The Chillcast with Anji Bee podcast posted a special one-hour interview feature with Lovespirals this week. Ryan and Anji sat down to discuss their brand new album, Future Past, and give her listeners an overview of the band’s decade-long history. The duo chat about their writing and recording process including musical influences, album concepts, and the various stories surrounding songs and albums as they listen to every track from Future Past plus a few songs from their past 3 albums. If you haven’t checked out Anji’s weekly music show before, now would be the perfect time!

Playlist:

1. “Shine” Future Past (2010)
2. “Home” Future Past (2010)
3. “This Truth” Long Way From Home (2002)
4. “Oh So Long” Windblown Kiss (2005)
5. “Hand in Hand” Free & Easy (2007)
6. “Love” Future Past (2010)
7. “Water Under the Bridge” Future Past (2010)
8. “Meanwhile, Irreplaceable Time Flees” Future Past (2010)
9. “Insignificant” Future Past (2010)
10. “Feel So Good” Future Past (2010)
11. “Rain” Future Past (2010)
12. “One of Those Days” Future Past (2010)
13. “Sinking” Future Past (2010)
14. “Believe” Future Past (2010)

Purchase Links:

• Buy autographed CDs from Lovespirals Webstore
• Buy Lovespirals music on iTunes
• Buy Lovespirals music on Amazon
• Buy Lovespirals music on CDBaby

Contact Links:

• Lovespirals on Facebook
• Lovespirals on Twitter
• Chillin’ with Lovespirals Podcast

Additional Links:

• Lovespirals CD Release Party & Concert hosted by Karmacoda
• Chillcast Video World Premier of “Home” by Lovespirals
• Unwind Lovespirals & Love Spirals Downwards Artist Spotlight
• Love Spirals Downwards

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TRANSCRIPT:

The Chillcast with Anji Bee: Lovespirals Feature January 30, 2010

Anji: Welcome to a Chillcast Special Feature on Lovespirals, the Southern California indie duo of musician/producer Ryan Lum and vocalist/lyricist Anji Bee. Lovespirals have released four albums, four eps, and numerous singles in their decade long career. Join Ryan and I as we share our music and stories from our brand new album, ‘Future Past.’ I welcome to The Chillcast studio tonight my special guest and partner in crime, Ryan Lum.

Ryan: Hi. Thanks for having me, Anji.

Anji: Of course Ryan’s no stranger to the studio as he and I do a more or less monthly band podcast called Chillin’ with Lovespirals. That show is quite a bit different from The Chillcast, as we pretty much just get together and shoot the breeze about whatever the band’s been up to lately. So I’ve said several times on The Chillcast that I was going to be putting together a special feature on Lovespirals, but somehow always manage to squirrel out of it. There’s just something a little awkward in talking about one’s own art, however I did do a special feature for my short-lived show, Unwind — I think it was three years ago. That one focused a little bit more on the transition from the previous band incarnation of Love Spirals Downwards into Lovespirals. So if you’d like to hear more about the early history of the band, you can check that out. I will have a link in the show notes over at anjibee.com. Tonight Ryan and I are going to be discussing Lovespirals fourth full-length album, ”Future Past’,’ just released officially January 1st, 2010. We’re going to be hearing bits of every song from this album. We’ll also share one song each from the previous three albums, to give you a little bit of a history of the band as, well. Of course, the first single from this album is the song “Shine”. So, I guess we’ll start this whole feature off just by talking about “Shine” a little bit.

Ryan: Yeah, it was actually the first song that we made for ‘Future Past.’ I don’t know if it was the first one we completed, but it’s the one I first started working on when I first started ‘Future Past’ about a year and a half or two ago. So, it kind of set the tone for the rest of the album. It’s kind of like a chill out, downtempo, groovy kind of vibe with a little kind of soulful blues thing and then we kind of expanded upon that for the rest of the songs.

Anji: The lyrical idea for “Shine” is even older than that. I originally wrote those lyrics flying home from our first ever live performances at the 2002 Projekt Fest, which actually was just before our first album ‘Windblown Kiss’ was even released, like about a month beforehand. So, basically the lyrics are kind of describing what I saw as the plane was taking off at dusk and flying over, you know, I could see all the city lights and I guess I just kind of started imagining what was going on below and that’s “Shine”.

