Hey guys!
It's storytime time!
I wish we could all gather around a campfire and listen to these interesting stories together.
But since that's not possible (For now! We could always host a house in the sand summer camp!), we can just pretend while we read the stories.
I highly recommend you grab your headphones and a warm drink, and listen to the song while you find out how it came to life.
Today we're getting an in-depth story, which really allows us to go on the creative journey with the artists.
- Behind The Song -
"Young Wolves" by Racoon Racoon
Racoon Racoon are a chamber folk duo from France.
Léa and Léonard, who have been a couple for eight years, started writing music together in 2015, while they were living in Belgium.
They soon had enough material and released their debut EP, "Our Love's Funeral", in February 2017 via the German label Majestic Casual Records.
Their second EP, "Dawn Chrous", was written in the heart of the Italian Alps and released earlier this year.
Racoon Racoon recorded in Belgium, and together with musicians from Brussels' Philharmonic Orchestra such as Thomas Fiorini (double bass) and Emile Verstraeten (violin, mandolin) which Léo had met while working as a set-up engineer for Ramin Djawadi.
In July of 2018 they released their stunning cover version of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound Of Silence" and made us all fall in love with their sound.
Léa and Léo are currently gearing up to release new music in 2019.
To shorten the wait, they are looking back on their past releases and are sharing them with us again.
The wonderful Léa took the time to chat us through the story behind "Young Wolves":
""Young Wolves" was written in the very first days we arrived in Brussels, Belgium, in 2015.
I (Léa) have been moving a lot all my life, but it was the first time Léo left his hometown (Bordeaux, France) to settle abroad, and it was quite a chance. Furthermore, our first weeks were quite uncertain; no flat, no job for him, we kind of left in a hurry because I found an intership there, so that was our unique lead, the rest followed right after.
So yeah, Léo began to write this song being alone with a ukulele in a crappy flat... Not glamorous at all. Maybe that's why this song is so ambiguously sad, waving goodbye to the past and saying hello to a very uncertain future! In the moment it just feels hard to let go.
Long rainy weekends locked up in our flat in Brussels pushed us to experiment music together...
That was a first in 5 years. We find tuned "Young Wolves", arranged the melody, changed the lyrics and started writing a few songs. "Our Love's Funeral" was the first one entirely written and composed together. After Christmas that year, we started to think about recording them as a minimalist acoustic EP and began to wonder when and where we could record them.
Being both interns at that time, we had zero money to invest in the project... Léo was working as an assistant in a big studio called Dada along with two friends, Baptiste and Marin. We waited for weeks to have the studio empty to start recording... The opportunity finally came out in March: an empty professional studio for a FULL weekend just for us! We set up 5 mics (Neumann, U47, U67) on Saturday and recorded the 6 songs live during a long session engineered by Baptiste that ended around 5am...
On Sunday we did a few backings, Rhodes and Philicorda.
The recording process was a bit done in an emergency cause we knew there would be no opportunity for re-recording. And as a result, it sounded too demo, because Léo just had one classical guitar for the session, the only instrument he brought to Belgium. So he spoke to Thomas Fiorini, a double bass player he met while working on classical music recording sessions for Ramin Djawadi (Game of Thrones soundtrack composer).
Luckily Thomas loved our songs and we recorded his parts a few weeks later, tracking everything first take. Thomas was a real game changer. Léo mixed it in August, right after we moved from Brussels to Turin, Italy. Told you, I have a thing for movings. Our first EP was born.
We've always been amazed with how the audience welcomed this song, to us it doesn't sound the best, because we know, or think we know, we could have done way better. But every single time we've tried to reinterpret it so far, it was a failure, haha.
This track just has a peculiar vibe, someting really nostalic and far away... A Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi that makes its imperfections perfect to anyone who listens, at least that's what we're told. The future will tell us if we can improve it or not! :)"
Listen to "Young Wolves" right here:
Racoon Racoon online: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Instagram
Thank you for your visit!
Racoon Racoon are a chamber folk duo from France.
Léa and Léonard, who have been a couple for eight years, started writing music together in 2015, while they were living in Belgium.
They soon had enough material and released their debut EP, "Our Love's Funeral", in February 2017 via the German label Majestic Casual Records.
Their second EP, "Dawn Chrous", was written in the heart of the Italian Alps and released earlier this year.
Racoon Racoon recorded in Belgium, and together with musicians from Brussels' Philharmonic Orchestra such as Thomas Fiorini (double bass) and Emile Verstraeten (violin, mandolin) which Léo had met while working as a set-up engineer for Ramin Djawadi.
In July of 2018 they released their stunning cover version of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound Of Silence" and made us all fall in love with their sound.
Léa and Léo are currently gearing up to release new music in 2019.
To shorten the wait, they are looking back on their past releases and are sharing them with us again.
The wonderful Léa took the time to chat us through the story behind "Young Wolves":
""Young Wolves" was written in the very first days we arrived in Brussels, Belgium, in 2015.
I (Léa) have been moving a lot all my life, but it was the first time Léo left his hometown (Bordeaux, France) to settle abroad, and it was quite a chance. Furthermore, our first weeks were quite uncertain; no flat, no job for him, we kind of left in a hurry because I found an intership there, so that was our unique lead, the rest followed right after.
So yeah, Léo began to write this song being alone with a ukulele in a crappy flat... Not glamorous at all. Maybe that's why this song is so ambiguously sad, waving goodbye to the past and saying hello to a very uncertain future! In the moment it just feels hard to let go.
Long rainy weekends locked up in our flat in Brussels pushed us to experiment music together...
That was a first in 5 years. We find tuned "Young Wolves", arranged the melody, changed the lyrics and started writing a few songs. "Our Love's Funeral" was the first one entirely written and composed together. After Christmas that year, we started to think about recording them as a minimalist acoustic EP and began to wonder when and where we could record them.
Being both interns at that time, we had zero money to invest in the project... Léo was working as an assistant in a big studio called Dada along with two friends, Baptiste and Marin. We waited for weeks to have the studio empty to start recording... The opportunity finally came out in March: an empty professional studio for a FULL weekend just for us! We set up 5 mics (Neumann, U47, U67) on Saturday and recorded the 6 songs live during a long session engineered by Baptiste that ended around 5am...
On Sunday we did a few backings, Rhodes and Philicorda.
The recording process was a bit done in an emergency cause we knew there would be no opportunity for re-recording. And as a result, it sounded too demo, because Léo just had one classical guitar for the session, the only instrument he brought to Belgium. So he spoke to Thomas Fiorini, a double bass player he met while working on classical music recording sessions for Ramin Djawadi (Game of Thrones soundtrack composer).
Luckily Thomas loved our songs and we recorded his parts a few weeks later, tracking everything first take. Thomas was a real game changer. Léo mixed it in August, right after we moved from Brussels to Turin, Italy. Told you, I have a thing for movings. Our first EP was born.
We've always been amazed with how the audience welcomed this song, to us it doesn't sound the best, because we know, or think we know, we could have done way better. But every single time we've tried to reinterpret it so far, it was a failure, haha.
This track just has a peculiar vibe, someting really nostalic and far away... A Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi that makes its imperfections perfect to anyone who listens, at least that's what we're told. The future will tell us if we can improve it or not! :)"
Listen to "Young Wolves" right here:
Racoon Racoon online: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Instagram
Thank you for your visit!
Credits // Words (Intro): Vanessa Jetwash | Image & Words (About Song): Racoon Racoon
