The Midnight Organ Fight - Background and Recording

Background and Recording

Having originally started as a solo project of singer-guitarist-lyricist Scott Hutchison in 2003, the band went on to release Sing the Greys - effectively an album of demos - in 2006 with a run of 1,000 copies. After signing to independent label Fat Cat Records in 2007 after gradually building their reputation from word of mouth, the band re-recorded several parts of the album and subsequently re-released it to serve as a "taster" for new material. To record The Midnight Organ Fight, the band stayed with producer Peter Katis (The National, Interpol) for a month at his home studio in Connecticut. Hutchison described the sessions as "hard work", having "spent really long days recording it." Despite this, he praised the work of Katis for being able to "bring a sonic muscle to the songs, and a trademark atmosphere that is entirely his own. He kind of pulled us out of the indie rock basement into a more luscious soundscape. He has a great pop sensibility."

Speaking of his writing for the album, Hutchison explained that, "it’s usually the music first, and I hum and sing syllables to feel out the rhythm and melody, then I finally write the words. Most songs just arrive the way they do by accident, and its certainly not particularly contrived. It’s very important to move the listener and I feel that is music's main goal: to make another human feel something." When asked about his guitar work on the record, the frontman said that, "I really love the challenge of 22 frets, 6 strings and seeing what I could do with that. As opposed to stepping on a pedal to change the music, you know, there's such a wide range of sounds that you can get from a guitar and it's fun to get different ones every time you pick it up." Lyrically, Hutchison states that "most of the lyrics are pretty direct" and that the album "almost spells out what’s happened." Regarding the personal nature of the lyrics, Scott states that he couldn't "really write about anything else, and I can still visualise the events in each song, which perhaps makes the delivery more genuine." The artwork for the album was also done solely by Hutchison, having spent four years at Art School; "I didn't particularly want to be an illustrator so I wanted to apply the rules that I learnt to everything I do, in terms of working in a bank or writing music."