Blame My Youth's Sean Van Vleet remembers very clearly the session in which he and producer Joey Moi co-wrote on of their latest single's "The Break." It was a day that did not get off to a good start.
As Sean tells Q104.3 New York's Out of the Box with Jonathan Clarke, "The Break" represented a key moment in his and Moi's collaborative relationship and it came out of a session that, initially, didn't seem like it was going to happen.
"We had 20 songs for an album all cut and ready, and I walk in there and he is on a Zoom [call] and I walk in and he just looks at me ... puts his hand up ... he didn't even look at me, just put the hand up," Sean recalls. "So I grab my guitar really quick, went to another room and I just start writing [the guitar hook]. ... I walk back in there and he's sitting, just scrolling, he doesn't even look at me; he's going through it."
Sean found out a little later Joey had just gotten a lot of bad news at once, including a discouraging conversation with his veterinarian about his dog's health.
"I walk in and it's cold and I sit down on the couch, and I'm like, 'I've got to break the ice,' so I pick up the guitar and I just start playing it," he continued. "He has his phone and he's just sitting there and I'm playing the chorus, the melody and some of the lyric. He looks up and he goes, 'That's very good. Keep playing it.' And then he starts writing lyrics, and he had never done that before. ...We didn't realize we had that sort of chemistry to go line for line as writers."
With both musicians drawing from past and present experiences, the song was completely finished more quickly than anything they had worked on together before.
"There was a heaviness of the moment and we tapped into that and then wrote about the truth," Sean says.
Watch the full conversation via the player above!
See Sean perform "The Break" live in studio with a guitar that was laying around the office via the player below!
Check out the official music video for "Tokyo Rose":
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