Songs Lyrics and YT- Youtube Music Videos: Present Tense

Wild Beasts Songs - Wanderlust Lyrics

Wild Beasts - Wanderlust

Wild Beasts - Wanderlust Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Present Tense
Released: 2014

Wanderlust Lyrics

Wanderlust

This sprawling tune lined with creeping synths was premiered on Zane Lowe's BBC Radio 1 show on January 7, 2014. Bassist Tom Fleming told NME: "We wanted people to think, 'S--- have I put the right record on?' It's a big sounding song about protecting what you've got and grabbing things by the balls."

The lyric, "In your mother tongue, what's the verb 'to suck'?" is a shot at British bands who are captivated with copying their American counterparts rather than pursuing their own ideas.

The band were horrified that the line was interpreted by some as an attack on Domino labelmates Arctic Monkeys. "I had to phone up the label to apologise and explain that I was not slagging off the flagship band," singer Hayden Thorpe told The Guardian. "Also, they're on the radio singing about settees in a Yorkshire accent; that's the home team!"

Vocalist Hayden Thorpe explained the song's meaning to DIY magazine: "It's a song about us as a band," he said. "It's a statement about our ideals, who we are as people and as a gang. It's almost a re-imagining of the initial things that threw us together when we were teenagers. We had these grievances, feelings of a power struggle, things we wanted to stomp all over."

The song is a mission statement for the band. "From the Stone Age to now, we judge our whole past by the culture people have left behind," Thorpe told NME. "'Wanderlust' is almost a kind of war cry, asking, is this the best we've got – kids singing in accents that aren't their own, singing about lives that aren't theirs, and reaping huge rewards from it?"

"So little is done with so much privilege – music is really a class thing, because if where I'm glad government that is making people pay £9000 a year for university, then it's only the rich kids who will get to arts and music school," continued Thorpe. "We're talking about such a small group of people who are gonna create work that is supposed to define all tell us what our lives are. It's a very scary prospect."

Fleming explained the meaning of the Present Tense album title to HMV.com . "This record is about playing with now, people's inability to live in the present and not either dwell on the past or obsess about the future," he said. "This record is about memory and trying not to long for things that either didn't happen or will never happen."

Wild Beasts Songs - Daughters Lyrics

Wild Beasts - Daughters

Wild Beasts - Daughters Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Present Tense
Released: 2014

Daughters Lyrics

Daughters

This fantasy of "pretty children sharpening their blades," finds Wild Beasts plotting a violent uprising against the selfish old guard. The band's Tom Fleming told NME: "It's a response to the world we're leaving to our children, with people in part consolidating positions. I have this fantasy about them destroying their parents."

The violent rebellion imagines Jesus Christ as a vengeful female: "I always thought that story made a lot more sense with a woman cast in that role, the bottom of the pile," Fleming told NME. "She's treated terribly, and then this woman takes revenge."

Vocalist Hayden Thorpe explained to DIY magazine that the song is, "about how callous we can be." He added: "And it then asks questions about our future. I see the song as apocalyptic in a sense. It's very much tapping into the anxiety of the now; that sense of unknowing and a sense of doom. We know enough today to be aware of where we're heading - it's the beginning of the end, if that sounds awful."

"Our current way of being is unstable," Thorpe continued. "The lyrics 'all the pretty children sharpening their blades' is incredibly sinister in that sense."

Wild Beasts Songs - New Life Lyrics

Wild Beasts - New Life

Wild Beasts - New Life Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Present Tense
Released: 2014

New Life Lyrics

New Life

Tom Fleming of Wild Beasts explained the song's meaning to NME: "It's about a lot of my friends having kids," he said. "You always think that you will be the first person in the world to do something, but actually there's a line stretching back to the beginning of time."

Wild Beasts Songs - Sweet Spot Lyrics

Wild Beasts - Sweet Spot

Wild Beasts - Sweet Spot Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Present Tense
Released: 2014

Sweet Spot Lyrics

Sweet Spot

This song finds Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming singing of a dream state, halfway between asleep and awake over picked guitars and sparse synth. Fleming told NME: "This has a very clean guitar and synth, which we were careful not to overuse. When we sat down to record this album, we realized, 'This wants to be a pop record now.'"

Hayden Thorpe told DIY magazine the tune went through a huge amount of versions. "We almost wrote it off," he said. "We just couldn't get it right. The barometer was flinging either from being this Ibiza thing straight back into this song you couldn't focus on. And we couldn't get it to level out. Like most moments on the record, when we had half an hour of demo time left we scrapped what we had and started again. Within half an hour the dual guitar line came about."

