The Man Who Built The Moon

Album: Who Built The Moon? (2017)
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Songfacts®:

  • Noel Gallagher recorded his Who Built the Moon? album over the course of about three years with Northern Irish producer David Holmes. The pair would get together when Gallagher wasn't touring and trade ideas back and forth. The former Oasis guitarist discussed the occasionally tense nature of the recording process for the record during a Sky News interview. Discussing the recording of the album's title-track he stated:

    "We took a keyboard riff we liked from an unused track and added chords. A year later we came to deal with it as a song and when we got to the chorus, David kept asking me to write a new one … again and again and again. I was ready to strangle him. The one that you hear is the eighth attempt and, you know what? The annoying thing is he was right."
  • Noel Gallagher recalled to Radio X's John Kennedy how David Holmes made him write eight different choruses for this song.

    "Every one I wrote, he just said: Oasis. Next one: that's High Flying Birds. Another one: that's a cross between Oasis AND High Flying Birds. It just kept going: That's the Beatles. I was in another studio and I thought, I can't do this any more, I think I've come up with a great chorus. I thought this doesn't sound like anything I've ever done. So he's gonna love it!"
  • The Who Built The Moon? album was named after a barmy cosmic conspiracy in a book by the mystic David Icke, which Gallagher's Manchester friends used to read aloud for a laugh.
  • David Holmes told Uncut the story of the process behind the Who Built the Moon album.

    "When Noel arrived in Belfast, I had created about 10 loop-based backing tracks that were great jumping off points. Noel set up a chain of guitar pedals and we started experimenting with different sounds/melodies. He pretty much nailed everything that week. He then took the tracks away and slowly but surely started to write the songs."

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