Interview: Canterbury

What’s the main subject of the album and what inspired you during the making of it?
There’s not really any subject for the whole thing, though, indivertibly we were all quite writing about the same things. With three songwriters in the band, it’s always going to be hard to have a general theme. However, we all found ourselves writing about where we are as a band. For seven years, we’ve been writing and recording music, where sometimes it’s the best thing ever, but sometimes it’s a bit harder than you think it’s going to be. It just is what it is. We’re growing up as people and songwriters. The “Dark Days” thing always came from – sometimes you just feel like you’re in ‘dark days’, everything’s a bit crap, but you always have something to save you out of there. The album’s quite dark and it’s about some hard stuff, but it’s still really positive and uplifting. We’ve tried to inspire people rather than being inspired by others. I hope we’re delivering some wise words and make a positive impact. Actually, you’re giving yourself the message and just hope to give hundreds of other people the same message.

Will there be any collaborations on this album?
There are no collaborations on this one. We’ll just have to wait until we hear back from Rihanna, so for the next record maybe… No, there is in fact a lot of orchestration on this album, more than we’ve ever had before. On this album, we were able to explore way more. We had some seriously amazing musicians come play instruments we’ve never been able to dream of, play or even be able to arrange. A really cool guy, Simon Dobbs, composed a great piece to fit with rock music. So in terms of collaborations, we should never ignore the fact that we’ve had four or five amazing musicians play on the record as well and taking some of the songs to a whole new level.

So is songwriting kind of your way of keeping a diary?
Yeah, definitely. That’s a good way to put it, actually. It’s kind of your mark on the world, really. Isn’t it? It’s something we do as people. It’s great to think we’re 24/25 year old guys with three albums worth of music to our name and that’s part of history now. So it’s quite exciting and for that reason you want your message to be sincere.

Since songwriting is your way of keeping a diary, you must be constantly writing new stuff. Yeah, for sure. We never stop – it’s quite hard to. But you see, when you make your first album you’ve had all your life to write, you don’t even know what songs are gonna make it onto it. But with this third album, it was the most intense period of time in which we’ve kind of had to write songs. But there are songs on this album which we maybe wrote two years ago but for whatever reason didn’t make it to the second album – or you kind of forget about them. It’s the quickest we’ve put them together as a piece. But you’re always writing away, especially when there’s three songwriters in the band, there’s always gonna be someone coming up with a song. It’s very hard not to write music, standing there with an instrument on stage or even just walking down the street and something pops into your head. You’d have to sing it into your phone to remember it. Yeah, we’re aways writing music and I think album four can come out even quicker than album three, because it will just ‘flow out’ and it’s not gonna stop once you’re in the flow of things.