Writing Music: White Lies’ To Lose My Life

I keep coming back to To Lose My Life by White Lies this week while I’m writing. I don’t think the lyrics here are anything special, but the sound is something else entirely. At times they sound like the Cure, other times Tears for Fears, perhaps even Joy Division, and then at times they are all their own.  But there is something specifically Eighties about the way they sound, which is probably why I keep gravitating to the album.

If this were 1993, this album would be played in the clubs like 911 or DNA in Tampa, and later you’d be able to dance to it in the Parthenon. I can remember the darkness and the smoke, the way the blacklights revealed all the lint in your clothes, and the way my muscles would ache when the evening was through. Like most people in those clubs in those days, I wasn’t full of angst or depressed, I just enjoyed the atmosphere and the sound, and the way my friends could always get me to laugh.

It’s funny how the darker music can always bring back such bright memories.