Noel Gallagher about his third solo album: “The greatest strength this record has is also its greatest weakness…”

Noel Gallagher about his third solo album: “The greatest strength this record has is also its greatest weakness…”



As you already know, Noel Gallagher is in the recording studio roughly halfway through making his third Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds album and so far, he’s fairly satisfied with the material that’s been flourishing in recent studio sessions.

As a songwriter, he is approaching the creation of this new album in a way he’s not done before – entering the process empty handed with no songs written in any form, instead writing with a producer in studio as they go along. Admittedly, it’s also frustrating.

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“It’s slow going and I am a very, very impatient man.” Gallagher says. “If I have a thought, a minor whim, I have to act on it that instant and see it through it’s logical conclusion. With this record, there’s a lot of ideas still up in the fucking air floating around which is really, really beginning to annoy me. I’m going to fucking soldier on, I’m not going to fucking complain. I’m going to soldier on for the kids, that’s what I’m going to do.”

The new record, following on from 2015’s successful Chasing Yesterday, has seen Gallagher force himself to embrace the unknown and trust his songwriting abilities more, now that’s he flying blind through the making of the album in some ways. The plan is going well at this stage and even as he takes some time out his schedule to chat about his upcoming Australian tour, the excitement with which Noel speaks when referring to his recent sessions brings us back to this idea of, arguably, one of the most influential songwriters of the Britpop era still finding ways to challenge himself and learn more about hit writing style.

“The greatest strength this record has is also its greatest weakness.” he says of this particular creative approach he’s currently in the midst of. “We [he and his producer] made a promise to each other not to write any songs, just to come to the studio with nothing. We’d throw ideas out there and then we could bounce ideas and write – it’s something I’ve never done before. The part I don’t like about that is that you never really know what the fuck is going on from one day to the next. Usually, I’ll go to the studio with 30 songs, I’ll record them all and I know what it’s going to sound like. I pick the best and pick a flow to the album. I’m halfway through this record and I don’t have a fucking idea how it’s going to end up! Not the faintest idea. I don’t know what the next seven songs are going to be like because I haven’t written them yet.”

Source: AU