Glass Animals perform in The Current studio
by Mac Wilson and Glass Animals
October 07, 2016
"I have stopped drinking caffeine," says Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley. "I got to a point where I was so utterly addicted to caffeine, I was drinking four or five of those [large] Starbucks things a day. … I've cut it out recently. It's tough, but I feel all right now; I feel OK."
Not that Bayley lacks stimuli in his life. While touring Glass Animals' last album, Zaba, he was encountering a lot of people he found fascinating. "We'd just meet dozens and dozens of people every day," Bayley says. "They're all telling you stories about their lives, and I started recording them on my phone, secretly."
Those stories became the foundation for Glass Animals' new album, How To Be A Human Being. Now touring in support of that album and in town to play a show at the Myth Live Event Center in Maplewood, Minn., Glass Animals stopped at The Current studio for a session hosted by Mac Wilson.
The stories Bayley was recording taught him a lot about the way people tell stories. "What they talk about, what kind of phrases they use, what they might have exaggerated, what might not be true, what they might have left out — all these things and what that says about them as a person," Bayley says. "So there's this little story on the surface, but then behind that, there's their life and what that story says about their life and … how they perceive the world."
Bayley found all those layers to be vastly interesting, so he used them to create his own characters. Those characters populate the songs on the album — and the artwork on the album. "We had all the music written and all the songs, and we decided to cast them all as actors," Bayley explains. "We went to a casting director in L.A. and said, 'Let's find these people.' We found them all, cast them all, and that's what you see on the cover, in the music videos, the artwork, everywhere."
The effort behind How To Be A Human Being sounds so orchestrated that it almost seems as thoughtfully planned as a film production. "I think it was much more of a scramble," Bayley laughs.
Listen to the complete interview to hear more about the stories and the production behind Glass Animals' How To Be A Human Being.
Songs Performed
"Youth"
"Season 2 Episode 3"
"Life Itself"
All songs from Glass Animals' 2016 album, How To Be A Human Being, available on Harvest Records
Hosted by Mac Wilson
Produced by Derrick Stevens
Engineered by Michael DeMark and Jalen Russell
Visuals by Leah Garaas
Web feature by Luke Taylor
Resources
Glass Animals - official site
