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GS recently caught up with Tommy Mac from Hedley and discussed each track from the band’s new album Wild Life, out in the US tomorrow. Pre-order the album and get an instant download of “Crazy For You.” Check out Tom’s insight below and be sure to enter our signed CD giveaway if you haven’t yet! Deadline to enter is tomorrow 5/20 at 6:00 pm PST.
“Anything”
“Anything” is funny. I love the juxtaposition between the video and the song. I believe the song is that kind of empowering, uplifting message of “it doesn’t matter what you’re facing, you can do anything.” With the video, we went the other way. It was a lot more tongue-in-cheek like “I can do whatever the hell I want.” To me, that was a cool juxtaposition. We’ve always been more about the uplifting messages of the songs but we also like to have fun at the same time.
“Crazy For You”
“Crazy For You” is our tip of the hat to the 70’s, almost a Michael Jackson kind of moment. Not that I would ever compare ourselves to the king of pop, but it’s just a fun song for people to dance to.
“Headphones”
This one is always interesting to me because it kind of has the “anti-chorus.” You expect it to go into a big chorus but it goes into more of a head-bobbing groove section, rather than a chorus. To me, that song is more about creating a vibe and a feeling rather than just jamming a pop song down everybody’s throat. I love it. I think this is the first album where we’ve done that “anti-chorus” and it’s fun to play live because I see a lot more dudes rocking out to that song than the girls. Guys usually come to our concerts as a designated driver or a girl’s boyfriend and they tend to stand in the back with their arms folded. When we play that song all the sudden the dudes are all rocking out!
“I’ll Be With You”
We’ve never been known to be a “straight and narrow” band, if that makes sense. There’s always that danger of someone being arrested or someone getting in trouble, or some kind of shenanigans happening. We’ve written a few of those kinds of songs throughout our career. It just describes a night on the town or the party ethic that comes along with hanging out with the Hedley guys. It goes back to that saying “a true friend is one that wakes up with you in jail.” [laughs]
Has that ever happened to one of you?
Oh, you know…we’ve had our brushes with the law, let’s just put it that way. [laughs] It’s always just us having some good fun when maybe people around us don’t understand our definition of fun.
“Pocket Full Of Dreams”
“Pocket Full Of Dreams” is an interesting one. That was really a contender to be in the live set, it just didn’t quite make it. To me, it’s just a really well-crafted pop tune.
“Mexico”
Jake used to sing the line in the chorus, Make my way down to Mexico! He used to sing that while he rode his bike around Vancouver, before it was even a song. For whatever reason that line was in his head. The guitar line that’s in the song is from Django Unchained. If you watch that movie it’s very obvious where that guitar part comes in. When Jake heard that guitar part, it spoke to that line that he sang about Mexico and it just evolved into this monster song that we love to play live now. It’s probably one of the highlights of the set; it’s just so powerful and so rocking. It starts and stops, gets big then small, it’s all over the place but it’s great. The Italian composer who wrote the guitar part is actually credited on the song “Mexico.” It was kind of a feather in our cap for him to be a “writer” on our record.
“Heaven In Our Headlights”
It’s like a kitchen party, barn-burner, old school…stomp your foot on the floor. Our band has gone through stages where, for a whole tour, we’ll just write reggae tunes. Knowing the songs would never be on an album, we just jam and make songs that mean something to us and discard them afterwards. I think “Heaven In Our Headlights” came about where some of that influence made the record. We were like “screw it, let’s make sort of a rootsy barn-burner of a tune and get it on a record.”
“Dreaming’s For Sleeping”
This is another like “I’ll Be With You.” It’s another “ride until the wheels come off” song. It’s always been the ethic of our band. Something people find attractive about the band is that the wheels are always about to fall off but somehow we’re holding it together. We’re still going 100 miles per hour, there’s always that element of danger that’s involved with Hedley. Songs like “I’ll Be With You” and those types of songs are more of a portrait of us than anything.
“Wild Life”
Jake had the line about blood for a long time, we jammed it and jammed it, and it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. He came back with a more complete version of the song and we had it. It’s about how fucked up the world is today. It’s his take on how screwed up everything is around us and just taking a step back. For a person to be able to take a step back and realize that is the first step in a person being able to change that, or even just deal with it. I think that song is a snapshot of someone stepping back and having that realization. We’ve been to Africa as a band and India with a charity where we helped them build schools and water supplies. I think that was the beginning of that song, going from our first-world problems to a third-world country where people didn’t even have clean water. It was a definitely a stark contrast and I think seeing that was the start of “Wild Life” and the start of us trying to be the change in the world we see around us.
“Got Love”
“Got Love” is a cool song. I like how it goes into the almost half-time chorus. It’s that kind of “we are the world, we’re all in this together” mentality. It’s almost the other side of the coin from “Wild Life.” You step back and take a look and see the world for what it is. You realize we’re all in this together so let’s just put our arms around each other and we can conquer whatever there is out there. There’s ugliness and there’s beauty, and in our cheesy “we are the world” kind of way it just a message of “we can all get together and make it beautiful.”
“All The Way”
“All The Way” is my favorite to play live right now. It’s so stop-and-start and so not a single. It’s a powerful song, and a really meaningful song for Jake. When we were working on it, I wasn’t sure where it would fit in. We started playing it in rehearsal and I was like “OK, I get it.” But truly the meaning of that song was lost to me until we played it live. It’s such a powerful huge moment in the set. Every night I get goose bumps playing that song, and I’m not even playing bass on it, I play keyboards. It’s funny when you kind of trip yourself up playing your own music.
Thank you so much for getting in detail there. Let me ask you one more question I thought of as you were describing these songs. If you had to single out one of these songs to sort of “represent you” as a band today, which one would it be?
Wow, that’s a great question. That’s like asking “what size venues do you guys like playing?” I can find something great and interesting in all of them, so it’s tough. For me though, it would have to be “Anything.” It wraps up all the messages we’ve been talking about in one song. The album is all over the place, but “Anything” is so simple and idealistic, it kind of wraps everything up so nicely.
Hedley – “Crazy For You”
