The creation and the process of Punching In A Dream was actually awful but we got there in the end.
And anxiety endusing. Yes and anxiety-inducing.
Hey I'm Alisa and I'm Thom. And we are The Naked And Famous.
And this is what inspired Punching In A Dream.
You went quieter at the end there.
Punching In A Dream it kind of blankets this area of our lives.
We were experiencing social anxiety, performance anxiety and anxiety of fulfilling an expectation.
So it was just like this crazy emotional emotional feedback loop.
We both experienced experiencing anxiety for the first time in educating
ourselves on this is what anxiety is.
Yeah I didn't really know at the time.
We didin't know at the time we thought that we were like...
The lyric 'bright lights turn me green'
I started to feel nauseous when we were performing.
We had some show down in Wellington and I didn't know what it was.
I thought I was sick but it was my first encounter with anxiety.
I thought I was being such a crybaby.
I would just cry all the time. I'm like what's wrong with me?
I didn't understand what was so wrong with me and then once you figure out that
there's a name and term for the symptoms you feel it's so relieving.
Thom pushing me to sing like I did in Young Blood because that just came about so...
Bullied more like.
Bribed.
Yeah, Young Blood awesome.
Alisa, sing like this again. We need you to do this again.
We've got to write this way, we've got to get you to sing this way again.
And doing Young Blood that was so effortless for me and getting there was so effortless for me.
But Punching In A Dream it was really hard work, it was.
And to the point where when I was in the studio in front of the microphone
I would just freeze up and my voice just did not sound good.
We thought we need to move the key down
we thought we had to shift so many things in order for me to sing this
particular way and I ended having to get a vocal coach in.
She was the first person that kind of educated me on what I was
experiencing and how anxiety literally does not help a singer
it tenses everything up.
And she told me how to relax and how to hit those high notes.
Big notes get the votes.
I was very inspired by Bon Iver, we both were.
But particularly on the production side the first Bon Iver record
it's layers and layers of multi-tracked vocals and so we stole that from Bon Iver
for our own recordings so for Punching In A Dream and Young Blood
It's not a single vocal sound it's actually three takes all put together and then
there's some chorus on them, there's a slap delay and a reverb.
Stack.
Smush together and that's how we got that vocal sound.
Crunchiness you hear on the bass synth
and the really loud rock drums.
Yeah I think I may be being very scared about
claiming to be a big Nine Inch Nails fan because I feel like there's
Nine Inch Nails fans out there eyeballing me being like...
But we were in our twenties and you and Aaron were just so inspired by them
and by thier soundscape, their sound design
played a huge part in inspiring sounds for our band.
We're all huge fans of alternative 90s rock music
so that includes big guitars and big drums.
That's it.
Well no actually, that is it.
That is the 90s though.
Like Nirvana, big guitars.
Anyway that was the DNA of where our musical inspirations came from.
You know what?
I think it's one of the things that also set us apart from some of the other bands
We were singing alongside.
I feel like we got lumped into synth pop and one
thing that we had that a lot of those bands didn't or two things that we had
it was a band and we always have been able to play live and it has a real rock performance
and then secondly I don't feel like we've got many throw
away kind of gimmicky silly lyrics.
Maybe we have little moments but we
try to be very sincere and poetic and write from the heart even if it was like
a 'yeah yeah yeah' it's not just a stupid 'yeah yeah yeah'
there's some sentiment behind it.
The power of sync and licensing music is that
songs can end up in the most unlikely places.
And one of them for us was on a FIFA soundtrack.
FIFA in and of itself it's just such an iconic name and
it belongs to such a thriving culture of video games so the fact that
we could have any kind of reach into that realm, because we got nothing
to do with FIFA. None of us play FIFA but yeah so that was really cool
Punch In A Dream it was a song we wrote in our early 20s and it actually became the
song that was a part of a lot of people's soundtracks growing up in their youth.
And they kind of grew up with us.
We never thought that Punching In A Dream or Young Blood
would have such a huge reach across the world
and we feel very honored that it's become apart of people's
music soundtracks to their lives.
Performing live ten years ago what was it like?
It's a lot of pressure.
I tell you what it's like, I hope no one has those videos.
And they're not online.
You know who does?
Your step dad.
He would literally come to every gig film everything.
He would have filmed our first gig, he's got our first demo
of our first song on a CD and I hope it never sees the light of day.
Bits of the roof and sh*t.
Aiming at the floor, all out of focus.