Broadcast

"There is a theme of letting go on Tender Buttons" says Broadcast's frontwoman Trish Keenan when describing the band's new album. "A flower lets go of it's fragrance, Michael lets go of his past and I let go of my embarrassment of letting go." As Trish's musings suggest, "Tender Buttons" is a striking personal diary and a powerful sonic imprint of two peoples lives.

Trish elaborates, "Tender Buttons" is a solar system of songs. Each song has its own environment, its own set of inhabitants with their own psychological perspective on life. Returning after a two year absence, the album sees a new sound for the band and a new line up of just Keenan and James Cargill.

Blending their influences of the BBC Radiophonic workshop and library music, with simple pop structures and reach-out melodies, Tender Buttons stands out from previous albums The Noise Made By People and haha Sound. Its minimalist arrangements and original lyrical settings show the band's new and liberated approach to the craft of album making. Gone are the detailed live drum performances to be replaced by sparse, hypnotic electronic drum beats, while Trish's lyrics and uninflected vocal style reveal a fearless and developed creativity not shown before.

With three brilliant LPs and countless sold out live shows across the globe, Broadcast continue to prove themselves to be an original and captivating band.

Read on for Trish Keenan's own insight into the creation of Tender Buttons.

From Broadcast's Trish Keenan:

BROADCAST VISION-memory music
The Broadcast vision is the meeting of human emotion in the electronic world. The optimistic belief in the compatibility of man and machine. A nature and nurture approach to music. The potential of folk, nursery rhyme and electronica to provoke memory and imagination. The past set in the future. A retrospective lyric set in an electronic description of an organic world.

THE LYRICS
I repeat myself. I believe that through this unconscious repetition, I have been leaking messages to myself for years. Two words have come up again and again for me. These two words feature in a number of my songs and I have not realized it until now. The words are let go. I have been telling myself to let go for years. So much so I am claiming ownership of them. They are my words. I refuse to let go of them. They are going to be my reminders to let go. Perhaps my epitaph.

The lyrics of Tender Buttons were generated through automatic writing. They are my free falling thoughts. I believe that words have their own life. That if you throw words together randomly, they naturally make sense. Language just wants to be understood.

On a few of the tracks from Tender Buttons:

BLACK CAT
Of all the the Tender Buttons songs "Black cat" was the first. It is, I think, the Fortean Times song of the lp. The black cat is a metaphor for psychological hang ups, the thought processes that make us act oddly when we are disturbed by our conscience. I watched my father have black cat all my life. He tried to chase it off with alcohol but it purred around him until he died.

GOODBYE GIRLS
The two words made me think of prostitutes. That you never say hello to them, meaning that you never get to know them. There are one or two prostitutes in my family. It's not hard to talk about it, but I feel protective. I guess writing Goodbye Girls is my way of accepting it. In a way it might be unfair of me to paint a picture of them as emotionless mannequins especially when their reasons are complex. It's an energetic and colorful song though, and not a negative song if you think of it as a celebration of turning off emotion, It's Ok to stop feeling for a bit isn't it?

AMERICA?S BOY - The Single
The lyrics to 'America?s Boy' were generated by my reactions to a tabloid cryptic crossword. The clues were topically about the war in Iraq, and in general, their stance was one of anti-American occupation.

In my frustration at not being able to decipher the clues, I began to react to them, make up my own answers, mimicking back the language of the clues. I was interested then in possible answers. I got on a roll arguing with the clues, asking questions back, taking offense to them and deliberately misreading them. What came back was a sort of celebration of the American soldier. Snap shots of the heroics of American Imperialism, the all out impressiveness of its big achievements. Also something that the British do not have in their culture, a self celebratory nature of Americans towards their own country.