Sunday Sounds: The Strokes, “Life is Simple in the Moonlight”

This week is dedicated to fantastic friends. Especially my Strokes-loving friends Isabel and Kim! The past few days have been a peculiar mix of events and emotions and in an effort to put things into perspective, I’m just really grateful for the good people in my life.

Lyrically, there’s a poignancy that I’m struggling to figure out. Regardless of how well, or how little, I may understand it, or think I do, the music will always floor me.

The guitar solo in this song– no, actually all the guitar work here slays me. The overall sound of the Strokes is always so spectacularly rich and complex and this excerpt from an interview from the May 2011 issue of Guitar World magazine with Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond, Jr. provides a fascinating insight to that:

Guitar World: To a large degree, the Strokes sound has always hinged on that sort of loose and ragged interplay between your guitars.

Albert Hammond, Jr.: We’ve always played guitar like that. And everything we do is very thought out, even though it might not sound like it. None of it’s random.

Guitar World: Does one person tend to play more chord-based rhythms and the other more single-note lines?

Nick Valensi: Not necessarily. It’s whatever works for the song. We’ve had times where a song is written and we both have our parts worked out, and then in the arranging process one of us will say, “I’ll take your part and you take mine, and we’ll see how that changes the song.” We’re not one of those bands with lead and rhythm distinction. If anything, it feels like what we do comes off as counterpoint.”

“Counterpoint”? Oh my, I am in love.

The finale of Angles, with “Metabolism” and this song, just gets to me so much and I know that it has a lot to do with the guitar work. Not to get too cheesy, but it’s also seriously so inspiring. It’s also a little embarrassing to know that this is the song that I choose to follow my own from last week. :/ haha