Turner admits that it's only gotten harder over time to bring the rewriting process to an end, and he relies on trusted people around him to intervene when his tinkering's gone on too long.
Hearing about the idiosyncrasies, the messiness, the anxieties that accomplished writers manage reminds us that communication is difficult for everyone. It's part of the human condition to want to express ourselves and to struggle with how to do that in the most satisfying, effective way. We all have moments when the right words are just waiting for us, but most of the time our ideas come in fragments and we must work patiently to shape them into a coherent whole. It's easy to forget that good writing takes work, whether it's a perfect bit of wordplay in a song lyric or an incisive argument in a legal brief, because the mental labor of writing is often solitary and invisible.
But it's no less demanding, and no less necessary, for that. For every story that comes to us whole, ready for the world, there are hundreds of stories that peek up inside us and have to be coaxed out. Sometimes, when I was winning, when I was getting treble 20, I was getting further inside a song, getting there. His skills, his lyricism especially, have been growing all the time.
And a relentless one. Mirror that with and , when the other Arctic Monkeys members all took substantial downtime between albums. I could go and do gardening or something. Who Is Alex Turner? By Matt Wilkinson. I used an eight-track recorder, a Tascam , and I sat with all my instruments and recorded the songs into the machine.
That way, I could hear everything at once, whereas in the past it was all in my imagination until I could play the songs with the band. I like the idea that records can sometimes feel like places the listener can go and get lost. And a lot of the chords and music in these songs felt lounge-y in a way that just seemed, to me, to fit on the moon. And spacey. And frustratingly tight-lipped, even on mundane topics, politely declining to specify what TV shows he watches or what apps he uses on his phone.
Then again, copping to such trivialities would bring him down to earth, while, more than ever, the new album has him setting his sights elsewhere. The whole thing is unsettling and louche, like flicking a half-smoked cigarette into a grimy lunar crater. Downtown Manhattan is fully alive on the other side of a double-paned window on this May afternoon, but it feels like a world away as Turner muses, gingerly, on the meaning of his latest work.
The last 12 years just flashed by. The style of me writing has developed considerably since the first record, but the bluntness of that line—and perhaps some other lyrics on this album—reminds me of the way I wrote in the beginning. No, no. Your character on this song also sings about doing a kind of Las Vegas residency, and the whole record has this loungey feel, like an underworld version of a typical Vegas show.
I like the idea of an underworld, not necessarily in Las Vegas but somewhere in me imagination, and that idea helped me to write the lyrics on the record. At the same time, when I think about you guys playing some of these relatively strange and subdued new songs live….
In my head, the whole verse, the whole song—maybe even the whole record—just tees up the idea of playing to a quiet room. The quiet rooms thing also had something to do with the fact that, on a lot of the vocal recordings for the album, I was the only person in the building, just sitting there with my microphone and tape recorder, writing lyrics. And eighty percent of the time, including on this occasion, those are the vocals that we kept for the record.
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