- 2023-11-23
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MUSIC
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The Japanese House Covers ABBA's “Super Trouper” from New Live EP “ITEIAD Sessions”
British alt-pop singer-songwriter Amber Bain, aka The Japanese House released a new live EP “ITEIAD Sessions” on November 22, 2023.
The EP features five live versions from her sophomore album “In the End It Always Does”, which was released back in June, and a cover of ABBA's “Super Trouper”.
The EP title is an acronym of “In The End It Always Does”.
The Japanese House shared, “It was so much fun making these stripped back versions for the videos with my band and Chloe Kraemer. We also recorded a brand new version of Boyhood and a cover of Super Trouper.”
“Super Trouper” was released by Swedish pop group ABBA from their seventh studio album of the same name in 1980.
The track was written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus.
The song reached No. 1 on the UK Singles chart. The track was also the fourth biggest selling single in the UK for 1980.- xk_Bpk_xHv8
The Japanese House explained track-by-track of the EP.
“Sad to Breathe”
“I wrote this when Marika [Hackman, Bain's ex, who Good at Falling is about] and I broke up. We're really good friends now and have sorted everything out—we're very close. When I think about how completely depressed and destroyed I was from that breakup, I almost find it cute and funny. I think that's why I decided to make the rest of that song euphoric and in double time. I guess in some ways it's me looking back positively on this really sad time, and telling my former self that it's going to be OK.”-
“Touching Yourself”
“I'll often write half a song when I'm in one place and then, when I try and finish it, I'll be in a completely different place. So it ends up taking on a whole new meaning. For the first half of this, I was in the throes of romance and thought it was fun to write a song about sexting. It ended up being about someone being far away from you. Obviously, at the beginning I was far away from this person a lot—I was always touring. And then suddenly I was close to them all the time because it was lockdown, yet felt so far away from them. I feel like I'm really embracing a more poppy side of myself—often I hold myself back on that front. Originally, I was trying to write a chorus around this weird time signature, and in the end I gave up and was like, 'I'm just going to write a really fun, simple pop chorus.' It was a good lesson—the most simple songs are often my favorites.”
“Sunshine Baby”
“I would call my ex and my dog my 'sunshine babies.' My dog is obsessed with the sun, and me and my ex are the same—probably some of the best moments of our relationship were just lying on the beach in Margate. The song started as an attempt to find a way to stop fighting, but at the end it became sort of a resignation about the relationship ending. That speaks to what the whole album is about. Do you resign to being in something that you're not completely happy with, or do you resign to it ending? And which one's worse? There's relief in giving up. And you can hear that in the music—there's catharsis in the outro, the sax, and lying back on a beach in the sand looking up at the sun like, 'OK, fine.'”
“Boyhood”
“I wasn't in a particularly good place when I wrote the early version of this song. I was thinking about trauma and things that happen to you in your life—how you become the summation of those things and how that feels unfair in a way. I was also thinking about gender in terms of me not having had a boyhood. The word 'girlhood' doesn't really even exist. I was thinking about how different it would be had I had a boyhood because a lot of the time I felt like I was a boy and would dress as a boy, asked to be called a boy's name. It's taken me a long time to accept certain aspects of my gender. In some ways, it's about embracing the things that have happened to you and about letting go of others in order to become someone that you feel you are intrinsically. The demo was really electronic, then we experimented with stripping everything back and it becoming a completely acoustic organic song. We watched this video of a gay dance group dancing in cowboy hats and boots in front of the White House—I think it's in the early noughties at Pride—and it's exactly the same BPM as 'Boyhood.' We wanted to encapsulate a definite cowboy twang but also [have] a campness to it. It's a dance song in a weird way—just a stripped-back, acoustic dance song.”
“One for sorrow, two for Joni Jones”
“I had this instrumental thing written with the piano and strings, and I had this idea that we'd have some sort of lyrical rambling over the top of it, kind of like an ode to Joni Mitchell. Obviously I love her so much and I named my dog after her. I went into the studio and said I'd written this weird thing—a poem I'd written hungover that morning after seeing a Charli XCX show—and that maybe it could be the lyrical rambling. Katie Gavin came in and sung pretty much the exact melody we have for it now. It was just so magical watching her do that—she was kind of laughing and crying and me and Chloe were both sobbing. It's just one of the most honest and pure things I've ever written. It's on the cusp of being embarrassing because it's radical honesty. But I think it pulls back at the right moments. It's talking about how it's so sad that you think your life's going to end [after a breakup], but actually day to day, you're just going to be walking in the park with your little dog and everything's going to be pretty much the same. This is definitely the most raw and real thing I've ever released.” - source : Apple Music
