In the second Anatomy of a Scroll, Music101 speaks to writer Tom Scott and producer Christoph El Truento about the Silver Scroll-nominated song from Avantdale Bowling Club, 'Friday night @ The Liquor Store'.
Auckland rapper Tom Scott told Music101 he wanted to capture the grim reality behind the party scene unfolding in Avondale, where he wrote the album.
"There's a line 'the waterhole of the s--thole', not that Avondale is a s--thole but ... it felt like a watering hole, like we're all congregating down there, just this one place, and there's this beautiful party but there's pain amongst it all, not everyone is just drinking because it's a lovely thing to do, it's like the pain of a long week, it's maybe sometimes trauma that you're running from, sometimes generations of alcoholism, and I've been guilty in the past of promoting it, so I just thought why not shed a different light on it.
"And I think maybe with maturity and at my age, where I'm not keen to just piss my life away, I could see it in a different light."
Beatmaker El Truento says it is interesting to see the song be nominated when it's intended to be segue track.
"[In] the original demo, Tom wasn't even really rapping, it was kind of offbeat, and more of a spoken word sort of long-form piece of music, so it didn't speak to me as a single or anything like that.
"I guess that's kind of amazing that it's jumped out and is up for an award. I can see how somebody would have some form of connection to the words and the space it puts them in, it's a very localised theme."
Photo: Supplied
The song was brought to life with the help of a short loop recording of a street musician playing on a makeshift guitar, he says.
"It had this very earthy kind of sound of the city going on in the background which kind of invoked the lyrics."
In fact, there a few different versions of the album as they went back and made more touches, he says.
"We said this album is finished and we mastered it and then upon listening back we agreed there was some missing pieces in the story, so we went back to the drawing board.
"The piano version [of 'Friday night @ The Liquor Store'] was the original version from that copy of the album, and I still really like that version but it just didn't slot into the story that we was trying to tell.
"It's a really beautiful piano piece that I felt was a shame to lose but the album at that point needed something a bit more aggressive."
The producer says he generally gravitated towards "more pretty sounding things", so it was a challenge to find the right sound to tell Tom's story.
"The part you hear that's kind of like the response to what he's saying or the deeper Friday night at the liqour store parts that come in, that's just him pitched down ... you also notice throughout the track the distortion on his voice gets harsher and harsher towards the end of the song, which is just building tension since it's not really a standard song format, it's almost like climbing a hill and then falling off at the end."
