had to change who I was to be accepted by this person. On the last chorus I wasn’t meant to sing ‘but I want more..’, I was meant to sing ‘but you want more...’ and just changing that one word changed the whole meaning for me. In the end you realise your own worth, even if it takes many years to get there.
He Loves Me is inspired by 1950s misogynistic love songs and sexism in movies, displaying the female role as this ditsy, dumb, give-her-a-slap-if-she-answers-back housewife. So many songs in that era were blatantly about women being abused by their partners, openly sung by women explaining how they deserved it – it really shocked me. I hope it opens more people’s eyes to psychological abuse, and helps them spot the signs that are not that obvious to the naked eye. Lots of women and men love and protect their abusers; it’s scary to think it’s happening all around us and we don’t know.
Naturally Born Bad is the ‘I will die for you’ love song inspired by one of my favourite ever movies Natural Born Killers. I wrote, mixed and produced this in just under two days, experimenting with '50s style three-piece harmonies and lyrical platitudes. It’s the first love song I’ve ever written with '80s rock throwback guitar melodies, played by Sean Bon. I really want this one to be in a movie.
Bad Egg Blues is like the movie sequel of Naturally Born Bad, it’s the part in the movie where two lovers go on a mass killing spree and hijack a dirty old club in the suburbs somewhere. Sean Bon and I jammed the whole song straight through in one take after experimenting with a bluesy version of the Hands Off Gretel song Bad Egg. We made it up as we went along. In the song, I imagine the femme fatal character taunting the lingering men in the club, all of them drooling as she dances and twirls before she whips out her pistol and blows their heads off. It’s quite a sick song, I hope to make it into a movie someday; Quentin Tarantino style with my own soundtrack.
Rock N Roll Radio is about a 15-year-old girl falling in love with a man twice her age. Inspired by the young girl in the movie, and Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita, I wrote from the perspective of a girl fantasising her life with a man who wanted nothing to do with her. I sang this song in one take on acoustic guitar.
Monsters is a song I wrote about trauma and heartbreak relating back to childhood, with people in this world resembling the monsters you feared as a child in your room. In the darkest of times you just need your momma to hold you and tell you everything’s going to be alright. It’s the only song on the album with excessive reverb on the vocals, which is what I wanted to create a sort of loneliness and emptiness with the lyrics ‘I’m the only person here that feels this way’.
How Fucking Dare You is a song about finding out the man you’ve loved for many years was cheating on you with another woman the whole time. With emphasis on the hard F on ‘fucking’, I wanted it to be angry and hard hitting – turning sadness into anger. For the intro of the song I imagined myself in a New York jazz bar sat by the piano, swigging neat whiskey and sobbing. For a lot of my songs, I imagine the music videos for before I even finish writing them.
Oh Na Na Na (I Want The World) is an old demo; I played it one take without any written lyrics last year. Written about my fear of dying, my ache to be loved and crippling anxiety of losing the ones I love, the song is about peace and living in the moment inside a world obsessed with greed and material things. ‘The bruises we make can we not let them fade and just lay here’ is a lyric I wrote about the chaos of everyday life, about war and the hatred some people feel towards those different to them.
Teddy is the final track on the album, relating back to wanting to be a child and hiding away in my room forever. I used clips from old family videos throughout; in the intro track my mum sings to me and my siblings in the bath when we were younger. I wanted to capture a moment in time with this album. I wanted to sing about subjects that were hard to address, and by ending with my mum singing to me as a child there was a real sense of coming full circle.
Lauren Tate's new album Songs For Sad Girls is out now. Get your copy here.
Lauren Tate UK tour 2019 (with Ginger Wildheart & The Sinners)
November
7 London, 229 Club
8 Cardiff, St Johns Church
10 Leicester, Y Theatre
14 Glasgow, Cottiers
15 Aberdeen, The Lemon Tree
16 Newcastle, Assembly Rooms
17 Manchester, Dance House
