British pop band Field Music continues to make vibrant ear candy, and their latest album, Commontime, is certainly no different (think David Bowie meets XTC). While putting on A Hard Day’s Night for his young son (2 ½ years old and with a strong singing voice!), singer Peter Brewis took some time to chat with Myspace about the recording process, a recent Tweet from Prince and the new record.

Hometown/Homebase: Sunderland, England

Did you guys have a vision for this album before you started?

We wanted to make the structures slightly more conventional in terms of what songs are and keep the sort of weirdness slightly covert, kind of hidden in terms of the harmonies and things like that. I think we wanted to try and write some proper songs for a change.

What was the biggest challenge about making it?

We’ve both become dads, so getting together in the studio was fairly difficult mainly due to childcare. When we were in there we were a lot more immediate with how we did things. Even though it took us a long time to record the album the sessions were quite quick. My son is 2 ½ now. He really likes rock music, pop music, but he likes his songs fairly straightforward so he’s our new head of A&R. He decides whether the songs are any good.

What was the toughest song to finish?

There’s a song on the album called “They Want You To Remember.” We had it in our minds it was going to go verse/chorus/verse/chorus/instrumental/chorus/outro. But what we wanted to do was have every single one of those sections sound like a different band. It sounds really pretentious, it really does but I think it works.

The song “The Noisy Days Are Over”—how did that song come about?

Well that was fairly straightforward, we had a couple of bass lines that contrasted quite well. But I mean it’s the same thing played over and over again so it’s quite unusual for us. We had in our mind a David Bowie vocal thing. We were listening to a lot of David Bowie before we made the record mainly because it’s one of the singers my son really likes. He really had a thing for Young Americans, the song and the album. The song itself is about leaving the noisy days of booze and nightclubs and going to see bands every single night, leaving that behind for a little bit perhaps or maybe forever.

“Trouble At The Lights”—what was the idea behind it?

I don’t know what it’s like over there, I’m sure it’s similar but cars are a big status symbol over here. And these big cars, they get driven quite badly or arrogantly without much care for anybody else. So “Trouble At The Lights” is I’m at the traffic lights with my son in the car and these expensive, big, protective military-esque kind of vehicles zoom past me on either side. I get really angry and almost to the point of wishing harm on these people. It’s dealing with that guilt of wishing ill on somebody.

Do you have a current personal favorite off the album?

The one that struck me the most and that maybe was the simplest song probably was “Disappointed.” Dave emailed me a demo of it and he was almost apologizing, saying, “Sorry I’ve written this, I don’t know what I think about it. It’s like something I might have written when I was 14 but I think it might be quite good.” I heard it in the demo form and I thought, Wow! That’s a proper, proper song! It reminded me of lots of the songs I’ve been listening to with my son. A little bit of Prince, a little bit of the Doobie Brothers. 

Speaking of Prince, I noticed a tweet from him mentioning Field Music—what did you make of that?

Part of me just wondered if it was really him. The tweet just said “Prince Field The Noisy Days Are Over Music.” I just thought, Did he like it or does he think we’ve maybe been influenced a little bit too much by him? Did he want his horn parts back?

There is a three-note phrase at the very end which I wouldn’t say it’s a quotation but it’s a definite Parade-era nod to Prince. So I just wondered. ‘Wow, is he a bit annoyed?’ But I don’t think so. I think he saw a band that had been influenced by him in a small way, not in a stylistic way but in a musical way. He’s a great writer and he’s great at arranging music and I think we’ve been influenced by him certainly. I’d like to think he thought it was a good thing.