Lucia & the Best Boys – formerly LUCIA – have spent their year building towards a new EP. Four new tracks under the very 2020-appropriate banner ‘The State Of Things’, it sees the Glaswegian band chart heartbreak – from pushing down painful feelings, to having tentative hope for the future. It’s an emotional rollercoaster sure to connect with anyone who’s ever struggled to move on. Frontwoman Lucia Fairfull fills us in.
Perfectly Untrue
‘Perfectly Untrue’ was written a couple of weeks after I wrote [final track] ‘Let Go’. This recording is in its original form, which Chris Greatti and myself powered on an all-nighter till 4am, as I was leaving LA the next day. It’s funny to listen to them both back to back as it shows the many mixed emotions I was going through during heartbreak, feeling strong and capable one minute, then distraught and confused the next. The only way through seemed to be to pretend that everything was fine or perfect whereas in reality, it was ‘Perfectly Untrue’. I can definitely say now looking back that this is the worst solution ever, but also I know that it is just a coping mechanism that people use as escapism. When you are in a weird or dark head-space, you see many versions of yourself that you didn’t even know existed. ‘Perfectly Untrue”s happy-go-lucky sound portrays the fake joy I pushed myself to feel in order to avoid the sad truth, which is displayed in the lyrics that are also coated in glitter and glamour – “dressed up in gold” and “dance until I die”.
Somewhere in Heaven
‘Somewhere in Heaven’ was half-written in June and finished in November. It was quite challenging to finish as I was in a different place personally, and a lot had happened in that space of time. Even though all the songs were mostly written in the same time frame, I was feeling very up and down every day, so if you were to place the songs in order of when they were written, you wouldn’t actually see a true development in my state of mind. They are collectively about a dark time; they are more positive than they sound. I think I used them as a way to let myself move forward, and ‘Somewhere In Heaven’ express’s a lot more true emotion about admitting I wanted to take more care in making sure things ended up with a sweeter ending rather than sour, as I was forcing myself to come to terms with reality by this point. It’s quite the opposite of ‘Perfectly Untrue’, which was more of a reflection rather than a present feeling.
Forever Forget
‘Forever Forget’ was the second song I wrote on the EP. I had gone away to write this EP to get everything I had to say out of my head, then to go home and draw a line under the way I was feeling as I realised I was dragging myself into the depths of hell a bit! ‘Forever Forget’ is about the painful and constant reminder you have of how things used to be, and all the ‘What if’s. It speaks similarly to ‘Let Go’ about how it is okay to leave things behind and move forward.
Let Go
I have always enjoyed writing songs that are clear and to the point, but I think ‘Let Go’ is the most honest and true I have ever been in a song.
Last year I had a tough time trying to put my thoughts into comprehensible words because I was emotionally confused and sometimes lost. This led me to try things out, like writing on a piano which I never really do as I’ve always started writing songs on a guitar. Somehow this allowed these words to spill out of me whilst sitting at a piano, after a very long and frustrating time of finding what I wanted to say.
The following week I was in LA, and I showed what I had written to my friend Alex Greenwald of Phantom Planet. He loved the song, and so I finished it with him out there at his house. We had no proper studio set up, and originally this was meant to just be a demo, but at the time the song felt so present to me that we decided there was no way doing a re-recorded version would have the same emotion. It was almost overwhelming as once we had finished it and I listened back to it, it was such a weight off my shoulders, and a slight sense of relief as I felt like ‘ah, this is what I’ve been wanting to say the whole time’.
