Atlanta-based rock band Manchester Orchestra tells its story through music with deep meaningful lyrics and hard-hitting guitar riffs. Staff writer Marcela Guimaraes caught up with frontman Andy Hull to talk about the band’s latest single and its upcoming record.
DIVERSIONS: You guys recently released your new single, “After the Scripture,,” which is featured on the “Dallas Buyers Club” soundtrack. How did you guys go about doing that? And what inspired you to write the song?
ANDY HULL: Well, the song comes from a family that we met several years ago.
We met a young girl who was diagnosed with cancer and didn’t really have long left.
The family got in touch with us and she came out to our show in Dallas, which is actually kind of ironic because it has nothing to do with the movie, but we got to spend this wonderful night with her.
Then she passed right after we played for her and the family asked us to fly out and play at her memorial service, and so we did. And we’ve made, like, lifelong friends with this family and we still see them like 5 to 6 times a year and visit them.
It was just a really pivotal, life-changing moment for me where I realized that the music that you create has so many different levels beyond your intention and just how blessed I feel and felt by the whole thing.
It’s just a very moving, life-changing event. So I wrote that song and we were recording our new record, and our new record doesn’t really sound anything like that song, it’s very aggressive and loud.
So the movie got in touch with us and asked us if there were any b-sides or extra songs that we wanted to submit, so we gave them a few and they just so happened to pick that one and we were pretty thrilled with it.
DIVE: How is the new album going to differ from previous albums?
AH: A lot. It just doesn’t really sound the same. We always try to make it a point to never repeat ourselves and to kind of continue evolving and we really set out to make this record different.
We started, not this July, but we started writing last July and we wrote about 28 songs and we just really wanted to narrow it down to, like, the best cream of the crop and to make sure it was a cohesive record.
So we went for immediacy and some kind of a thick, heavy sound which, with Simple Math, our last record, is definitely more of an orchestral, epic, kind of glam thing.
This is far more of a straight ahead kind of like an unapolegetic rock record.
DIVE: You guys have a video podcast on your Youtube channel, any chance you guys are gonna keep that up with the new tour?
AH: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of tough because the guy that used to do all that stuff used to play bass for us, so we have no idea how to operate a camera. But we are definitely trying to get back into regularly updating those videos.
diversions@dailytarheel.com
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