Welcome to Singled Out! where we ask artists to tell us the inside story of their latest single. Today Fountains Of Wayne guitarist Jody Porter tells us about "Aurora" from his new solo album "Close To The Sun," which was released earlier this year. We now turn it over to Jody for the story: I had the title first. It's about a girl from London who went searching for some new life she saw glamorized in old films that basically over romanticizes New York or the American way. The story had an element of reality but I wanted to fill it in so it wasn't just telling a story and try to give it other angles.
I lived in England for long enough to know the street names that sounded right meter wise and that's where it starts. "From the back of a taxi to a 1 way flight/ she said so long to the simple things in life"... Grass is always greener kind of thing in the first verse. As it goes on... "winter took it's toll/ the garbage in the dirty snow/ everything looks worse in the light/ better in the movies than in real life... She's on the bus to a s***ty 9 to 5/ never takes the 6 train late at night" and so on.
In my mind I was using the night turning into day thing to parallel the disillusion. The suns coming up after a long night of looking for something that's not there. Then choruses -"Aurora I'm not waiting for your new light to shine thru/ this girls been confiscated somewhere underneath yer moon and Daylight always comes too soon." etc..
The recording of the song was pretty straight ahead with 2 acoustics bashing it out in the verses. I used a Nashville tuning on one so the 2 together sound a bit like a 12 string. Then the electrics have a spacey panning thing to give the choruses more depth. It recorded for the album as soon as I wrote it.
I didn't have a demo to reference and the song wasn't lying around for ages. It was written during the sessions and went down fresh so I probably ended up liking it more.
Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself with a full album stream - right here!
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