Keane

0:07Hey, it's Matt with MSN.C. We got Tom from Key in here. How's it going? Really well, thanks. Yeah. Nice. Every interview I'm watching, getting prepared for this, everyone's talking about your hometown. Is this like your penny lane record? Is that what's going on? It's an interesting way of framing it. I hadn't really thought about it in that way. There probably is a sense of kind of looking back to where we all started out, where we began. I think our music is kind of entrenched in life growing up in a small town and those kind of dreams and ambitions that you have when you're in that kind of place. And then certainly the album sort of continues from that context into trying to talk about the journey that you then make life and how those dreams have come very complicated and confused. And you end up somewhere, but it's not quite where you expect it.

0:54Is it where you started out? I mean, do you want it to be in a band or your life I would think? Yeah, yeah. But I suppose the ideal of what a band is when you're sort of 12 years old and watching videos of you too. It's all just the performance and the glamour. And there's no kind of real life going on underneath it. But of course there is. I suppose that's the bit that's kind of weird. Well, and the bit, there's much richer in terms of inspiration for us, the actual real life. That's what people I think respond to in our music. There's nothing to do with us being in a sort of successful band. It's much more to do with us being real people.

1:42How does the collaboration work between you and Tim for writing a song? Well, it'll basically Tim will lock himself away for as long as it takes to come on with a great idea for a song. Normally a whole song. You're ex-soluted everything? Yeah, absolutely. And then he'll send it around to the rest of us. We'll expect an email. And then we send our feedback. Or not, as a case, maybe. But this album, he wrote like 80 songs or something. So there was a lot that's changed from a lot. And so, yeah, we were able to kind of make our minds up with a fair amount of freedom to say that one's shit. That one's great. He wasn't too affected.

2:29How does your vocal melodies change from what he gives to you as to what we hear in the final product? Not a huge amount. There were certain songs that had a lot of kind of structural changes. One of the things we wanted with this album was with the last record, with perfect symmetry, there were a lot of very long sprawling songs. We felt maybe it suffered from not being quite concise enough. And all of us felt like we wanted to get back to that ethos of like, if he can't say it in the three and a half minutes, he can't say it at all. You know what I mean? If the song doesn't say it all in that amount of time, then it's probably not worth pursuing. Unless it's been the complexity. So, how do you make a set list? How do you choose what songs you want? Does it change up every night? We try and change it as much as we can.

3:14I'm the one who has now taken the responsibility of trying to arrange the set list. And it is quite a complicated effect because there are a lot of things to choose from. It's a delicate balancing act. And it can also be difficult to kind of judge what the mood of the gig is going to be like. So you kind of have to think your way around all that and then work it out. But what I've resorted to now is just printing out a list of all of the songs and then just cutting them out and sort of sitting there trying to rearrange them in some kind of reasonably coherent order. I mean, I did it. I did it. We really dramatically changed the set for Montchil last night. And as soon as we got out on stage, I realised there was a much more kind of, there were a much more sort of parting crowd than people were expecting.

4:04We were expecting a little bit more of a reflective type of crowd. So we started into Atlanta, which is quite a slow song and I think it kind of killed the mood straight away. But thankfully the set kind of grew built, so we won them over in here. Five quick questions, one more answer. Roder Studio. Right. Leonard McCartney. McCartney. Oh, you knew that one off the bat? That's nice. Most people think. When you hear a song, it usually gets you first, lyrics, melody, or rhythm. And lyrics. Song you've written your most proud of. I've read a song last year for a friend of mine who passed away. I'm very proud of it. You had to see the line of day. Maybe one day.

4:49Cool. And in one word, team. It is. Thank you very much, man. Thank you very much, man.