{"id":3563,"date":"2011-08-21T08:50:55","date_gmt":"2011-08-21T15:50:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=3563"},"modified":"2011-08-21T08:51:12","modified_gmt":"2011-08-21T15:51:12","slug":"gomez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2011\/08\/gomez\/","title":{"rendered":"GOMEZ"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/h1>\n

GOMEZ<\/h1>\n

Who are their fans? You might be surprised\u2014they certainly are<\/strong><\/h2>\n

How can you pick out a Gomez\u00a0fan from a crowd? Answer: You can\u2019t. \u201cNo one can identify our audience,\u201d declares guitarist Tom Gray, one of Gomez\u2019s three singers and four songwriters. \u201cThat\u2019s certainly the case at gigs. If you took people in the audience out of the room and said, \u2018What do these people have in common?\u2019 you\u2019d have a hard time figuring out what it was.\u201d<\/p>\n

That diversity is testament to the English quintet\u2019s sound\u2014the mix of indie rock, pop, soul and blues heard in full flower on Whatever\u2019s on Your Mind<\/em>, the band\u2019s seventh and latest album. \u201cWe very much wanted to make a quirky record\u2014something a bit more infectious and eccentric,\u201d Gray says. That meant self-producing, with friend Sam Farrar of Phantom Planet pitching in as co-producer. \u201cWhen we work with a producer, they have a tendency to iron things out, and we didn\u2019t want to do that. We wanted it to make more left turns.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because the five band members are spread across the globe\u2014Gray, bassist Paul Blackburn and singer-guitarist Ben Ottewell remain in England, while singer-guitarist Ian Ball and drummer Olly Peacock live in Los Angeles and New York, respectively\u2014they wrote the new material online, sending snippets of songs via the web. \u201cWe\u2019ve used similar approaches before, but this is the first time we\u2019ve really refined the process,\u201d Gray says. \u201cWe gave ourselves six months and had to write songs every couple of weeks. We all had to keep working on\u00a0each other\u2019s stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

While online communication has a reputation for fostering passive aggression and all-out rudeness, Gray and his bandmates didn\u2019t squabble over whose songs were getting the most attention. \u201cThat\u2019s never really been a consideration,\u201d he says. \u201cOn the last record I only wrote one song, but I wrote six for this one. Sometimes your own stuff just isn\u2019t what\u2019s cooking, and sometimes it is. You can\u2019t be\u00a0precious about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gray is especially fond of the disc\u2019s title track, an earnest, string-laced ballad that, once completed, gave the band license to stretch out and try some lighter, funkier jams. \u201cOnce you\u2019ve got a really big song like that, it\u2019s like, \u2018The rest of this could be easy,\u2019 Gray says. \u201cIt\u2019s funny how some songs take the pressure off others. We have a tendency to overwork things if we haven\u2019t got those bigger songs in place.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Kenneth Partridge<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GOMEZ Who are their fans? You might be surprised\u2014they certainly are How can you pick out a Gomez\u00a0fan from a crowd? Answer: You can\u2019t. \u201cNo one can identify our audience,\u201d declares guitarist Tom Gray, one of Gomez\u2019s three singers and four songwriters. \u201cThat\u2019s certainly the case at gigs. If you took people in the audience […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[2453,2447,2454,1636,2455,2452,2451,2450,10156,2448,2449],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3563"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3563"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3566,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3563\/revisions\/3566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}