Album Style and Direction
According to the band's MySpace messages, the new album would be a mixture between their heavier side and the romantic side shown in their previous albums. James said in an interview with the digital newspaper Scotsman.com: "I'm sure a lot of fans will be excited by the following: It's closer in spirit to the first album - it's got real soul to it. We've gone more for the emotional, tugging at the heartstrings approach. We went off on a bit of a rock tangent on the last album. It was good fun but it's time to get back to our roots."
On March 21, 2008, James Walsh wrote:
There has been an emphasis on strong melodies and simple arrangements for this album and the guitar playing of Richard Warren has definitely enhanced the sound. I'm not one for slagging off the last album and saying this one is 100 times better because the last album definitely had its merits. However we have spent a lot longer writing and recording this one and the result is the perfect companion to Love Is Here.
According to Manchester Evening News, there isn't a particular theme to All the Plans but "married life and international politics are some of the key ingredients." James said "We've tried to write classic songs."
In an interview with James Oldham, James Walsh expressed that he thinks perhaps they got a little bit too defensive to media impressions:
We wanted to prove people wrong. Working with Phil Spector on the second record and then making a more American sounding rock record was just our way of trying to prove ourselves to our detractors. The new album is us realising that that was unnecessary and returning to the sound that we love and established us in the first place."
The album was postponed one week in order to not clash with U2's then-forthcoming album No Line on the Horizon. According to James Walsh, when the band was recording a live session on Radio 2 on January 13, 2009, radio hosters Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie highlighted the fact that Starsailor would release All the Plans on the same day as U2 and else suggest to call Bono and "toss a coin for who moves their release date." Bono called heads winning the toss and All the Plans was postponed for a week.
Read more about this topic: All The Plans
Famous quotes containing the words album, style and/or direction:
“What a long strange trip it’s been.”
—Robert Hunter, U.S. rock lyricist. “Truckin’,” on the Grateful Dead album American Beauty (1971)
“The difference between style and taste is never easy to define, but style tends to be centered on the social, and taste upon the individual. Style then works along axes of similarity to identify group membership, to relate to the social order; taste works within style to differentiate and construct the individual. Style speaks about social factors such as class, age, and other more flexible, less definable social formations; taste talks of the individual inflection of the social.”
—John Fiske (b. 1939)
“Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn’t there. If he can’t pretend that, he will look through the object, or round it, or above it or below it, or in any direction except into it. If, however, you force him to look into it, he will at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be.”
—James Agate (1877–1947)