(music: “Shine”)

Anji: I think the second song that we wrote and recorded for ‘Future Past’ was “Home”, although I had so much trouble finding the voice that I wanted to use in that song. It almost seemed like the song wasn’t going to get made at one point.

Ryan: Yeah, it ended up being one of the last songs we recorded of yours vocally.

Anji: Yeah, the music had been sitting there for probably a good year by the time I finally figured out how I wanted to sing this song. I don’t really know why this one was so hard, but I went through that a lot in this album actually. I think, probably because most of this material was actually written well in advance of doing the recordings. I had an opportunity to practice the songs much more than usual and I’d kind of gotten into the habit of sort of belting them and a lot of these songs really required more of a soft touch. But anyways, I also want to bring up the very exciting fact that we just released a music video for “Home”, which is Lovespirals’ first video ever. It was created using some footage shot on my handy dandy Mino HD –a little handheld camcorder. I’d been shooting a lot of footage with it, some of which we released as behind the scenes videos. I thought it looked pretty good, so I thought, “Why not? I’ll try to make a video.” So, Ryan and I went out to this really beautiful location in Newport Beach and he filmed me singing the chorus and I put it all together in Final Cut. Just kind of went crazy and we’re both pretty happy with the results. You can check that out on the very latest Chillcast video edition and of course it’s over at lovespirals.com and you’ll soon see it on all your favorite video sites. I really love that sound you have in the solo, by the way.

Ryan: Oh, that’s a Hammond organ. It’s one of the virtual instruments that comes with the recording software we use, Logic Studio. So, I go in and find an instrument I like and tweak it to my liking. That’s what you hear there. I was really pleased with it when I came up with it.

Anji: Yeah, it’s so cool. I really thought it sounded like a vibraphone. It has a very 60s kind of sound.

Ryan: Yeah, a lot of people think of Hammond organs as the big giant vibrato-y organs.

Anji: Oh, we’ve got some of that on the album too.

Ryan: Yeah, but by manipulating the drawbars, you can get a really mellow kind of jazzy organ sound too.

(music: “This Truth”)

Ryan: It’s kind of weird. After making an album –this goes back through pretty much all the albums I’ve ever made– there always seems to be a song or two on each album that’s the seed that’s planted for the next album. And from our previous album, ‘Long Way From Home,’ that seed song for ‘Future Past’ is “This Truth.”

Anji: Ah, yeah. I can definitely see that.

Ryan: It has the most sound-wise, vibe-wise in common with ‘Future Past’ songs. I mean, I guess it could live right on ‘Future Past’ seamlessly. It wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

Anji: It sounds pretty good right now.

Ryan: Yeah, I haven’t heard it for a while and it’s surprisingly good.

Anji: I feel like I’ve been hearing the remixes way more than the original. This song really stood out on the mix of songs from ‘Long Way From Home.’ I could never quite put my finger on what it was about this song that sounded so different. You’ve got a really different guitar sound, first of all. There’s something kind of Motown about the rhythm and the beat.

Ryan: Mhm, I agree.

Anji: I don’t know what you’d say “This Truth” sounds like, but it’s got a nice bluesy sound, a little bit of an R&B thing going on.

Ryan: Sounds like you’re describing ‘Future Past’.

Anji: It does, doesn’t it? Yep, I guess it was the seed song, you’re right.

Ryan: It worked.

Anji: I don’t think that we realized when we wrote the song that it was the single, but it totally ended up being the single of the album because we ended up getting so many darn remixes of it. I think it’s probably the song that most people are familiar with from the last album. First, of course, we had the set of remixes from the Peace Productions remix contest. Then one of those remixes inspired a UK dance label to release their own set of remixes in a super trance style that came out last year on Love Rush Digital. So, I guess it was the hit.

Ryan: Yeah, surprisingly. I didn’t write it as a single. I never try to make a song like, “Ah, this is the single.” I try to make them all equally as good as each other.

Anji: Yeah, I guess that’s one of the big differences between us and big label bands because major labels are always looking for a single, and they put all the time and effort in the single, and for us the single just kind of incidentally happens at some point after the album is totally done and released into the world.

