The Cinema released their fantastic debut record, My Blood Is Full Of Airplanes, last week, and Matt Malpass and Leighton Antelman have been kind enough to do a Track-By-Track guide to the record with PropertyOfZack. Today we’re posting the next three songs in the segment, so read up and check back in the future!

4. Say It Like You Mean It:
Matt: I think this song might have been started during the first batch of songs we wrote when Leighton flew in the first time to start this record. The original working title for this one was Kings, and we had a pretty boring chorus on it. I think after sending the rough mix of the song to a few people at our management we got the feeling that it could be a really cool song if we changed up and completely re-wrote the chorus. So I opened the session and literally highlighted the old chorus and all the music and hit DELETE and started from scratch. Leighton came up with a really cool chorus line after he got the new music and we went from there. One thing that I really liked that Leighton did with the track the first time I sent him the initial music was to do the little stutter thing at the beginning at the song where the kick and guitar just keep repeating, we ended up using that throughout the song. That’s one thing I loved about this project in general—I never would have thought to do the stutters until he threw them in there—I felt like we played off each other pretty well throughout this song. Also I think lyrically this song took a few lines from a song called Mexico that we never finished—I think that song had a bunch of cool lines in it but since we never finished it those lyrics ended up getting picked off and put into a few different songs, is that right Leighton?
Leighton: I did end up taking quite a few different lines off of a song called Mexico and adding them to various songs. I especially enjoyed making this track because we hadn’t written a song yet with this type of feel. With a minor type groove to it. Then once we added the new chorus it was really one of the stand out tracks to me.

5. Picasso:
Matt: Aside from Airplanes, this is the “original” Cinema song—I think it was either this song or Airplanes that I played for Leighton the first night we started conceptualizing The Cinema. At the time I played the idea of it for him I had a really terrible structure for the song with some scattered lyrics I put together. I think in the end the only original lyrics that made it were some of the chorus lyrics, and then we both re-wrote the verse and bridge music and Leighton wrote the rest of the song lyrically. There’s only a few songs on this record where my lyrics made it to the final stages but the cool thing I think is that Leighton and I were on the same wavelength on some of these so he could hear some potential in some of the lines and just ran with it to make them better. That’s one thing I really loved about this project though, was that it was a true collaboration where we both just threw it all on the wall and just saw what stuck.
Leighton: I was actually getting really into reading this Hunter S Thompson book one time while I was out in Atlanta recording vocals. At some point in the book I came across him talking about fur coats. So immediately in my mind the line, “It’s fur coats and fashion” came out. This was actually the very first song Matt played one late night in the studio. I thought it had such a unique vibe to it when the chorus hits. So I decided to add claps to the beginning of the song one night. For whatever reason it just kind of stuck and we left it on.

6. Kinetic:
Matt: I think this song came in the second batch of songs we did. After the first batch of songs I didn’t have anymore musical ideas laying around so after Leighton flew back home I spent the next few weeks/months writing tracks at night after hours in the studio. We were intentionally trying to give the album a different feel in terms of tempos and mix between upbeat/midtempo/slower songs and I think this was the first attempt at a more upbeat song. I think musically it was the first time I tried to start a song being more poppy, I think maybe I was trying to pay homage to Phoenix or something initially, but of course the music would always change once I sent Leighton the initial track and he would send me back his initial vocal ideas for the song. I think this chorus was actually originally just going to be the bridge but I loved the way that it made me feel so much that I suggested we use it for the chorus. I have a pretty vivid memory of hearing that line for the first time while I was standing outside the studio hearing it through the open door as the sun was setting and an airplane was flying above and it just had this really calming effect on me “yeah where we wanna be now, where we thought we’d be safe and sound, back on the ground”.
Leighton: This is another song that I changed the chorus two or three times before I was happy with it. I’m a picky son of a bitch if you haven’t caught on yet. This was also a song that probably made me step outside of my comfort zone the most out of the bunch. I had never wrote or been a part of anything really like it. I truly think you have to step outside what you’re comfortable with if you ever want to grow musically.