Let Me Down Gently

Album: Trouble in Paradise (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • Singer Elly Jackson and producer Ben Langmaid decamped to a cottage in the Welsh countryside in 2011 to record their second album, Trouble in Paradise. "I'm not going to stop writing until we've got songs that can compete on the same level as 'In For The Kill' and 'Bulletproof,'" Jackson promised NME at the beginning of the writing process.

    However Jackson found herself unable to sing falsetto. "All that would come out is the sound of air," she recalled glumly to Billboard magazine. "Nothing else."

    Jackson was eventually diagnosed with residual muscle tension brought on by a form of performance anxiety and the problem was eventually solved with the aid of a confidence therapist. However progress remained slow and after a disagreement on the direction the record should take, Jackson and Langmaid parted ways in February 2012. Jackson carried on working on the set with producer Ian Sherwin, who'd engineered a portion of her debut.

    A 2013 release was touted then failed to materialise. "You have to make the record that you want to make, when you want to make it," Jackson told Billboard. "However frustrating it might be for management, the label or even my own career, I'm not going to do something unless I feel that it's the best thing that I can possibly do."

    Eventually a release date of July 7, 2014 was given and this breakup anthem was uploaded to La Roux's official SoundCloud on May 12, 2014 as the album's teaser track.
  • This was one of the songs that Jackson and Langmaid fell out over. "That was one of the ones Ben wasn't into," Jackson told The Observer, revealing that it almost never saw the light of day.

    Jackson added that Langmaid refused to consider several songs she'd written, but the pair also drifted apart personally. "On the first record we would talk a lot and it became very emotional," she explained. "One of [Langmaid's] biggest roles was [being that person] I could go and talk to about lots of very personal stuff at length and then write about. But for want of a better way of saying it, I didn't need that any more. I felt I could do that with a number of people."

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