Welcome to 'Wandermoon'
Soft Hearted Scientists describe their music as "kitchen sink psychedelia." They might be onto something: This is the sound of flower children with a mortgage. "Syd Barrett could get away with singing songs about goblins and gnomes," says singer/guitarist Nathan Hall. "Our brand of psychedelia features council tax and second hand cars as well as the usual psychedelic feelings of transcendence."'Wandermoon,' track-by-track
Join Nathan Hall on this journey through the new album
Mountain Delight This is about several trips up to Bethesda in North Wales where my mum used to live, all joined together. Sugar cones refer to Gluvine which my brother learnt how to make when he lived in Germany and gets you pleasantly wasted. The night sky up there is astonishing and that is in there. The line about hyperventilation helps me see in the dark is the simple idea of running burning off stress and restoring perspective. Oh and outrunning my demons too.
The Trees Don't Seem To Know That Its September: This was one of the few tunes thats ever come to me fully formed out of nowhere and without an instrument - while I was driving back to Cardiff from West Wales lamenting the end of summer and the onset of autumn. Its a doomed plea for Summer not to leave. As King Canute could have told me - that ain't going to happen.
Tornadoes in Birmingham: This is a sort of ecological hallucinatory ballad which envisages a life that could be as nightmarish as a Kevin Costner movie such as "Waterworld" and maybe everyone having to live on mountaintops. But the scenario is not as bad as Constner's turbo turkey "The Postman". If you set someone up in a "Saw" style scenario and left them in a room with that that movie on, I reckon they'd have chewed their handcuffed hand off in under 8 minutes.
Mind you, if you want to go one worse, where you are chewing your own face off with embarrassment, I advise "Dusk til Dawn Part 3." The second sequel. Yes there is one. Dear lord this is upsetting me. I must stop.
Arrival Song: This is "quite liderally" about arriving in West Wales on holiday in the car, a rather frazzled Scientist on the run from Cardiff for a bit and taking stock of my life. Walking from St Davids to Whitesands Bay in incredible weather helped sort my head out. I also remember that when it was time to go home my tent took off in a gust and became a 10 foot diameter wheel that literally rolled the length of a field before vaulting over a dry stone wall and colliding with a couple on a cliff top path. They survived.
Road To Rhayader: Yet another escape song. This one is about a trip to the reservoirs up near Rhayader in February 2008 in totally uncharacteristically amazing weather. I was on a winter downer and it was like a bloody rebirth. And the thought of those drowned villages really spooked me. I can't remember quite why it was decided to have a duet between 2 owls threaded all the way through the song. It just felt right and they are fantastic guest vocalists.
Westward Leading: This is the 10 minute epic. This has a bit of everything in it. Yet more road trips, meteors, frogs, canaries, the sea, ghosts, lighthouses, memories, levitation, and transcendence culminating in the mantra of Wandermoon. It might be my favourite song we've ever done. Its got an album's worth of stuff going on in it. Oh and the spooky sound on the vocals at the end is called backwards reverb like in the Poltergeist movie when the girl is talking from beyond. Frank messed around with it until it was truly hallucinatory.