Close-up: Sleeper Service – Almond Butter

“I came up with the guitar riff for ‘Almond Butter’ a few months ago, I believe while I was trying to write a guitar part for one of our previous songs: Evan. Greg (my bandmate) and I had been writing a lot of music which was intense and introspective at this time. It took a lot of energy to write the songs we’d been working on recently, especially since most of the work we were doing was remote because we were both at university, 300 miles apart, in the middle of a nationwide lockdown. The songwriting process could be quite fatiguing at times as a result, so I just decided to write a demo that was relaxed in its tone but infectious in its groove. Et voila – Almond Butter was conceived.

We usually have quite an easy and transparent work-relationship. Greg is usually the wizard behind the vocals and dreamy melodies of our songs while I tend to work more behind the scenes on production and mixing. We both love working in our respective specialisations and as such it’s never a difficult process to come up with a song. For this one though I think I actually wrote the melody and ended up singing on the majority of the record (partly due to our restrictive circumstances I mentioned earlier), while we jointly worked on the production and lyrics of the song. Mixing was handed over to our wickedly talented engineer friend Louis Lion.

Creating ‘Almond Butter’ didn’t take enormously long. I think the bulk of the song was finished in a couple of weeks, but it sat on our SoundCloud private demos area about 90% finished for a couple months; it took some time to navigate the release strategy of the song, as it was quite different to our previous discography. However, I think we got it right in the end and we couldn’t be happier with its reception by our friends, family and our first couple fans we have floating around on the internet!”
(Tom Keogh, Sleeper Service)

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The ‘Close-up’ series contains insight provided by artists about their work.