I Love You So Much was a song which Reuben presented to us on the same band call which The Mire was debuted on.

Back then it was called Nervous World. It was calm and mellow the whole way through, more of a gentle guitar ballad than anything else. It was just Reuben, some guitars, and a synth pattern repeatedly falling throughout. The vocals were double tracked, but asynchronously. Reuben didn’t have the first vocal take playing when he sang the second one, so the two takes fall out of time with each other and twist around the same basic melody with different ornaments. The result embraces a more imperfect approach to vocals.

The kernel of the song was essentially all there. The whole track is really that phrase, ‘I love you so much’, gaining and losing meaning with each repetition. Reuben wrote it while he was at university, and it’s dedicated to close friends, but it’s neither totally romantic nor entirely platonic. At the end of the day it’s about urging the people we love to stay in the world, despite how terrible it can be.

When we brought it into rehearsal, Reuben felt the song should sound like the demo: quiet, steady, no big climax. The band had other ideas. We jammed it through a few times and eventually Kristian suggested a potential dynamic arc for the song as he saw it, with a climax where the quietest part was in the demo.

This new form was simple but brutal. The verses hold back as before, with Zach’s violin threading through them, and then the whole thing climbs. The cacophonous drum solo is collapsing in on itself and the whining guitars pile on top. The inevitable release eventually runs out of steam and settles down again, continuing the same refrain like a mantra. Now it’s quieter, more raw.

Charlie does backing vocals on the record, and Alex mostly plays what Reuben tells him to play, which is an underrated skill in a band. Charlie also overdubbed a small, nearly inaudible piano part that sits under the track for most of its runtime, and only really lets itself be heard near the end in a hopeful arpeggio, soothing the song.

Reuben has said that adapting his songs to a band setting has been a learning process. This one was the clearest example. The original version didn’t want to explode. The band insisted it had to. Reuben resisted it at first but once we tried it, it was clear that that’s what the song really needed to do. It needed to say it loudly (that which isn’t said enough) rather than whisper it.

Lyrically it lives inside the Garden Songs world without trying too hard to prove it. There’s the prolonged drought image, ‘seven long years with no soil’, and the references to worms, but these words predated the Garden Songs theme. It’s not totally clear to us why that line, I love you so much, really repeats that much. Maybe it’s too kitsch, too ‘pop music’. It can lose its honest meaning if not said carefully. But on the other hand, there’s not much more to say than that, is there?

The Mire began as Charlie’s song, and it arrived in the way his songs often do: not by planning, but by pressing record and seeing what survives.

On 5 September 2022, Charlie had a line, a melody, and not much else: ‘well I came home to a memory of what was once a beautiful dream’. He set his phone down at home, plugged in his guitar, and improvised the whole thing on the spot. It’s Charlie’s preferred method, and a kind of discipline in itself: staying loyal to the first impulse, resisting the temptation to “improve” it into something unrecognisable. It’s also very efficient, in the sense that you can’t overthink if you’ve already committed the evidence to audio.

He brought the recording to the band’s songwriting calls while we were split up at university. We agreed it was worth keeping, and worth taking seriously later. The following week Charlie re-recorded it and added flute and clarinet parts, because he had recently started trying to play flute, and Reuben had recently started trying to play clarinet. This is the sort of sentence that sounds promising until you remember the “recently”.

When we came back together, it turned out to be fairly easy to assemble, mostly because Charlie had already written most of the architecture. The woodwinds became Charlie on Mellotron, with Zach doubling on violin, which did what the flute and clarinet were trying to do, but without the illusion that we were suddenly a chamber ensemble.

At first, the song had a working title: ‘Not My Phone’. It also had a problem. There was too much blank space where the refrain needed to hit. After one rehearsal, Charlie wrote the lines that now feel like the song’s spine:

‘I can’t believe what we could’ve been,

the man I promised I would be,

in the mud, the muck, the mire,

my dreams on the funeral pyre,

I’ve seen it all before.’

Once that section existed, the track stopped feeling like a sketch and started feeling like a verdict.

Charlie is the lead vocal, with Reuben on backing vocals, which most people don’t even realise, because our voices are (un)helpfully similar. We’ve essentially engineered a vocal blend so seamless that the listener can’t tell we did it.

There is one solo on Garden Songs that fully earns its place, and it’s Alex’s. In rehearsal, he improvised a lead part that was immediately ‘right.’ On the record, he doesn’t even play until that moment. He just arrives, says what needs saying, and disappears again, like someone turning up late to a conversation and still being the most articulate person in the room.

The outro was also born in rehearsal and kept. It has that undulating, repeating texture we associate with Philip Glass, the sense of a pattern turning over and over until it becomes physical. It’s not a climax exactly, more a slow acceptance. The song doesn’t resolve. It sinks. Which is fitting, given the title and the general moral outlook.

What we remember most about The Mire is how intact it stayed. It came out whole, and we mostly had the good sense not to dismantle it in the name of “progress”. For us, it’s a reminder that a first idea is sometimes not a starting point, but the point. Also, that taking up woodwind instruments in a fit of optimism is best treated as a temporary condition.

The Wall was the last song written for Garden Songs, arriving in the most direct way possible: in a rehearsal, in one room, in one sitting, completed in one hour.

Coming towards the end of the rehearsal sessions in summer 2023 which would become the Garden Songs sessions, Kristian was lying on the floor in a genuine “we are finished” moment. Nobody felt particularly confident about anything we were doing. In fact, it did not even feel like “doing” so much as “continuing to be in the room with instruments”. At some point Kristian said, frustrated, “This one, God, I’ve just hit a wall.” Not to be outdone, Charlie and Reuben quickly responded they’d hit a wall two rehearsals ago.

