Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers joined Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 to discuss collaborating with Beck on their new song “Skipping Like A Stone” from their forthcoming album ‘For That Beautiful Feeling’ due out next month. He tells Apple Music about the origin of the collaboration, songwriting process, why the group loves touring, and more.
Tom Rowlands on Collaborating with Beck on New Song “Skipping Like a Stone”…
He’s incredible. Yeah, he is one of those artists, came up a similar time. And we’ve always followed his music. You say he knows, it’s always had a sound. Someone obviously, even in the lo-fi experimental, falling apart days, there’s such a strong character and such a strong voice. His voice is just incredible. With this song, we had the bones of it worked out, and there’s a demo that must never be heard of me singing it. Or an early version of it.But anyway, he took that and he just… When you heard him singing it and then he expanded upon it, and then it comes back to you and you’re like, ah. It’s more than you could ever have dreamt of. Yeah, it’s lovely. But for us, we always want to find a different way of doing something, or a different approach. Or something that keeps us coming into the studio to unlock that puzzle. And we had this idea of this very, it was direct emotional song. And it was trying to make the setting for that where it would still feel like our world, but is saying something really clear and direct.
Tom Rowlands on The Chemical Brothers Forthcoming Album ‘For That Beautiful Feeling’…
… we’re always writing. We’re always in the studio, always making music. But yeah, it felt like… Yeah, because to make an album for us, there has to be an impulse of actually wanting a reason for it to exist kind of thing. The idea of just doing another one just because you’re just going to do another one, that’s not how it is. Yeah, we are writing music and then it was a feeling of growing a collection of songs that seemed to have a similar feel, or some kind of cohesion together, and just pushing that feeling on.
Tom Rowlands on The Chemical Brothers’ Songwriting Process…
Often it can go a different way. Sometimes you do start with a quite songy song, but then you spend about three years destroying that song, and then trying to find the remnants of it that they’ve begun with. But basically, it’s an experiment. And a lot of it is done through jamming. We set the studio up much like how we set up a live rig, and just play. You’ll probably start with an idea. There’ll be an idea or a feeling we want to hit, or an emotion or a sound or something, and then we just follow that around and around. It does get a little bit maddening… No, you love that moment. In a moment of connection and the moment of feeling like something is lifting off in the studio, that’s why we do it. That little bit of magic after months and months of pursuing something to get that little moment of like, ooh, there’s something happening here.
Tom Rowlands on Why The Chemical Brothers Love Touring…
Yeah, we love it. But even on those early stages when we played Brixton Academy, or something, we’d be putting in a surround sound system, making a flat dance floor. Spending all the money on just trying to create this environment where we thought our music could really fly, kind of thing. And it’s the same thing now when we get to play, I don’t know, the O2 or something. Everything goes into creating this environment, this place where we want to just get exactly everything that we can control, kind of thing, to make something happen for that night. But it’s cool as well, we played a lot of festivals and stuff. We played this summer a lot of festivals, and start of the year at Coachella and stuff. Which, it’s been good. It’s fun. It’s fun to play in America now. People go don’t seem to know who we are. And then afterwards they’re like, “Oh, cool. That was fun.”