(music: “This Truth”)

Anji: I’m going way back in Lovespirals history, the first real song we ever actually wrote and recorded together is this one, the opening track to our first album ”Windblown Kiss’.’ The song’s called “Oh So Long.”

Ryan: To make our history even a bit more complete, we should add that prior to this, we did make a few atmospheric drum and bass songs, but we never really sat down and wrote them, nor were we trying to make an album, but we later, more recently, compiled them into what we call the ‘Ecstatic EP,’ named after one of the songs. But this is it. This is our first real song. This is what really got Lovespirals going was “Oh So Long.” It’s kinda cool; it still sounds a lot like us. I think it’s kind of the first time we got to hear the magic of what Lovespirals is really capable of. Like our unique vibe, the unique sound that we have. You hear it all here, like the sultry, soulful, bluesy thing that we do. That we still do.

Anji: We actually recorded the song right here in this room. Memories are flowing back to me of how it used to be set up differently.

Ryan: You’re right. This, your podcasting studio used to be the band studio room.

Anji: I don’t know how we ever did it in this room because this room is tiny.

Ryan: We had to be extremely creative.

Anji: And compact!

Ryan: Every inch was spoken for. It had to be well thought out.

Anji: Where you’re sitting right now is where the gigantic mixing board used to be.

Ryan: Yeah.

Anji: I still remember how excited you were when we finished this song. You were just so ecstatic. You really wanted to dive in and finally make an album.

Ryan: Yeah, you could just hear the magic on this song, like, “Wow, this is what we can do.”

Anji: I remember you said that was the quickest album you ever wrote, actually, ‘Windblown Kiss.’

Ryan: Yeah, I kinda remember we had this nice summer and we just blasted trhough. I mean, we didn’t do it all in that three months or so, but we got a lot done. We had some songs done prior to it, but we completed the rest of the songs in about three months or so, which is super quick for us.

Anji: I think each album has taken progressively longer to create as we become more and more perfectionist and have more and more outside interests.

Ryan: Yeah. There’s something to be said about letting it flow and getting it down quickly. ‘Future Past,’ jumping forward eight years or so, is a much more meticulously crafted record. There’s a price to pay for having something I can sit back now and say I think this is a really good, nice recording,’Future Past,’ but you kinda lose that spontaneity of letting the songs come out quickly and letting them just speak through you.

Anji: You know, personally, I was in a rush. I was like, “Let’s go!” because I’d been waiting so long for you to work with me on music. The other songs were so few and far between and I had so little input on them that I was just really excited that you finally wanted to buckle down and make music. I was like, “Let’s go. Let’s make another one. Let’s do it.”

Ryan: For me, it’s having what I call the sound concept for the record. Once we got this song going, it’s like, “Aha, I see where we’re going!” Kind of like what “Shine” was for ‘Future Past’. You need that –I need that– to get going. Once I get that, there’s pretty much nothing holding me back. Nothing. I’ll just keep recording and making songs until we have an album.

(music: “Oh So Long”)

Ryan: That’s our friend Doron Orenstein playing the saxophone. He was on a few tracks on ‘Windblown Kiss’ and one or two on our second album, ‘Free and Easy.’

Anji: Yeah, he was. He helped support us on a couple of live dates, as well, including that Projekt Fest show I mentioned earlier.

Ryan: Yeah.

Anji: That was definitely an interesting experience for him. (Chuckles) So, this song we’re playing now, “Hand in Hand”, probably confuses a lot of people, actually, because we have two songs called “Hand in Hand” that are very different. They kind of share a seed idea, as you mentioned earlier. This version is the official album version from ‘Free and Easy’ and it has a few samples of Doron’s original saxophone part from 1999 or 2000 recordings you did of a drum and bass song also called “Hand in Hand.”

Ryan: All this is on our ‘Ecstatic EP.’

Anji: Yeah. I remember when you recorded my vocal part, you ended up sampling out a few pieces you wanted, you know, like other drum and bass bands did. I was kind of like, “Oh, but I really liked the lyrics I wrote on that.” You know, it’s been so many years now, I can’t remember exactly how we ended up doing this version, but –in any case– it uses all of the lyrics from my original “Hand in Hand” vocals and just kind of references the vocals from that take, but they’re really different here; softer and more whispery.

