Dust Devil

Album: Disconnect From Desire (2010)
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Songfacts®:

  • School of Seven Bells is a three-piece dream pop band formed by Benjamin Curtis of Secret Machines, together with identical twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza, formerly of On! Air! Library!. The band is named after the School of the Seven Bells, a mythical South American school for pickpockets.
  • This is a track from their second album, Disconnect From Desire. Alejandra Deheza told Artist Direct the story behind the song: "That's my favorite! 'Dust Devil' was a pretty late addition. The beginning of the music for 'Dust Devil' came about during our European tour; I think it was in the UK. At first, we labeled different song ideas things like, 'London to Birmingham.' I remember revisiting that particular loop though. We had just played these crazy shows in Spain. Barcelona and Madrid are like party towns! They're really fun. We had this late show that we played at like 1 or 2 in the morning, and it was packed. It's funny because we were up until 9am, and everybody was still out! People were still coming back from clubs! It's a totally different culture over there; it's so awesome. Anyway, I found that piece of music again. Benjamin likes to give me a lot of stuff so I can look it over and work on it."

    "For that track, the lyrics and the vocals came out really fast," Deheza added. "We'd recorded a bunch of songs, and I remember putting it together in the hotel room in Barcelona. I was like, 'Whoa, this is the song!' It was actually one of the fastest songs that we did too. I'd written a little vocal melody that I had in my head over an acoustic guitar, but it wasn't until Spain that I listened to this piece of music that Benjamin had given me months before. I knew I had a song that worked exactly with that. It was perfect."

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