Flemish in the North On the Making Of “Holly Tree”
What was the creative process like for this particular song?
This song started out just as an experimentation on my end (Chris) - where I was trying to formulate an interesting synth tone, at this point a couple years ago at least. I wanted something somewhat round and rhythmic but with some bite to it, so I spent a bunch of time customizing and testing different Logic synth patches. I ended up landing on a tone that ended up being the main rhythmic backbone of the song you hear today, which was coined “Dirty Synth” as its working name up until the month of its release. I crafted the simple melody/chords, and brought it back to Everett, needing some collaboration to explore the idea in full. Everett filled in all the holes, crafting some masterful guitar progressions that we felt complemented the synths super well. Once we had our structure, we added some window dressing and more synth presence, landed on a vocal melody, and started lyric-writing.
At this point in my life I had been processing and dealing with the passing of my father after a multi-year battle with illness, so that was all I could really be writing about. I ended up making the song largely about the headspace I was in, trying to sift through everything in my head, a world lacking in color, and having the hope that some color will return as time rolls on, painting anything we have control of.
How did you work with the producer or engineers to bring your vision for "Holly Tree" to life?
We self-produced all of the instrumentation, and most of the vocals throughout the track. We worked with two different free-lance producers that we trust and love. Previously, we had handled all the production and engineering ourselves, but were able to get a fresh perspective with this track by working with Italian Producer Sime who brought a fresh perspective and added a wonderful amount of brightness to the song. As for mastering, we went back to Kramer, a tried and true legend, who had mastered our previous three tracks.
Both brought this song truly to life, but all prior production and tone-crafting was done internally by Everett and me. That’s always an extremely collaborative process, and a part of the process we spend a lot of time and attention to detail in.
How do you feel "Holly Tree" represents your artistic identity?
This song feels like an all-encompassing graduation for us artistically. This is probably some of the most thematically pointed lyricism we’ve ever engaged in, and it's also one of our more direct songs musically. If you’ve listened to our short catalog, you can probably tell that there’s a smattering of sounds, influences, and not one clear genre that we hold ourselves to. This is entirely intentional, but this song felt really natural for us from steps A to Z.
Can you tell us more about you as a band?
We’re just 2 guys who met in college and have been best friends ever since; we had a history playing in bands in our respective hometowns, we both play guitar, and land pretty generally in the same ballpark of influences and styles. We had talked about playing together for years and finally put it all together a few years ago (w/ our debut single, “Snow Crocs”). We keep up with our day jobs so this band is our passion project. We put almost all of our creative energies and output into this project for the love of the game, we don’t play live just yet but songwriting, collaboration, artistic exploration, and sharing said art with the universe is our vocation.
How do you continuously grow and evolve as a band?
We try to tinker with our identity musically more and more with each song, trying to reach our farthest corners (if anyone here has seen the movie “Frank,” they’ll get that reference but we promise we don’t have a tyrannical figure in our musical space) and see what the FitN sound truly is as we grow and evolve as a duo and as people. That means tonal shifts, exploring the guitar as an instrument, exploring our voices as instruments, and pushing each other to dive as deep into our bags as possible. The most enjoyable part of working together is where our musical tastes don’t perfectly align, which adds to a really fun experiment as we work together to meld our respective tastes into a singular sound. That’s the great and total benefit of being a duo, ultimate accountability and full collaboration. That’s what will keep us going.