Ryan: More Lovespirals.

Anji: It’s such an optimistic song. The lyrics, I wrote them for the very second song I’d ever I collaborated on with you. I was so filled with excitement to finally be working with you on something, “If we put our minds together, we’ll create something that will last forever.”

Ryan: So you wrote this when we were making our first album, even though this is on our second album now.

Anji: I actually wrote it before.

Ryan: Oh yeah, you wrote it during the EP.

Anji: Yeah, the ‘Ecstatic EP,’ which unfortunately never got released at the time because of a major computer meltdown and we lost all the files. All we had were demo mixes. We ended up scrapping it and doing something completely different when we finally got around to doing ‘Windblown Kiss’. But those lyrics has always stuck with me and I wanted to express them on one of our albums. So, here we are on the second album, ‘Free and Easy,’ which was the first album we did on our own label.

Ryan: Yeah, our Chillcuts label. Prior to that, all my albums have been on Projekt Records, and it was time to move on and do things on our own, especially in this Internet age where you can promote and publicize -and distribute– without a label. Most importantly.

Anji: Yeah, 2005 is when this album came out?

Ryan: Yeah.

Anji: And yeah, finally the digital revolution, I guess you’d call it, had really taken hold. I mean that was why we started the band podcast, to promote this album, in essence.

Ryan: Yeah.

Anji: I thought it would be a great way to get the word out and explain more about our music. I think it’s worked pretty well for us.

Ryan: Yeah, I’m glad.

Anji: And yeah, just everything like iTunes was getting in full swing and iPods were taking over stereos. It was an interesting time to be a band.

Ryan: All the things we take for granted now were kind of becoming set around 2004, 2005.

Anji: I know.

(music: “Hand in Hand”)

Anji: I really think that was inspired by Duran Duran’s ‘Rio.’ (The “da da da” vocal in “Hand in Hand”)

(music: “Love”)

Anji: So fast forward five years to ‘Future Past’ and once again, you’re making a drum and bass song.

Ryan: And why not?

Anji: It really surprised me when you first played me the music that was to become “Love.” What inspired you to do that?

Ryan: Well, I think it happened with you and I together. We were listening to the iPod and some drum and bass from Good Looking Records in the 90s, LTJ Bukem’s label and his artists. I hadn’t listened to that stuff for many, many years and it struck me like, “Wow, that stuff still sounds awesome!” It doesn’t sound dated, and I had kind of forgotten over time how pretty that music is, how powerful that atmospheric drum and bass stuff is. That’s why I liked it so much. I forgot about it over time.

Anji: Dude, you were a huge proponent when I first met you.

Ryan: Oh yeah, big time.

Anji: Like when you released your album ‘Flux’ in ’98, you were all about it.

Ryan: Yeah, that’s what influenced me to make my ’98 record ‘Flux.’ It’s all about that kind of sound. I just kind of integrated it into dream pop, I guess, bringing those two sounds together. But yeah, I was all about that and over time you forget about some things you liked and fortunately we rediscovered it. We were finding that bands from that era like Blue Mar Ten, they announced they were coming back with an album that came out right when ‘Future Past’ came out. They said their album’s going to be a full drum and bass release. They realized other people see the value in that music. So I wanted to make some more drum and bass too. The challenge was to make it in a way that fit, more or less seamlessly, with the vibe of ‘Future Past’.

Anji: I guess now would be a great time to mention that “Love” is probably going to be the next single that we release. We’re having this one and “Feel So Good” remixed now by some different producers. We’re getting a lot of remixes back of “Love” and they’re sounding really good. We’re especially excited about one by Michael Plaster of Soul Whirling Somewhere. He had done a great one of “This Truth,” and is really knocking our socks off again. Also got one from Divasonic from San Francisco. And there’s one I actually played on the show last year by 7 Day Visa, and I’ve got one by Chill Factor 5. You can look forward to that. It’ll be a digital only release. Speaking of which, there was some talk that ‘Future Past’ was going to be a digital only release…

Ryan: There was some talk, huh?

