NEW ALBUMS
Q&A
Jack Cooper: “If it goes onto the tape, that’s it”
Why did you get it together in the country?
Jack Cooper: We were living in Leytonstone in a one-bed flat. We liked it but after a year of the pandemic we were thinking about starting a family and we couldn’t afford to stay in London anymore. So we just drew a circle around my wife’s work, which is in Chingford, and we ended up in a village not far from Saffron Walden.
You wanted the album to reflect nature. How did you go about it?
After the last record, I started to think, well, it’s one thing to sing about nature, to incorporate imagery that evokes the natural world and folklore, but where am I going with it? And what does that actually mean as far as the music is concerned? I spend a lot of time outside, walking, and I started to think about how things grow and how life moves together. Whether that’s literally in terms of flocks of birds, a school of dolphins or certain rhythms, processes, movement and cycles. I started thinking about the collectivism and the democracy of nature, and the brutality of it as well. I come from a background in pop music where the melody is first and foremost, and part of the idea is to reinforce that melody to the point where it’s imprinted on someone’s brain. I wanted to make music that is recognisably song-based and predominantly tonal – but strip away a lot of the signifiers of pop or folk music – defined verses and choruses. I wanted to make something far more abstract.