Glass Animals talk ‘magic moments’ ahead of show at PNC Music Pavilion

CHARLOTTE — Their song Heat Waves set a Billboard Hot 100 record, and now Glass Animals is making a pit stop to bring the heat to Charlotte Thursday.

It is a part of a world tour to support their new album, “I Love You So F*** Much.”

The band played a secret gig in the Queen City last weekend in preparation. A few hundred dedicated fans got a sneak preview at The Underground ahead of their show at PNC Music Pavilion.

Guitarist and keyboard player Drew MacFarlane spoke with Channel 9 about what went into making the album, their secret tricks, and what to expect from the show.

You’re based out of England, so what made you want to kick off your world tour in Charlotte, North Carolina, of all places?

MacFarlane: “Well it’s a beautiful place, you know, why wouldn’t we want to? We love it here. But we also store our gear about two hours north ... it’s kind of like where all of the sort of production for the big shows lives, like the lighting rigs, the video screens, the stage props and that kind of stuff. Really what it is, is that once we kind of have learned our music and our instruments and how to transform this new album into something that works as a live show, we have to kind of get into a huge space, like a warehouse space. I mean, it’s massive, you could literally like fit a plane into it, it’s kind of crazy. And you have to build the stage interface, the sort of audio team with the visual team with the lighting team, and that’s what we do up in Winston-Salem.”

What was it like scaling it down for your show at The Underground on Sunday?

“I love small shows. There’s something super intimate about them, you know, like they’re sweaty, they’re fun. They’re like little club shows and you know, there’s always part of me which kind of misses that when we go and play bigger venues when you can like literally like reach out and touch the person in the first row and you can see the expression on everybody’s faces. I think the feedback loop that creates is really special and intense and I think we’re super lucky to have been able to do these smaller shows in the lead into this tour because it kind of lets us connect with fans and see their responses to the new music really early and kind of get that energy going with them, which it’s been amazing. Like seeing the fans’ response to songs that we’ve only released a couple weeks ago, that was super heartwarming.

There’s always part of you which is nervous going into releasing an album or playing the new songs live. Like we’ve we’ve been with them just the four of us for so long like, you know in the studio recording and making the album and then rehearsing and for so long and then once you get it out in a room with people and see that kind of like raw response to it and when it’s a wonderful one like the one on Sunday like that is just like is the best feeling.”

You’re behind programming, synthesizers, keyboards, guitar, pretty much running a little bit of everything in every song here. What’s your process in terms of writing and melody writing with Dave Bayley?

“So Dave will write a bunch of demos and he’ll bring them into the studio with the four of us and this time around what we did is we wanted to keep it really like spontaneous and kind of keep this feeling of, I guess, aliveness to it. So we didn’t want to get too bogged down in like the details of programming which is you know, something we’ve definitely been guilty of in the past. This time, we would just stick the song on in its current form and maybe I would be at like the synthesizers or on a guitar, and we would just be improvising and trying to find moments of magic, and you kind of know when one of them stuck and kind of work through layers of that process. Then we’d have a huge task of sorting through it all at the end, sort of find the right combination of elements and the things that felt kind of like they expressed and supported the song in the best way.”

Was there a magic moment that you knew this was a winner, this was going on the album like right off the bat?

“It sounds kind of crazy because it was so early on but first day we sat down in the studio. We knew that this was going to be an album about space. We knew that it was going to be an album, which is kind of like intimate love songs set to the backdrop of the vastness of the cosmos, which in itself is kind of like an existential crisis and all of us were kind of like going to like geez, what is this gonna sound like? This is pretty crazy.

“Then literally the first demo that we heard was A Tear in Space and it starts with this kind of like sweeping, you know, almost sort of filmic introduction that you feel like you’re out in the desert or something, and then suddenly the beat comes in and you’re right up there in this claustrophobic kind of space capsule zooming through space. And I think just hearing that for the first time I was just like, wow, we’re in it, you know, nothing else matters. This is where we’re going. It’s gonna work.”

Is that your favorite song off the album?

“I find that my favorite change quite a lot. Like I love that song when I first heard it but then pretty soon after that Show Pony became my favorite. I think I just loved the story of that song and how it’s kind of like an intense page for the album. Like, it’s about a relationship and every line kind of takes you zooming through the history of this relationship up to the point of his destruction. And I think that’s something about the narrative that really just captivated me for such a long time.

And then it changes again when you play live. I’ve completely started to love the song “How I Learned to Love the Bomb.” There’s something so special about that one live and I’m loving that one right now.”

Do you have anything new on your guitar rig or your keyboard rig for this tour?

“Yeah, oh my gosh. I’ve just done something quite weird. I don’t know if it’s weird, actually, maybe the guitar heads can help me out on this.

I’ve just stuck a - I had this J. Mascis guitar, which is kind of like a Jazzmaster. I always played Jazzmaster guitars, I don’t know why, I’ve always just loved them. Anyway, so I had this Jazzmaster and I took the neck off and stuck a Fender baritone neck on the J Mascis. So it was like this weird guitar now specifically so that I could play “How I Learned to Love the Bomb.” When we recorded in the studio, we actually played it like way high up and then transposed it down again with this like pitch-shifting algorithm, which we couldn’t do live. So we kind of had to build a guitar that would be able to recreate that sound in a live environment without digital stuff. So that’s quite fun. I’m enjoying that.

Then another one little gear thing is that Edmund [Irwin-Singer], our bass player. He builds a lot of gear pedals and synthesizers and for this tour, he built us these really cool little retro-futuristic guitar pedals, basically, that control all of our pedal guitar sound shifts. If you keep a close eye on them, you’ll see them down at the bottom of our keyboards. They’re kind of wooden casing, with lights on top of them. They’re really cool.”

Anything you want to say to the fans going out to show or thinking about catching a show on the tour?

“Be prepared. It’s gonna be intense. It’s gonna be big. I’m so excited. I can’t wait for people to see it.”

Glass Animals is scheduled to play at the PNC Music Pavilion Thursday night, click this link for tickets.

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