This is “Happy to be Here Diane”.

We’re an indie duo from Brazil writing little songs. This is our newsletter, in which we’re going to each write little thoughts about everything and anything.

This is our second EP, “The Guest Room Floor”, available pretty much everywhere. It is cool.

If I’m not mistaken, Hours was supposed to be (or maybe still will be, depending on João’s plans) on JP’s solo EP. He’s had that song for a while now, and back then, I was kinda hitting him up to mix and master his solo project.

So he sent me Hours recorded straight from his laptop mic. I don’t know how, but JP had a notebook with the best built-in mic I’ve ever heard.

He sent me the tracks, and the first thing that came to mind was the color orange. That late-afternoon orange, with dust floating in a beam of light coming through the window.

I kept thinking about how to bring that feeling into the song, and then I thought about playing with resonances. So I used an Ableton plugin that basically created feedback from the track itself. I duplicated the guitar track and threw that effect on it—that’s the sound you hear in the chorus.

That was the solo EP version.

But when it came over to our EP, I felt like it needed to blend in more. That’s where the almost-hidden tribal drums came in, with most of the highs cut out, plus that little piano phrase and the pulsing synth at the end.

Like the hours themselves, I wanted it to start and end kind of undefined. Not like, “Here’s the beginning. Intro. Verse 01.” So the fade-in was the obvious choice. And I think it matched perfectly with the full stop at the end.

Originally, Leandro and I started composing and recording songs in 2019, right before the big hellish pandemic. Both “Homespun” and “It Wouldn’t Matter Anyway”, from our previous EP, come from this moment. At the time, I was (and probably he as well) also recording songs as a solo act. To make the projects distinct, we tried to idealize what would make “Happy to be Here Diane” different. We came up with this idea of leaning into a more 60s songwriting style, very literal, Beach Boys and, for me, The Kinks. Very short and straightforward songs, less than 3min. I don’t know if “Hours” fulfills the criteria, but it’s from this spirit that the song came to be.

There’s nothing particularly deep about “Hours”. I was thinking about very concrete and literal themes for songs and remember reading something about the Golden Hour, this transient moment in time. Cue reading more about it and seeing pictures. The rest was stream of consciousness. Pure imagery mixed with anxieties. I particularly like the first verse.

For the “climaxes” of the verses, as someone who grew up with and started this partnership thinking of the Arctic Monkeys, I really like the eventual “very long verse with no breathing”, and just felt like it. Simple like that.

I remember “The night lilies, the morning dew” being based on “William’s Last Words”, by the Manic Street Preachers, but I genuinely can’t remember where the night lilies bit came from. Word association? Ah, the limits of human memory. Where are you, Richey? Where have you gone?

So, there’s nothing particularly deep about “Hours”. Unless, of course, there is. You tell me.