Masterpiece

Album: Caracal (2015)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song features Brisbane-reared singer-songwriter Jordan Rakei, who was discovered through a an old school friend of Guy Lawrence named James who is also into music and DJs. Lawrence recalled to Spin: "He lived in Australia for a year and did some traveling and found loads of wicked music. He found this one guy singing in a bar, bought his EP right there and then, and he told me to get it. It was on Bandcamp. Went and got it and I just loved it. He's like a white D'Angelo basically."

    "We were like, 'Whoa, that's pretty cool.' Then I knew he was from Australia so I was I like, 'If we're ever there, maybe we should hook up.' Then I checked him out on Twitter and his last tweet was that he'd just moved to London. We were like, 'Yes, so ideal!' It turns out he's half-English, so he's got a UK passport, moved to London, and got in the studio with us two weeks later and wrote 'Masterpiece.'"

    Howard Lawrence added: "We sat and spoke music with him for like an hour and a half before we started writing anything, just talking about a lot of jazz. We didn't know if he was going to be a good writer or anything because there is nothing online about him, no way of finding out if he had written all these songs himself or if he produced them or what. So we just got in the studio almost on a whim, hoping he'd be good. He was."

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