1.YOU ARE YOUNG This is quite a philosophical song. I think more than anything it's a message to myself to try and stay young at heart. It definitely feels like a message to my daughter too, in places. And also from the beginning it always made me think of standing in a crowd at a festival, a huge mass of people united by a feeling of bliss and freedom, which are things that are most easily associated with being young - as you get older it gets harder to find that feeling, and I love the idea that music can lift us out of ourselves, make us forget our everyday troubles, make us feel young. I also think the line "You've got to bring some good into this world" pretty much sums up my view of being a human being - I kind of feel that bringing some good into the world is about the best thing you can hope to do in life. I'd say it's the reason we make music. I think we all remember very clearly a moment when we were rehearsing this song together. We had spent many hours chopping and changing the structure of the song, trying to make it snappier and less ponderous, and when we eventually felt we had something worth listening to we went into the control room to listen to what we had done. When it got to the 'outro' section after the breakdown there was a real feeling of energy and excitement in the room, of knowing we had created something a little bit magical. Those are the moments you live for as a band. 2.SILENCED BY THE NIGHT Towards the end of 2009 I started to feel that I really wasn't writing enough songs. The touring for Perfect Symmetry made it hard to find time to write, and between trying to finish Night Train and write a few songs for Mt Desolation I realised that I wasn't making any progress on the new Keane album. I had read an interview with the band Doves where they mentioned a book called The Frustrated Songwriter's Handbook, which basically suggests sitting down at an appointed time with some friends and trying to write 20 songs (each) in 12 hours. So Jesse and I tried this a few times over the next couple of years - I wrote about 70 songs that way and a lot of the songs for Strangeland came out of that process. Silenced By The Night was one of them. I had been watching Peter Bogdanovich's fantastically inspiring documentary about Tom Petty, and I was interested in the way he often uses the same chord sequence over and over again, changing the melody over the top to make different sections (U2 do this a lot too!). Anyway, when you're doing this intensive writing thing you have to grab at inspirations quickly so I thought I would try the repeating chord thing, and that became the hypnotic piano riff in Silenced By The Night. I think the pace of it instinctively made it feel like a 'driving' song, and I've always loved driving at night, so the verse lyrics came from that. I couldn't find a phrase for the chorus and was running out of time, so I looked over the back of the piano and say a copy of Patrick Humphries' biography of Nick Drake. I remembered a passage in it about how when people get very depressed things can seem utterly hopeless in the middle of the night, but then when the morning comes life seems a little more manageable again. So the idea of trying to make it through the night to the dawn became the chorus of the song. 3. DISCONNECTED I wrote this when I was driving up the west coast of America. I suspect it may have had its origins in some argument or other with my wife, but I can't remember! But since that no doubt passed very quickly, I think the song has quite a jaunty feel to it, not too weighed down by its lyrical content! I think it's quite Beatles-y in that respect - sad words with a very 'happy' melody. I like the imagery of a relationship being like a decrepit house, especially the line about boarding up the windows. I think I only finished the song because I stumbled across the rough sketch in the studio one day and thought I'd have a quick listen - just at that moment Jesse came in and said "What's that? I love it! 4. WATCH HOW YOU GO This was a bit of a breakthrough song for me, in that it's a break-up song that isn't about anger or even regret, but more about acceptance and trying to handle loss with a bit of grace and understanding. I don't think I've managed to articulate that before. I love the fact that we've kept it very simple and sparse and resisted the urge to 'go to town' with the recording of it. 5.SOVEREIGN LIGHT CAFE This was the first song I wrote for the album, and for a long time it was the only song I felt was a definite contender for the next Keane album. I had a sketch of the melody on a cassette and was listening to it on a flight into Mexico in 2009. I couldn't come up with any words, but then I was sitting in a bus on the way from Sao Paulo airport to our hotel and suddenly the name of the old cafe on Bexhill seafront came into my head. I had actually always wanted to write a song with that title - when I was about 16 I remember being on holiday with Richard and having a song that went "Sovereign Light Cafe, down by the sea, go there with me" or something….it was a crap song! Anyway after a gap of many years the phrase popped back into my head and unlocked this idea of looking back to the beginning and trying to work out what had happened to me, and to us, over the last 15 years or so. I remember doing a demo of the song on the tourbus, and because I wanted to sing the vocal without disturbing anyone I sat in the back of the bus with a duvet over my head to muffle the sound. The glamour! -- Keane Taiwan: 基音乐团台湾粉丝团 http://www.facebook.com/groups/KeaneTaiwan/ --

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