If you’ve heard Mollie King’s latest single, ‘Hair Down’, the chances are you may have been struck by some of the song’s rather… let’s say unusual lyrics.
As well as being an ode to cutting loose on the dance floor and, indeed, letting your “hair down”, the track’s verses see her chastising barbershop quartets, throwing around sports metaphors left, right and centre, and giving some unlucky man the “caller busy tone”.
In an attempt to make sense of it all, HuffPost UK sat down with Mollie on ‘BUILD’ and gave her the opportunity to clear up some of the lyrical confusion.
Watch the video above to see what she had to say.
Discussing the recording process of the new single, which she collaborated on with Brian Higgins of music production house Xenomania, she explained: “When you normally go in to write a song, it’s usually done in about a day.
“The track will be ready, and then you’ll write the melody first, and then you’ll fit the lyrics in, and you’ll chat about, ‘what do we want to write about today?’, and then you crack it out, probably within a day.
“Whereas with Brian, you record loads and loads of different bits, and I say ‘bits’ because they’re really, really small sections, so you don’t know what would be a verse, what would be a chorus, you just hear these tiny snippets.
“And most of the time, they’re just melodies, there’s no lyrics so you can just sing anything you like over it, complete gobbledygook, and he then will decide which bits suit your voice the most, and which sounds the most authentic.”
She continued: “Once he’s found those bits, we start writing lyrics, and then we piece it together thinking, ‘that sounds like a good verse, and that bit is definitely the chorus’. It’s a bit like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle.”
Despite this intense way of working Mollie insisted: “You definitely have fun [in the studio with Xenomania, especially when you’re laying down the original melodies that have no lyrics, because you can sing about anything… so I’ll be singing, like, ‘eggs on toast’, ‘baked beans’ and all these random things.”
Take a listen to Mollie’s full ‘Build’ interview, where she discusses her time in The Saturdays and her upcoming ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ stint, below: