29/03/21
This song will always be special to us – we just never really thought we’d release it!
“Turn The Page” was the first piece of music we wrote together back in 2016. We both had some down time between gigs, work and uni and decided to hit the studio and see what we could come up with. The initial idea came from Lauren who had been watching the detective series Marcella and liked the theme tune. “We should write something like that!” “Aye! Let’s do it!” Armed with a couple of synths and a Moog app on an iPad, we started to experiment with sounds – mainly fuzzy bass ones – and hit record.
Initially, it was a slow burning instrumental and it felt like we’d created a mood rather than a song. We wanted to experiment with sounds that wouldn’t really have suited anything we were doing at that time and quickly everything began to revolve around the wobbly synth bass you hear in the intro. The electric guitar was added to counter all the sinister low end and we were pretty chuffed with ourselves and how it was sounding. “This is good!!”
Some haphazard drums were drawn in on midi before either of us knew much about programming and then Lauren came up with the lyrics…
The bass sound created such an atmosphere – as if you’re trudging through mud and not getting anywhere fast. The ‘terrified to turn the page’ hook came out as soon as I stood behind the mic. Naturally, every note stayed on the same pitch and the delivery was, rhythmically, a little broken – I suppose I was mimicking that feeling of being stuck or held somewhere. This was a totally new territory for me as a singer. It felt freeing to layer up ideas and follow the feel of the track rather than write a complete song at a piano before recording. There was very little melodic guide in the music so I was kind of speaking, kind of singing and it felt fitting. When the music drops, it feels like breaking out or escaping. Instinctually, I just made sounds and didn’t worry about words. I wanted to continue the ‘wings clipped, trapped in her cage’ analogy so it was important for the melody to soar as soon as the beat drops
– LG
If I’m honest, I couldn’t even tell you what the Marcella theme tune goes like now or if we’ve completely ripped it off – whoops if we have! – but this idea sparked something in us which led to us starting Novasound and our creative partnership.
We put “Resonant Evo” (the song’s working title) away for a couple of years after that but often referred to the approach and synth sounds we used on it for other projects. By 2019, we had our own studio and were recording artists and composing music for theatre and we decided to make The Girl Who Cried Wolf a place to put our own writing. Fast forward to our first headline show (remember gigs?!) and we’re thinking, how can we make this different from our usual set? Well what better opener than the dark ambient “Resonant Evo”?
And then Covid happened and everything stopped for a bit…
We’ve came back to this track time and time again and so, when we were putting together our first EP as The Girl Who Cried Wolf we couldn’t leave it out! It was a great process revisiting the production and mix: bringing out the sounds that were almost hidden in the earlier versions and redoing drums and percussion to support the hook. It took a whole new life! We’d gone from a deep atmospheric soundtrack piece to a dark grungy electronic song with vocals that wrap right around you and there was nothing more fitting to open the EP.
And now we have an official music video made by Duck Duck! The visuals are taken from the 1963 Italian giallo film, The Girl Who Knew Too Much, and takes us back to that original concept of it being the soundtrack for something bigger.
The song resonates more with us now than ever. Since we messed about in a studio back in 2016, the global conversation about gender, consent and equality has escalated to a new level entirely. For us, there’s something striking about how few words are used in this track to sum up a universal female experience.