Anji: I bet it was our fan Jason Painter who was first to say no.

Ryan: Yeah, some feedback from fans said they’d really like a CD that they can physically purchase because we sign them, we autograph CDs on our website that we sell to fans.

Anji: Yeah, we autograph them on the website? (Laughs)

Ryan: Yeah, it’d be harder maybe to do that with digital only, so maybe I’ll find a new tool.

Anji: That would be rad. We’ve been selling CDs directly from our site –God– forever, since way back in the Love Spirals Downwards days.

Ryan: Yeah.

Anji: I guess probably starting with your 2000 release, ‘Temporal,’ we opened a web store.

Ryan: Yeah, you’re right.

Anji: I think we were probably one of the first bands to have a web store.

Ryan: And finally in 2005 we integrated it all into our website and it’s been that way ever since.

Anji: Yeah, you found a real nice way to seamlessly integrate it with WordPress.

Ryan: This last release was fully integrated into our WordPress site.

Anji: Actually, I guess we could talk about the day we released the album. That was kind of crazy.

Ryan: Yeah, a lot of people were trying to find it ahead of time, trying to sneak onto hidden parts of our site, and kind hacking the URL.

Anji: One person in particular…

Ryan: Yeah, someone bought it a week or two before. Andrew from England, who has the unique distinction of being the person to have bought all three of our albums that we released ourselves first. Each one of them –he always finds a way to get them before anyone other person does. This time he hacked his way into our site and bought it, like a week or two before it came out.

Anji: Andrew Banville’s great. He actually said on Facebook that he was really nervous. He was checking the site every day. He was so nervous that he wouldn’t be the first one to buy it this time.

Ryan: Then another couple fans found it, too. We were going to release it Tuesday –Monday at midnight, the stroke of midnight– for the start of Tuesday. A few fans found it ’cause I was getting the site ready –I was getting the album up on the site– and a few fans found it and purchased it ahead of time, too.

Anji: That’s right. That was fun times.

Ryan: And once it went live, then it was a crazy day of just order after order. I go, “Oh my god, I don’t think I bought enough padded mailers.”

Anji: We didn’t. We had to order more padded mailers. We were finicky, wanting to make sure we did everything as eco-friendly as possible. If you listen to our band podcast, we’ve talked quite a bit about the efforts we’ve gone to be more eco-friendly around our studio and our home. So we thought, if we’re gonna release a CD, we had to do it right. We did research and found a local company that seems to have the most eco-friendly packaging for CDs: 100% recycled cardboard, recycled plastic bottles make up the tray.

Ryan: Vegetable-based inks.

Anji: And vegetable-based coatings over the CD itself. The more you learn, the more shocking it is how many weird processes go into making these things.

Ryan: We decided to get half of our CDs not shrink-wrapped in plastic, because we found that we kept opening them and throwing it away when we autograph the CDs for our fans.

Anji: Which is so painful.

Ryan: As Anji mentioned, our padded mailers are made from recycled post-consumer paper products. We also have a nice steak of recycled printer paper, too.

Anji: Trying to keep it green.

Ryan: For the past couple years –essentially during the making of ‘Future Past’– I really got back into my love of playing guitar, which is my main instrument. My parents bought me a guitar at a department store when I was a young child and I’ve been playing ever since, more or less. I’ve really taken the time to get my sound down, and better than ever. I’ve gotten a lot of cool new pedals –some of them kinda esoteric boutique pedals, handmade. Others more mass produced, easier to find pedals. And I’ve got quite a few guitars now, Stratocasters, Telecasters, a Les Paul that I’ve had since early High School days, a couple acoustic guitars, a bass, and a couple other odd ones here and there. I’ve got several tube amps. My favorite one is a Fender Bassman from 1968, a head, and I have a few cabinets for it. I’ve been playing, practicing guitar, almost on a daily basis throughout that time period. So I really wanted to have a song where I could kind of let loose a little bit, and kind of do my guitar thing that I’ve been stepping up on for the past few years. That’s what this song ended up being, “Meanwhile, Irreplaceable Time Flees.”

