After spending the last six years as a touring member of Foster the People, singer and multi-instrumentalist Phil Danyew is now setting off on his own. As Elephant Castle, Danyew fuses 60’s rock with dreamy layers and analog gear.
On his debut single, Cool To Be Unhappy, he flips the break-up ballad with vibrant tape saturated textures woven with the fabric of the sun.
On the inspiration and process, Danyew offers:
“‘Cool To Be Unhappy’ is about a girl I once loved who thought it was cool to be unhappy. Needless to say, it didn’t work out.
I wrote the song about five years ago and I’ve reimagined it a few times. Originally it had a fast syncopated synth line throughout the whole song. The synth had lot of energy but it took up too much space. Once I committed to killing the synth line, there was so much room to work with. I ended up replacing a lot of the synth with older keyboards like some Mellotron flutes and Farfisa organs.
I used tape as much as I could and limited myself to play / sing it until I got it right. This lended itself to not editing the soul out of the music which I think is common in today’s pop music. We have the incredible capability to make things sound (too) good and (too) perfect. All this over-editing and processing comes at the cost of the human-ness of the art and is something I tried my best to avoid.”