(antiMusic) Welcome to Singled Out! where we ask artists to tell us the inside story of their latest. Today Decky Hedrock from electro rockers The Japanese Popstars tells us about how the title track from their new album, "We Just Are," came to be. We now turn it over to Decky for the story: After about 2 years of playing out and gigging, we realised that we had enough tracks to compile an album of our own material. We had written lots of pieces of music and ideas over the last while, we thought "Lets do it, we could put these tunes out as The Japanese Popstars album!". So we set our goals to produce a 12 track long player. The problem was that we had more than 12 tracks. I think it was somewhere around 24 tracks that we had to choose from! So the next job was to agree on the music which we felt best represented what The Japanese Popstars were about.
We wanted something that reflected our live show that we had been so well known for, and built up a following from, over the past two years but we realized that we could not have something so uptempo and in-your-face as an album, because most people would get a little bit bored listening to repetitive beats constantly. So, we decided to give the album a more euphoric and chilled out approach, in particular areas, so to bring down the tempo and feel of the running order. Basically to give the album more texture, contrast and diversity!
The hardest and worst part came next. Which order do we place the tracks? This took about 1 month to finally decide what tracks ran next to each other. No joke, we got very annoyed with each other, some harsh words where said, people cried, ran away and lots of group hugs came about, until we all decided on a track list that we were all happy with. So, were did we get the name for the album? Well.... When we meet people for the first time, one of the questions they always ask us is "Why are you called The Japanese Popstars?". So we thought it would be funny to call the album something that explains that.
So we say "We Just Are".
Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself and learn more about the album - right here!