Anji: We should mention that this is the first instrumental that Ryan has done under the name Lovespirals. He’s done quite a few under the name Love Spirals Downwards, but this is the first one since I joined the band. There’s one called “Beatitude” that was actually recorded before I joined the band. And, actually we’ve had a fantastic response to this song. It seems to be the one that gets brought up –almost the most– in comments on the album.

Ryan: Some of you may have figured out from hearing that last track (“Insignificant”) that Pink Floyd has been an influence on me. Not only in David Gilmour’s guitar playing style, which I think I have a little bit of –I’m kind of like, a more melodic phraser like he is– but also in the production, the recording of their albums, notably ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and ‘Wish You Were Here.’ ‘Wish You Were Here’ I’ve really tried to fully analyze its sound to figure out what is the magic that makes it so wonderful. I think it’s one of the most beautifully recorded albums ever made.

Anji: For sure.

Ryan: Some of the things I’ve learned I tried to get onto ‘Future Past,’ actually. Again, it’s not just guitars, but the way voices are produced, the way basses sound, and just the instrumentation like the synthesizers that Richard Wright uses. You can hear some of that on this track here, “Insignificant.” There’s like, a small plethora of vintage keyboard sounds all over ‘Future Past.’ There’s like, this Rhodes keyboard, an analogue synth going on, there’s Melotron, string machine, Hammond organ –just an orgy of retro synthesizers– but then again, it’s ‘Future Past,” you know? I thought I could get those sounds and bring them forward into the present time and get a more contemporary sounding record out of them.

Anji: Oh! Something that bears mentioning, this song almost didn’t exist. Originally, he had the “Irreplaceable Time Flees” instrumental, and he was really set that he wanted to start the album with it. When I was coming up with what I thought would be the order of tracks, I just could not find another song that I thought flowed nicely after that, so I pushed him, saying, “I really think you need to write a song that goes with that intro.” After some pretty stiff resistance…

Ryan: What?!

Anji: He ended up coming up with this. It ended up being one of the most powerful songs on the album, I think.

(music: “Feel So Good”)

Anji: So this one, “Feel So Good,” continues that retro flavor, but I think it comes across as more funk and Motownt than the past couple we listened to [“Meanwhile, Irreplaceable Time Flees” and “Insignificant”]

Ryan: Yeah, funk and Motown, very retro.

Anji: However it is still very Pink Floyd influenced. In fact, when we were working on the chorus, I was like, “You know what I really want? I really wanna sound like the background vocals on ‘Dark Side of the Moon.'” And so Ryan started working up this awesome Leslie kind of effect for that.

Ryan: Yeah, just like the ladies on Pink Floyd’s “Time.”

Anji: Exactly. I remember we were watching a behind the scenes of ‘Dark Side,’ and they were showing them playing the master tracks on a mixing board, fading stuff up and down, and I think that kinda gave me a lot of insight into how they handled vocals, and made me think a little bit more about how we might approach some of my vocals.

Ryan: Yeah, a little production tip to young budding producers out there; look to the past.

Anji: (Laughs) I just thought of something funny; when we were mastering with Robert Rich, up in his studio, when he first flipped this track on it was coming out of those big speakers — what are those speakers he uses?

Ryan: They’re called Duntech and I think they retail new for around ten thousand dollars, but I don’t think he paid that much money for ’em.

Anji: Wow! Fancy! It’s always an amazing experience to hear your material on those speakers, I have to say. And the whole experience of mastering with Robert Rich is always incredible. But, anyway, he flips this song on and I actually started blushing. I was like, “Oh my god!” I hadn’t really considered how other people would feel when they heard that song, you know? It’s a very intimate personal song.

Ryan: You raise a good point, ’cause when we’re recording our album, we’re not playing live and we’re not really showing our songs to people as we’re making them.

Anji: No, it’s completely kept under wraps here in the studio.

Ryan: Completely! Like we’re doing a top secret project or something.

Anji: (laughing) Absolutely.

Ryan: So when we go into mastering, Robert is pretty much the first guy to hear them. Right then you start wondering –you get into the mind of another person– and you think, “Gee. Wow! Somebody else is hearing this stuff.”

Anji: I know!

