Scissor

Album: Sisterworld (2010)
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Songfacts®:

  • Liars is a three-piece American band consisting of keyboardist and guitarist Aaron Hemphill, drummer Julian Gross and Philippine-born frontman Angus Andrew. This is the opening track from their fifth studio album, Sisterworld.
  • Angus Andrew said: "The song is built from some strange vocal interactions I was having with myself. It's a description of someone realising their own inadequacies."
  • Sisterworld was written and recorded in Los Angeles by Liars and Tom Biller (Kanye West, Beck). It is the first Liars album to be recorded entirely in the USA since 2004's They Were Wrong, So We Drowned and sees the band taking inspiration from fringe characters lured to LA and the resulting subcultures and alternate spaces that they generate. Andrew explained to CMU: "We thought about what it's like to not fit in. How people deal with that by creating their own spaces. We wanted to try to acknowledge, explain and confront unhappiness and alienation in an environment where these subjects are mostly encouraged to be glossed over - both physically and musically."
  • Andrew explained to CMU the band's songwriting process: "We compose songs individually, sometimes taking pieces from each others work, so that in the end we bring finished demos to each other for further revisions and suggestions."
  • Angus Andrew told NME December 4, 2010 why he chose this song as the track to introduce Sisterworld with. "On the running order of the album it was always going to be the first track, and I feel weird about making the first single any other song than the first song on the album. Also, I just thought it was a nice introduction to how dark the album can be. One of the aims of Sisterworld was to take different perspectives on Los Angeles, because there's this strong perspective around the world of LA as being Beverly Hills and cosmetic surgery, but the LA that we know is vastly different."
  • Andrew explained the lyric "I found her with my scissor" to NME: "I carry scissors with me everywhere I go. I use scissors every day in cutting up stuff and, if you know me, you'd know that… I felt like it was the most immediate object you'd have to hand if you were thinking of offing yourself."
  • Andrew explained the lyric "I'm a coward in a soft-boiled army.": "Like, the weakest army you could ever think of. This is a song about feeling your inadequacies."
  • Andrew told to NME about the video: "You get sent a lot of ideas f or the way directors want to envisage your song, and when I read the one that Andy (Bruntel, director) wrote, I knew it was the one. The premise that it was to be set on the ocean - the ocean is a nice metaphor for that song; beauty then fear of the street below."

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