Antiphon

Album: Antiphon (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • Midlake spent much of 2011 and 2012 painstakingly recording their fourth album at the farm in Buffalo, Texas where The Courage Of Others was tracked. However the perfectionism of frontman and songwriter Tim Smith was increasingly frustrating the rest of the group and in late 2012 he announced that he was leaving Midlake to form a new project called Harp. The question arose as to how would the remaining four members (Eric Pulido, McKenzie Smith, Paul Alexander and Eric Nichelson) manage without Smith's songs?

    "Of what we'd recorded," Pulido told Mojo magazine, "Tim had said, 'You can have this…' but what we couldn't take with us turned out to be 75% of the recording." The solution was to begin again from scratch, and the quartet wrote and recorded a new full-length album in just six months. Pulido said that they titled it Antiphon, "because it means a response to an oratory or piece of music, and this album is a response to what's gone on with Tim. The original Antiphon was an orator in Ancient Greece who was part of an oligarchy that fought democracy. But we didn't overthrow Tim! He's not Antiphon."

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