Ryan: That must be weird for songs… Some songs are more personal lyrically than others, like this one, I imagine.

Anji: I still remember the very night that I wrote these lyrics (for “Rain”). I don’t always remember when and where I was when I wrote things, but –God, this was years ago I wrote these lyrics. It was probably after ‘Windblown Kiss’ but before ‘Free and Easy,’ ’cause I think you were playing that guitar that you bought to go on tour.

Ryan: The semi-hallow body.

Anji: Yeah, you were playing a lot of jazz. I think you were just doing a really simple run.

Ryan: I wasn’t playing “Rain” yet.

Anji: No, you weren’t playing “Rain,” you were just doing a real simple blues run and these lyrics just popped into my head. I was totally in love with them, and was like, “We have to record this song!” But you were like, “No, I’m not gonna make this a song, I’m just doing a blues run.” And I was like, “But I wrote the best lyrics of my career,” you know? So anyways, I wrote them down and just kind of always had them in the back of my mind, like, “I’m going to save these lyrics for something great!” God, do you remember writing this music anymore?

Ryan: No, I actually don’t remember the exact moment, but I kinda roughly remember coming up with keyboard part. That’s how I wrote it. Obviously this song is a full-on keyboard song.

Anji: This is one of the earlier songs of this album. I guess, if only we had recorded every moment… But I guess I was like, “Hey, I can finally break out those lyrics that I have been saving.” And I really love how this turned out.

Ryan: Yeah, I think that’s how it happened. You heard me noodling around with it when I was in the studio by myself at night. I vaguely remember this now, coming up with the descending chord progression with the melody on top, and then you started humming something, and you said you had lyrics that could work.

Anji: I really like these lyrics a lot. They’re some of the more poetic lyrics that I’ve come up with.

Ryan: I should mention a little secret for our hardcore Lovespirals fans, ones that have all of our albums. Each album has one of these minor key, slow blues songs. Every one of our four album has one.

Anji: They do! And they’re always my favorite track, I swear.

Ryan: Maybe I’m biased because this is the most recent album, but “Rain,” I think, is the best one by far of all of them. You already heard, we played earlier “Oh So Long,” from ‘Windblown Kiss.”

Anji: That was the first!

Ryan: And this is the most recent one.

Anji: We didn’t play “Walk Away.”

Ryan: From ‘Free and Easy.’ And what did we call the one from the last album? “Once In A Blue Moon”?

Anji: “Once In A Blue Moon.” I love the jazzy blues song.

Ryan: It’s a Lovespirals tradition. Let’s see if we keep it up on our next album.

Anji: While we’re on the topic of lyrics, I guess I should talk about my process a little bit. Often albums’ lyrics are written in one period, like you can hear the trajectory of a relationship from start to finish, or someone processing a father’s death or something. But I’m the completely the opposite of that. I’m continually writing lyrics. Things come to me at the oddest moments. I write them down or sing them. I used to sing into a tape recorder and now, of course, I can sing them into the computer, because I’ve got this great setup here.

Ryan: Or your iPhone.

Anji: We’ve been using the iPhone. I’ll definitely play an iPhone demo a little later on the show. I have a lot of lyrics from different points in my life and about all different topics. I might write a song today that’s referencing something that happened to me 15 years ago. So, when you’re listening to a Lovespirals album, there’s not a continuous storyline about something going on right now. I might be singing about seven different people. Songs may have been written over a 15 year period. Like I mentioned, “Rain” was written probably around 2003 or 2004, and “One of Those Days” is also an older lyric. But then again, some lyrics on this album were written specifically for Ryan’s music. You never know with Love Spirals who or what I’m writing about or when.

Ryan: I think that’s cool, too, it helps the songs from not sounding too samey. I try to make songs that don’t sound the same musically, and she adds lyrics from different years, sometimes different decades.

Anji: Absolutely.

Ryan: I like that.

Anji: I think it’s a little known fact that usually my favorite parts of our songs are actually the guitar solos.

Ryan: Gee, thank you.

Anji: I grew up in the golden era of rock music and definitely bowed down to the guitar gods. Even though I play a lot of electronica on the show, my heart is definitely with the guitar. I used to want to learn guitar myself. I do play songs from time to time with a nice guitar riff in it, but I really can’t think of another band that uses guitar so heavily –like Fender Strats– all through downtempo albums.

