A world, not a hit

Chasing a hit is chasing weather. Sometimes it falls. You do not build a house on that. A world, by contrast, holds in calm weather. It has motifs, words, a temperature.

The artists we want to work with often already have a fragment of a world — even if they call it something else. A way of speaking. A kind of melody. A humour. A sadness that is not a pose.

A hit, if it comes, comes from an excess of clarity, not from a calculation. You see it afterwards. Those who aim at it first end up writing songs that sound like other songs that “worked”. It is a room with too much light.

Building a world means repeating just enough to be recognised, and varying enough not to be bored. That is a balance. The label is there to hold it when the temptation to copy-paste gets strong.

We prefer three songs that belong to each other to one isolated song begging the world. One makes a catalogue. The other makes an incident.