Hi there! Here comes the second single and video from Further Afield! It’s called Gondolier. It’s a doozy - hope you like it!

About the song: We’ve been threatening to make a dance record for years. In fact, we’ve probably begun every record thinking it’d be cool to make a dance record. But our innate sensibilities take over and … it just comes out as +/- {Plus/Minus}. Nothing wrong with that - but what if we actually stuck to it? So this was one of those attempts. As it happened, James bought this little keyboard, the Teenage Engineering OP-Z and let his son have a go one morning. The initial loop was the first thing his son came up with. James took this and used it as the basis of the song.

Initially, the skeleton of the song was just a couple of verses and then a long instrumental solo created on the OP-Z. James reworked the verses a bit, came up with the melody, and adjusted the instrumental to build more and it seemed like that would be it… but we still felt the song had somewhere else to go… where we went was an electronic world of synthesizers and drum machines while still keeping our 4-on-the-floor beat. Lots of vocals! Oohs and Aahs! We thought we were done (it was probably a reasonable 5 minute song at this point), but James had one more section to dance to. Things quieted down… we tried to throw in as many acoustic instruments as we had into the mix. At nearly 7 minutes, this is the longest song we’ve ever written. We count it among our best. Hope you like it!

About the video: Given the (ahem) epic nature of the song, we thought the video deserved a similar treatment. We shot in the same location on 3 different days in 3 different seasons - trying our best to maintain the same basic shot in each. We also planned out where everyone would need to stand if the “extra players” arrived on screen. Lots of fun was had… lots of food was eaten. Hands got cold, the doppelgangers became unruly, but we think we pulled it off. Big thanks to Doug Choi for shooting and generally helping us conceptualize this video.

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That’s all for now - +/-