HT Interview: U.S. Royalty, A Glance into Mirrors
On their first full-length release – titled Mirrors – Washington D.C. up-and-comers U.S. Royalty piece a musical mosaic over the course of ten songs. Most early reviews of the album point to the Americana element, but the band manages to include sections of skinny tie ’80s themes, cutting hook-based rock and hushed ballads.
The songs don’t necessarily don’t flow per se, but rather serve as almost point-counterpoint, giving the record a appeal in getting to know both the songs as well as the song sequence. In the tender Voice Memo, one of the most introspective tracks, which closes out the album, singer John Thornley sings in earnest, “Where I hope to find some rest for my troubled soul.” For the rest of us, this song is a good place to find it.
Hidden Track: The reception to the album, Mirrors, has been terrific thus far, and rightfully so. I saw that you mentioned making a real shift in the songwriting approach for this project as opposed to the previous E.P. Could you describe what you did differently this time around?
John Thornley: Paul and I would demo and work out most of the songs beforehand. We would lay down and layer a lot of the parts then bring it to the rest of the band. Then we would fiddle with arrangements or add new ideas. It seemed to go faster than all sitting in a room together and writing from scratch.
HT: Also, how would you characterize the collaborative process with Gus Oberg? It’s not every day that a young band gets to team up with a Grammy winning engineer.
JT: We had known Gus for about a year before he worked on this project. As we were pulling together songs for this album, we really wanted him involved with the project because we felt he would be able to get the sound we had not been able to get on our recordings up to this point. He had seen us live, so he knew our live sound, but in the studio he was instrumental in helping us record something that could sound big and sweeping while at the same time layered and cohesive.
READ ON for more of Ryan’s chat with John Thornley of U.S. Royalty…
