Tokyo Police Club - 'Champ' Track By Track Guide

As Tokyo Police Club prepare to release their second album 'Champ' on Monday (July 19), Gigwise sat down with keyboardist Graham Wright to get a track-by-track guide.

'Favourite Food'

I think this is the longest song we've ever written.  Its definitely the biggest 'departure' from the Tokyo Police Club of yore, so its fun to put it first on the record.  Its throwing down the gauntlet, in a way. If people dig this song then its a safe bet they'll have an open mind to enjoy the rest of the record.  Also, we put in an audio sample of us playing hockey, which makes me very happy.

'Favourite Colour'

Dave originally recorded this song with our friends Dean and Jay, at their studio Chemical Sound.  Dean played drums and Jay played bass, as I recall.  Dave played it for me, thinking it was too much for us to ever do as a band, and I immediately begged to differ.  We struggled for ages to get it back to the spontaneous feel of the original demo, but we always knew it would be awesome when we got it.

'Breakneck Speed'

I believe this is the oldest song on the record.  Dave wrote it while we were mixing Elephant Shell, and we got the basic band vibe of the thing basically right away.  Then we spent a bunch of time with it before we came up with the 'oohs' in the chorus, which really sealed the deal.  This was also the first song we recorded for Champ.

'Boots of Danger'

This is the second Champ song we recorded.  Right up until we went into the studio, we weren't totally sure how to do this tune.  We almost abandoned it a bunch of times, but it kept on popping its head up, so we figured it was worth coming back to time and time again. Thanks to our superfriend producer Rob, we managed to nail it in the studio and then it became our first hit single and sold a record 2.4 billion copies (I travelled to the future to write this).

'Bambi'

This is probably my favourite song on the album.  Fun fact: the main 'synth part' is actually made out of a bunch of guitar tracks cut up and rearranged.  Cool!  Check out Josh wailing on the chorus guitar.

'End of a Spark'

I think this is the first Champ song that we finished writing.  I remember playing it on a tour of Canada last December every night, except instead of playing guitar I stood around and did nothing, which was sort of boring.  Theres one part of this song where wanted a reverb hit, so we put a ton of reverb on an amp and dropped it. Productive!

'Hands Reversed'

This was a tough one to arrange, just because it arrived so fully formed in its bare form with just Dave and guitar. Its hard to know what to add to a song like that without making it worse.  In the end, Greg came up with an awesome beat, Josh made some beautiful sounds, and I kept my mouth shut.  Presto!

'Gone'

This is my other favourite song on the record, for selfish reasons. Mostly because the keyboard part is my favourite that I've ever recorded.  I played an old Casio through a DigiTech Whammy, with Josh changing the harmony settings on the pedal and scrolling through stuff at random.  It was one of those magical moments while we were recording that you can't duplicate.

'Big Difference'

Probably the rockingest song we've ever done?  Gregs beat in that one rock out part is out of hand.

'Not Sick'

Sometimes I bust my ass coming up with what I think are super cool keyboard parts, but inevitably the band will latch on to whatever stupid simple thing I play while checking my settings in soundcheck. This was one of those instances, and the song was built around that riff.  It proved extremely difficult to record - getting things to set in the groove was a nightmare, but it was worth all the hassle.

'Frankenstein'

This song had its origins in Boots of Danger.  Josh came up with a guitar part for the half time part at the end that was so good we decided it needed its own song.  As luck would have it, it fit perfectly with a tune Dave had been kicking around.  This song features the triumphant return of Graham Wright, Baritone Sax Wizard, on the very last note.

'Champ' is released on July 19.