"The song itself has been around for a long time," Thorpe continued. It's about euthanasia, really. What I think a beautiful pop song should be able to do is take a very difficult subject and make it sound completely weightless; throw it up in the air like it's a feather. That's what I wanted 'Sweet Spot' to do. This might sound morbid, but the song also refers to how death and sex are from the same creature. It's the snake's head and the snake's tail."

Wild Beasts Songs - A Simple Beautiful Truth Lyrics

Wild Beasts - A Simple Beautiful Truth

Wild Beasts - A Simple Beautiful Truth Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Present Tense
Released: 2014

A Simple Beautiful Truth Lyrics

A Simple Beautiful Truth

This was inspired by an early 1990s dance-pop classic. "In a way I was wanting to write my own version of Haddaway's 'What Is Love,' which to me holds a lot of importance," vocalist Hayden Thorpe explained to DIY magazine. "On a nostalgic level that was the kind of soundscape that as a child I came into. You grow up hearing music in passing and all of a sudden it's incredibly moving. That's a song I've always held dear."

Bassist Tom Fleming commented to NME: "It feels like a proper pop song, and we wouldn't have been brave enough to do that before."

The surrealistic video was directed by the Danish photographer Klaus Thymann. It finds the Wild Beasts dancing around a number of locations whilst clad in some shiny suits. The band explained it was The Talking Heads who inspired them to embrace their inner Fred Astaire. "We were inspired enough by the absurdist approach taken by Talking Heads to don electric suits and dance in the ether on the top of a Beacons mountain," they said. "We wanted to capture the weightlessness of a song like 'A Simple Beautiful Truth', to attempt something so ridiculous as to be sublime."

"The experience was strangely liberating," the band added, "and we asked ourselves why we hadn't done this before."

Hayden Thorpe said he was trying to capture a rare moment of clarity with this song. He explained to NME: "[It's] that kind of lucid vision when ... everything seems simple and you see the kind of small beauty in everything. And you spend so much time taking for granted so much and kind of ignoring what is the beauty of the small things, and it's a song that tries to stretch out that very brief little window." This clear-eyed flash of epiphany usually only comes to him when he's "slightly hungover."

Thorpe learned an important lesson during the eight to nine months it took to complete this song: what seems easy, never is. He explained to NME: "Any brilliant pop song should be kinda weightless - it should kind of defy gravity, and it should seem effortless. And what became apparent was to achieve that kind of song, for it to feel effortless, actually required a huge amount of work."

Hayden Thorpe told NME the story behind the video. "I've never felt our past videos have captured who we are," he said. "They presented as arty and stern-faced, and every time we watched them we thought, 'Oh, lads, lighten up a bit!' We wanted an element of absurdity."

"We were making fantastic songs and we wanted our outfits to reflect that, but it became four guys looking like Power Rangers on a Welsh hillside instead," Thorpe continued. "Our dance moves are crude and our outfits looked like our mums made them. I did practise that dance in my bedroom and felt like a teenage boy again. It was great."

Wild Beasts Songs - Palace Lyrics

Wild Beasts - Palace

Wild Beasts - Palace Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Present Tense
Released: 2014

Palace Lyrics

Palace

Wild Beasts close their Present Tense album with this ballad that uses the metaphor of buildings for love as Hayden Thorpe sings of finding beauty in perfection. "'Palace' is about acceptance," he explained to DIY magazine. "The closing line is perfect in that it admits that striving for perfection is the wrong cause. If you go for this, you miss all the beauty of the awkward, the ugly and the accidental."

"There's an acceptance of the chaos; living with it and accepting it," Thorpe continued. "Early on, we always wanted 'Palace' to be the closing track." It has this air of cautious optimism. The line 'this is a palace and that was a squat' came from the realisation that I was one of many people that thinks achieving something automatically makes you a happier, better person. There's a mid twenties realisation that all of this is nonsense and counts for nothing. It's crushing. I had a realisation that I had everything I wanted, but I was living in a basement flat in Hackney; essentially a wreck. And I was paying a decent amount of rent for that. But there was an acceptance that I wouldn't change that for the world. I've lived in far prettier flats and they felt like squats. And this basement flat felt like a palace at that point."

Bassist Tom Fleming commented to NME: "It's a straightforward song and I like having a really big, bright song at the end."

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