Reuben then diverted into talking about how much he loves Drop D tuning, despite the fact he wasn’t actually in it. He started playing like he was, which made the chords drone-like and slightly off-kilter, and he landed on two shapes he liked. Alex asked, “What words could go with that?” The rest is history.

Charlie and Reuben sat facing each other for the next hour and completed it, giving them just enough time to run it through as a full band prior to leaving rehearsal that night. That last band run-through is below.

Some of what made it work was that Charlie and Reuben knew it was working immediately, but the rest of the band weren’t actually convinced until they stepped back from it. Alex’s part was where it starts to sound like The Wall rather than an idea. He found a lead motif early and just kept returning to it, over and over, letting repetition do the work. It’s simple in concept but it makes the song feel inevitable, like it’s tightening a knot each time it comes back.

Lyrically, it embodies Reuben’s style at the time: repeating phrases with a bludgeoning effect. I Love You So Much is the other obvious example of that approach. In The Wall, repetition feels like the point. You keep arriving at the same place. We still don’t fully agree what it’s “about”, but it carries that specific feeling of realising something has a limit, and realising it a bit too late. There’s denial in it too: the sense of keeping your head down and trying to push through, even when you already know you’re about to hit the same place again.

The bridge, with its vocal harmony and key change, has always stuck Beatles-adjacent to us, in the way We Can Work It Out shifts the ground for a moment. It’s been pointed out to us that the same moment also has a bit of early My Chemical Romance in it. A friend from uni said it, we laughed, and then we couldn’t unhear it.

The ending came slightly later. Kristian turned up the next day with the climbing line, and that became the final push. In recording, once that melody was in place, Charlie brought in a Boss harmoniser pedal in the final minute, then built the lift properly with strings. We recorded real strings, alongside Mellotron, and it’s what lets the ending rise without changing the song’s core mood.

What we remember most is how quickly it arrived. The Wall came out of a blocked rehearsal and solved it. One lyric phrase, two people starting to play, and then the rest of the band locking in behind it. It is still the clearest example we have of what happens when we stop trying to force a song and just let it happen.

Maybe for the 10 year anniversary, we'll release the uncut full writing of the song.

Garden Song was the catalyst for everything that came after, and it quietly signalled a new era for us.

Over the Easter holidays in 2022, we reconvened in the same room where we’d end up recording the EP a year later. Reuben wasn’t there. The plan was nothing special - catch up, wrap about old times, and play some old covers. After the covers, we decided to jam around an old riff Zach had come up with years earlier. Once we’d learned it, slightly incorrectly as Zach still likes to remind us, Charlie started playing chord ideas underneath it, which later became the verses and choruses. Charlie also suggested moving into waltz time at the end, partly inspired by Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever.

That day, we did one full run-through and recorded it, improvising essentially everything on the spot. From riff to “most of Garden Song” took less than an hour. 95% of what you hear on the record came from that one jam.

It was only after we sent it into the band chat and showed it to Reuben that we properly realised it might actually be a good song.

Some of that was practical. For the first time, we had proper monitoring in a rehearsal setting, so we could really hear what each other was doing. The interplay between Charlie and Alex’s guitars was especially noticeable. Gone was any quiet deciding about who would take the solo on which song. Instead, it was just playing.

Summer 2022, we reconvened briefly between jobs to trim the fat of the then 8 minute 30 second demo. Mostly that meant removing repeated cycles and incidental jam remnants. Reuben shared an early iteration of the lyrics which was eventually scrapped, but the melodies stayed.

Easter 2023 was the next time we were properly all back together again, and we started rehearsing it at the Quierpels’ house. It picked up a working title, “Waka,” a shortening of the house name. By then Reuben had completed the lyrics and debuted them to us. They’ve stayed unchanged from what you hear on the record today. This was also where we debuted the choir idea that stuck through to the master.

One year ago this week we released Garden Song as a single.

At the time, a lot of the work was us trying to prove to ourselves that we could finish something and still like it enough to let other people hear it. We thought a few friends might listen out of kindness and that would be that. The fact that people have actually found it, been kind about it, and kept it in rotation is still slightly unreal. We hope the song has meant something to you, or at least kept you company now and then in the way other records have done for us. If nothing else, it has apparently helped a surprising number of people on long walks, late trains and at least one dissertation-bound walk to the library.

Earlier this month we were lucky enough to have all five of us in a room again. The school where Charlie teaches let us borrow the studio for two long days. We did what any sensible group of adults would do and immediately filled a spreadsheet with call times, tea breaks and snack windows. 

Our best moment probably came when we tried to cue Zach into a particular drum part. The idea was a careful entrance under a very quiet piano and solo vocal. Something important was clearly lost in translation, because he came in with the loudest intro he could physically manage. We had to stop recording because everyone was laughing so much.

Those two days have left us with four or five songs sitting at roughly seventy per cent completion. They lean more on piano and strings than Garden Songs did. There are still guitars and the usual attempts at restraint that fail in the last three minutes, but the centre of gravity has shifted slightly towards the piano stool. One working title currently has nine words - make of that what you will.

New Place is kept alive by a friendship that has been there for years. The project is more seasonal now. It comes into focus when we can be in the same place and rests when life pulls us elsewhere. We would still love to release something this year. That is not a promise, more an intention written carefully where we can see it.

When these new songs feel ready, we will be glad to share them. In the meantime, thank you for listening, for sending messages, for putting our very first attempt next to records we grew up on, and for giving us a reason to book a studio for the weekend.

-New Place