How a bedroom riff, a remote vocalist, and a bunch of mates turned into My Pet Rhino’s biggest track yet
‘Is this How It Really Ends’ is a track born from bedroom guitar noodling and finished with a chaotic pub-choir of mates.
It’s scrappy, heartfelt, and weirdly huge, stitched together across continents with remote vocals and a whole lot of stubborn love.
Songwriting & Recording Process – Is This Really How It Ends?
For me, songwriting always starts by sitting on my bed strumming an unamplified electric guitar with no effects whatsoever, just playing until something catches my ear. It is impossible to hide bad ideas when playing like this: if I can make an idea sound good when the guitar sounds its worst, then I am onto a winner!
‘Is This Really How It Ends?’ came from one such noodling session where I was attempting to find chords that had a similar ‘ring’ to them as the song, ‘I Ain’t Your Boy’, by Jamie Lenman. Within minutes I found some chords that tickled my fancy, and I started humming a little melody over the top to try and prompt some lyrics.
The sound of the words is just as important (if not more important) than the meaning of the words, so I find sound-matching syllables to a melody is a great way to start searching for that killer first line of lyrics which then dictates the direction the song will go.
Fortunately, as soon as the line ‘When you hear that voice out loud’ popped into my head, I knew I could turn that into a story describing my frustrations at being a songwriter who cannot sing very well, and then suddenly, twenty minutes later, the song in its final form was completely finished.
When it all comes together that quickly, you know you are onto something decent.
When it came to recording, I planned to record almost all the parts myself, however the two big roles I needed to fill on the track (and album) were lead vocals and drums. Not surprisingly given I had written a song about how I can’t sing, I was not keen on singing this myself, and after roughly two years of unsuccessfully looking locally for a vocalist, I decided to look online and see what alternatives were available.
I was blessed to find Leanne “LeeLoo” Greenman, an American vocalist based in Europe, who thankfully offered her services to sing on the album remotely. LeeLoo has an incredibly powerful and versatile voice that is perfect for a song with wide dynamic range like this, and she went above and beyond with the performance she delivered! As did the drummer, Mark Spiteri, who absolutely nailed the chaotic drum ending I was after. The drum performance inspired me to create the music video for the track as something which highlights just how impressive the drumming is.
The biggest highlight of recording the track was putting together the ‘pub-choir’ to chant the vocals at the end of the song. I wanted this ending to sound massive like a crowd singing a chorus back to the band at a live gig, so I invited as many of my family and friends as I could to Zen Studios in St Peters one afternoon to come and lend their voices to the cause.
It honestly feels so special to include all my favourite people on the track and make it as much ‘their’ song as it is mine. Geoffrey Lee at Zen did a remarkable job of blending all the voices together and polishing the final track to give that big, chaotic ending I was after.
