Utah scrap metalers Charlatan are gearing up to release their album "Remarkable" on April 7th and to celebrate we asked vocalist Grey Sorenson to tell us all about the single "China." Here is the story:
Quinn Allman, our producer Dan Whittaker, and I were in the studio shuffling through Quinn's hard drive full of song ideas. We came across this song that had these really eerie guitar bends that rung in the back of your skull (Quinn has the sickest bends).
When Dan and I expressed our immediate interest in the song, Quinn sent me a list of lyrics he had quickly written down as throwaways. We started joking about the very emo quality of the lyrics and started making up our own to the melody that he had in mind.
When writing lyrics for Charlatan, I write songs for me, not about me. I enjoy working out ideas in the written word that can help me later in life by being freely interpreted. Ironically, I have no qualm writing about me for other people's music because it can't be tied directly to me.
After a while, I decided to go out to my favorite writing spot; a green, splintered, hexagonal, picnic table, which has acted as a sort of meditative thought conjuring spot since we first started writing at High Vibe Recordings. Thinking that I was writing a song for Quinn, I decided to put thumb to phone screen, and dump out all my emo thoughts about myself.
That night I laid down the vocals to the first verse and chorus of the song. The song remained out of sight and out of mind for a couple months. By that time, Quinn decided to work on his project with his wife Megan Joy, and we (Charlatan) were in the process of writing the first songs for "Remarkable". Heath and Tyler had the rough draft of "China" saved in their phones and wanted to see if Quinn would let us rewrite for our own use, and he was more than kind enough to let us use it.
The project file had been named "China" after listening to the viral remix video of Donald Trump saying the word China over and over again. We ultimately kept the name to keep the joke going.
We restructured the song, rewrote the instrumentals, added another whiney verse about my feelings, and a bridge that pays homage to our previous EP "Nothing to Gain". That, my friends, is how Charlatan went about writing the self deprecating song called "China".
Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself and learn more about the album here
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