Eighty Ninety first jumped on the scene with their viral hit, “Your Favorite Song” and their music has been apart of our indie loving hearts ever since. Their latest, “10K Summer Night” is truly perfect for, well, your summer night. Talking to the duo was extra exciting and we’re so glad to have this track on our playlists.
With summer coming around, tell me about the meaning behind 10K Summer Night and what was your vision for this song when you created it?
To us, the idea of a summer night evokes a feeling of freedom but also comfort and safety — basically, how you feel when you're with the one you love. Ten thousand summer nights is a hundred years worth of those summer nights. In other words, a lifetime with that person. We wanted to make a song that could live up to that title, and also even feel like the kind of song you'd listen to on a summer night (arguably the best time of the year to listen to music, especially in a car with the windows down). One of the things that's hardest to articulate about love is how it feels so intimate and yet so expansive at the same time, and we tried to reflect that contrast in our production by starting small - just Abner and his guitar - and slowly building into this cinematic, widescreen, cascading conclusion: it's just about two people, but it feels like the whole world is at stake.
Being noticed by Taylor is a huge thing, IMO. What was your initial reaction when you saw this?
It's absolutely incredible, we still can't believe it. Anyone who knows us knows that Taylor has been a big inspiration as a storyteller, writer and artist — getting recognized by her in that way blows our minds. I think I (Abner) literally screamed when I saw it. Harper was in the other room working on a mix and came running in. It exposed us to so many of her fans and really opened a lot of doors for us. One day we hope to be able to thank her!
Tell me about your songwriting process and how you two go about creating the tracks you have?
For us songs start as a feeling — a kind of elusive sense that something needs to be expressed. A lot of times it can be painful or difficult and it can be tempting to ignore or bury. But songs emerge for us when we pay attention to those feelings and give ourselves the mental and emotional space to experience them. Sometimes that's it — the feelings go away after you acknowledge them and they have their say. But the ones that keep hanging around need to be written. Something about getting it down on paper helps to work through them. It's almost like a ritual.
We generally come to the studio sessions with finished songs, rather than start with production ideas or beats. All of our production choices pretty much come from one question: what is the song trying to express, and how can we help with that sonically? So generally once a song is written (either on guitar or piano) we'll track the two mains, which are usually an acoustic guitar and vocal. Then we'll add in drums, lead guitar, synth, bass, keyboards, programming — really just let inspiration guide us because there are no wrong answers. Just what's exciting us or speaking to the song at any given moment. We brought in an outside mixer for the first time ever with 10K Summer Nights — our friend Andrew Maury who's done incredible work for artists like Shawn Mendes and COIN and really made the song shimmer in this perfect way.
What can we expect from you in 2019?
We're going to be releasing more singles leading up to our EP as well as a couple of collaborations that we're really excited about. More on those soon!
Follow Eighty Ninety on Twitter and Instagram and listen to their new song now.
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