Ryan: With guys doing Hendrix and Gilmour-inspired solos on most songs.

Anji: Absolutely. Usually to get my guitar fix, I have to turn to someone who’s known as a guitarist, like Doyle Bramhall II.

Ryan: His album ‘Welcome’ from a few years ago –maybe 5 or 6 years ago– might be my favorite album of the decade.

Anji: Yeah, definitely. He’s totally blowing me away.

Ryan: For anyone that doesn’t know, he’s an Austin-based guitarist, toured with Roger Waters and Eric Clapton, and has his band Arc Angels. We saw them twice this year, stood front row in awe for an hour and a half.

Anji: OMG yeah. We only bought tickets for one night but after, we said we have to see that again.

Ryan: Let’s drive to Hollywood tomorrow.

Anji: I almost lost my hearing because of that man.

Ryan: They do play loud, but it’s to be expected.

Anji: So, we talked about this fairly extensively on Channel of Lovespirals, but for your benefit, the way we write songs is basically will either be playing guitar or keyboards and then I’ll come in and start singing with him. This album was fairly unusual in that he played his guitar as a starting point much less.

Ryan: On past albums, I pretty much wrote almost all songs on guitar and the keyboard parts were added later. I noticed when I compose on keyboard, the songwriting comes out a little differently. I say I have two brains, the guitar guy and the keyboard guy, and the keyboard guy kind of won out on this album.

Anji: I mentioned earlier that I had an iPhone demo of a song I was going to play for you.

Ryan: Yeah, you hear the clicks. That’s me banging keyboard and the iPhone speaker picking that up.

Anji: What you’re listening to is basically the whole origin of the song. We probably had maybe jammed it once before grabbing the phone to record it.

Ryan: Yeah, we just said, “Hey, we need a quick way to record so we remember the next day.”

Anji: I’m surprised how well it sounds.

Ryan: Yeah, it’s decent enough. I think you just kinda held it up near the speaker and your mouth, so it captured both.

Anji: Kinda like split the difference.

Ryan: Yeah.

Anji: We have lots of demos like this but this one has a certain magic. I think it’s kind of nice.

Ryan: It’s kinda neat hearing the song recorded as it’s coming out of us for the first time.

Anji: Right after this, I’ll play the full song. One more thing: originally this song was called “Future Past”, which is obviously the origins of the album name, but after it was completed we decided the best title would be “Believe” and left ‘Future Past’ just for the album name.

Ryan: I think it worked out.

Anji: Now you can compare the demo with the final version. I’ll close out the show with our song “Believe” in its entirety. So this is the conclusion of this special feature on Lovespirals for The Chillcast with Anji Bee. I want to give an extra special thanks to Ryan Lum for being in the studio with me today.

Ryan: Oh ho, you’re very welcome.

Anji: (giggles) And I also wanted to thank him for taking it upon himself to totally re-record the theme of The Chillcast this year.

Ryan: Hopefully it’s a little new and more improved sounding.

Anji: I think it’s very smooth.

Ryan: Yeah, compared to the older version, it’s like miles better.

Anji: (laughs) I don’t know how many of my listeners even realized that you were the one who created the theme song in the first place, but… As always, be sure to stop by my site anjibee.com for links to all the songs featured and where you can buy them online. Of course, there’s really only one place you need to go to find out more about the band, and that’s lovespirals.com. We recently totally redid the site; Ryan build a really great band webstore where you can purchase ‘Future Past’ –both in eco-friendly digital format and in digital download. In fact, we’re giving away a digital download with every purchase of the CD, so you get that instant gratification.

Ryan: Anji didn’t mention that we will autograph all CDs purchased on our site.

Anji: Oh, that’s right! That’s the funnest part about buying it from lovespirals.com! Or course, the album is also available on iTunes, Amazon, and CDbaby. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Come join the conversation! I almost forgot to mention the Lovespirals are having an album release party with our friends, Karmacoda, in San Francisco on February 26th at Harlot. I will have all the details up on lovespirals.com very soon.