Track by Track: My Sad Captains – Sun Bridge

Three years after their last album, My Sad Captains return with their new LP ‘Sun Bridge’ out via Bella Union this Friday(6th October). Sun Bridge is named after the way a still lake offers the ideal conditions for the sun’s reflection to resemble a bridge across the water. Expanding their sonic textures, it’s an album that reflects on how uncertain times can be the seed-bed for change: or, for a bridge to extended adventures.

As singer/guitarist Ed Wallis explains, “Our last record, ‘Best of Times’, was primarily about doing one thing well – a kind of mid-tempo, dreamy kraut-pop. Our aim with this record was to be more dynamic, and push things out in different directions; simultaneously stretching out the ambience while sharpening the focus.”

To celebrate this release, the band talk us through their new record Track by Track:

Early Rivers

This is something that Leon, our guitar player, made and I think it really sets the tone for the record, a kind of gentle drawing of breath. It makes me think of kosmische things like Ashra or Cluster, and the initial version Leon sent me was 8 or 9 minutes that drifted really nicely, and ebbed and flowed. But I butchered it because I wanted to use it more as an intro. I think of it an aural representation of the ‘Sun Bridge’ idea, which is a term I heard in Finland to describe when a lake gets really still and the sun radiates across it to form a ‘bridge’. It creates a sense of calm at the start, and hopefully a sense of anticipation for what’s to come, and announces the sound of the record.

Everything at the End of Everything

This is the first song we put out and was one of the last ones we wrote, but I think it’s the song that brings together in one place all the different strands of the record: a bit of motoric, lots of different synth sounds and textures, finger picking guitar. The song actually started out as a slow, folky open tuning song, but I have a tendency to make mid-tempo songs, and we wanted something that moved a bit faster and the song really found its feet at that pace.

Destination Memory

‘Destination memory’ is the ability to remember things you’ve already told people, and the song extends that idea to being about repeating past mistakes. It has a lot of different sonic and melodic layers, all built up from a hazy guitar loop. Jeff Zeigler mixed the record and he added a lot of depth to the sounds, knitting everything together. I really like the way Brian Eno stacks up his vocals, and the three part harmony was an attempt to do something like that I guess.

Don’t Listen to Your Heart

Over the course of the previous record, I think I’d stopped really writing songs on an acoustic guitar – which is what I’d always done previously but had moved away from in search of other approaches to keep me interested. But this song got me back into doing it, although it’s not something I really remember writing, it just kind of emerged over time. This was one of the first ones we played as a ‘new band’, after our previous drummer and guitar player had left, and it was the one that made me think: ah, this is going to be ok. Ben has a lovely musical feel to his drumming which really shines through on this tune, and Leon came up with this striking, melodic, guitar line, which he described as being a bit Everly Brothers, which I think is right.

None in a Million

This came from us trying to play ‘Wintersweet’ – an instrumental track on the record – as a full band. It didn’t really work, but Dan was playing this quite jarring staccato bass line, and Ben had this flowing drum part which sounded cool together. Almost like two entirely different takes on the same thing, that somehow worked together. So I looped that and took it home and used it as the basis for something else. I really like working like that; having some kind of foundation, and then just singing different melodies and adding different parts and textures. It can lead you into interesting spaces, where one idea cannons off another. It’s something I started doing on Best of Times with a song called Familiar Ghosts, and that kind of formed a template for a few of the songs on this record.

William Campbell

William Campbell is the lookalike who replaced Paul McCartney in the Beatles when Paul died in a car crash in 1966. Fortunately, William turned out to be a genius of similar stature to Paul, steering the Beatles through Sgt Pepper, writing Hey Jude etc. The song is one of a number of open tuning, instrumental guitar songs I had for this album. This was the one that fitted best with the overall sound, once Jeff had mixed it and really upped the space and atmosphere.

Curtain Calls

This is a song I wrote a long time ago, probably at least 10 years. We used to play it, but if fell by the wayside before we made our first album. For whatever reason I thought of it again, and started playing it in a different guitar tuning, and remembered that I liked it. It’s quite a weary sounding song lyrically, so maybe I needed to wait until I was in my mid 30s for it to make sense and be the right fit.

New Sun

Lot’s of the songs on this album have a sense of new beginnings, new opportunities, of coming into the light, and ‘New Sun’ is very much one of them. It started life as a very slow, fingerpicking song, kind of with a Beck ‘Sea Change’ vibe. That didn’t really feel appropriate and I got obsessed by the song ‘Himmelblau’ by Wolfgang Reichmann, so wanted to try the first half like that. It didn’t end up sounding anything like that, but it took us on a journey somewhere else, which can be a good way of working: to aim for something, miss it, but find something different.

Wintersweet

Ambient music has become increasingly important to me over recent years, probably as an antidote to all the craziness in the world. I think it started from exploring that side of krautrock, having come in through Neu!, Can and Faust, and then discovering Harmonia and Cluster, and the records Brian Eno made with them. There has also of course been a lot recent great things like Bitchin Bajas, Mountains, Grouper, and the whole New Age revival. So that’s been a big influence on this record and informs quite a lot of the other songs, but this is probably the furthest excursion, where we let it sit and evolve and be what it is. It’s definitely one of my favourite things we’ve done.

Relive

Sequencing this record was really hard. We recorded a lot more songs, and a lot of our songs are quite long, so we had to cull things from what we recorded to what we sent to Jeff to mix. We sent him 12 in the end, but it was still just too long, and got it down to 10 that we definitely wanted on the record. But then getting the mood and the flow right was really important, in particular getting the balance between the jammers and the pop songs. Putting this song at the end made it all fall into place and gave the record its shape. It feels neat because it has the line about the ‘sun bridge’ in, so it brings you back home and rounds off the journey. It also ends with another instrumental excursion at that Leon made, so I like how it bookends the album.

Live dates

20th October – LONDON – The Victoria
22nd October – MANCHESTER – The Castle
24th October – GLASGOW – The Glad Café
25th October – LEEDS – Brudenell Social Club
17th November – BIRMINGHAM – Actress & Bishop
20th November – LONDON – Oslo Hackney
21st November – BRIGHTON – Sticky Mikes Frog Bar