Listed Building

Ah finally we get one from Defunct Devices.

Here’s a chance to point you to this interview I did with my close personal friend Spencer Segelov where I attempt to make ‘I started writing songs by playing the guitar until there was a song’ into something interesting. But there we go – that’s what happened. I picked up the guitar during lockdown way and played in a way I hadn’t before. I wrote lots of songs and finished an album quickly – ‘Listed Building’ was one of the first of these.

Its working title was ‘Jazzmaster Song’, because that was the guitar I wrote it on. I didn’t really think about guitars for a long time, but suddenly I started paying them as much attention as I had been paying synths and electronic instruments for years. I had treated them as if they were basically all the same, but reader they are not. 

Indulge me for a moment… The Fender Jazzmaster is the pinnacle of electric guitar design, and when I played one for the first time I felt like I was home. The shape and feel are just perfect. A good Jazzmaster pickup contains all the sounds other pickups somehow omit. But oh, the tremolo system and bridge. The musicality of these is everything to me now. A Stratocaster tremolo is far too twitchy and lends itself too easily to those whammy / boing! sounds that dickheads use in their guitar solos (for example the guitar solo on ‘Overthinking’). 

The Jazzmaster tremolo system is now a fundamental part of how I play. It doesn’t feature massively on this song, but this is where I first began to discover its charms.

What else is going on musically? A really quite odd, mildly atonal riff. A middle section which I believe is in 7/4 and a chorus which someone said sounds a bit like Placebo – which I can see, but wasn’t intended. As I was going full ‘Jazzmaster Song’ I also threw in some fairly obvious MBVisms in the background of the chorus. Why not? In the past I’d have resisted obvious references, but a mantra for Defunct Devices was to ‘let the songs be what they want to be’. 

Lyrically, this actually constitutes the first part of a series of songs about ‘lost places’. Originally I envisaged doing a short EP early in lockdown which would have that name, and where each track would focus on a ‘lost place’. What am I getting at with ‘lost places’? Lost in what sense? Here I think we just mean ‘abandoned to the ravages of history’. I’m thinking about a place where children used to play. Now maybe due to be redeveloped into something more mundane – maybe helped along by a suspicious fire. 

That idea is maybe abandoned as a binding lyrically concept, though it’s still the working title for the next album. Musically, ‘Listed Building’ didn’t fit the other songs that are emerging for that record, so onto Defunct Devices it went.