Low - Song Backgrounds
L o w
home
the songs
discography
tour archive
reading
CKM label
  trustlow.com
Song Backgrounds


I Could Live In Hope (1994)

Alan, Mimi, John, and Zak in a photobooth
words - a rough sketch of a real experience. too embarrassing to go into, but it was scary and changed my life. richard from the band versus thought we were singing "interlocking hero" in the chorus.

fear - speaking to my daughter who, unknown to me, would be born 7 years later. the beginning of biblical reference ("40 days without water").

cut - one of the first songs we wrote. had a whole bunch of lyrics but narrowed them down to this, teaching me a good lesson; most of what you write is crap, but if you only use the tolerable parts, it's not so bad.

slide - mim doing harmony to me works well, but my first attempt to harmonize to her isn't so hot. i remember this song hurt my hand to play on guitar. i like the echo-y dub drums. i love the half-spoken "you wait. . ." mim vocal.

lazy - my sister's name is sarah but it would be mean to say it's about her. had a music man amp that made that weird vibrato. don't have it anymore. popular request at shows. always wanted to hear a cool echo-y dub mix of this song.

lullaby - a reflection of our shoegazer fandom at the time, but i think mim's vocal is what makes it.

sea - one of those songs that just falls in your lap. sounds like an old song - maybe because of the folk harmonies.

down - closest thing to a low guitar jam. our demo of this was 9 minutes long (even more guitar!).

drag - probably one of our most self loathing songs. it's easier to be this obvious when you're younger. age makes you want to hide such feelings, or at least be more cryptic, unfortunately sometimes. hard to play now without feeling like a cry-baby. i'm not sure if that's good or bad.

rope - all about the bass part john brought in. fun song to play in the bars ("you're gonna need more. . .")

sunshine - i used to work at summer camps for mentally handicapped kids and this song was by far the most popular camp song. we thought by slowing it down it would bring out the very sober, depressing theme of the lyrics. a lot of those old folk songs are like that. we just messed with it in the studio and kramer went nuts and insisted we do it for the record.

« back to the index