Track-by-Track: Band of Horses' Infinite Arms

Factory
I was listening to a lot of Nick Drake and was really enamoured by the string arrangements in his songs. Also, I was trying to make it a bit dramatic sounding in a Bittersweet Symphony kinda way.

Compliment
This was a song we recorded three times before we actually got the style that we wanted. It was all live in the studio except for the vocals. I’ve seen people leaving comments that the song sounds really produced when we just did it three times and chose a live version of it. I don’t know how you can over-produce that.

Laredo
I went to this cabin in Minnesota at the Canadian border and three or four of the songs on this record all came from the same four-day trip up there. I was just staring out at the lake for a couple of days and this one just kind of came out of nowhere.

Blue Beard
Bill Reynolds (bassist) played me a demo of Blue Beard that he recorded at home and I threw some vocals on it and played with the structure. I ended up playing drums on that one which is really strange because I’m a terrible drummer.

Way Back Home
A lot of people reference the Beach Boys with this song without us even telling them that when we went to mix it we actually went to the studio where the Beach Boys recorded Pet Sounds.

Infinite Arms
This song deals a lot with the major theme of the record, and being the title track that’s maybe a little obvious, but this is one I’m not quite ready to unveil the mask on. But I can tell you that it almost didn’t make the record.

Dilly
I’m always wrong about what’s going to be the first single and I thought that this would be a good one to at least leak to blogs and shit like that because it’s just so upbeat and a bit different for us. It has a doo-wop feel which is a new horizon for Band of Horses.

Evening Kitchen
This is completely written by Tyler Ramsay (guitarist). He sent me a demo of the music, I recorded vocals on top of it and it was embarrassingly bad but luckily he had the foresight to record his own vocals and lyrics.

Older
This is a song of Ryan Munroe’s (keyboardist) which he wrote quite a way back and we’ve been playing it live for a long time. Like Evening Kitchen it showcases the other members, which has been my main goal with this record.

For Annabelle
This is a homage to my daughter, as at the time of writing my wife was pregnant with our first child and I guess impending fatherhood was probably the main influence or inspiration for the song. Also, Tyler wrote the intro in five seconds.

N.W. Apt.
I had the music down for this as a demo but I couldn’t figure out what to sing on it basically and I think I just went to mine the territory of living in Seattle and some of the situations that revolved around that time. To me it’s comedic but I don’t know if anyone will ever get what the fuck I’m talking about ‘cos it’s done in my usual way of masking the actual content of what’s really going on.

Neighbor
I was messing with this synth guitar thing and I can’t play piano at all but with the synth guitar I could make guitar shapes and piano sounds would come out, so I just wrote in a little journal while staring out at that lake again.