Album Description
"Candylion took form in the spring of 2006 over a fragmented 2 week period at Gorwel Owen's Ofn studio in Llanfaelog, Wales. My ears were happily ringing from a few months touring with the Super Furry Animals and I had a batch of mellower acoustic songs I wanted to record quickly and get out of the way before the next speaker-blowing SFA record. Once in the studio however I got carried away and found myself in a nostalgic mood, pining for some of the music I grew up listening to. The cornerstones of this record became the soft vocal sound of Psychocandy-era The Jesus and Mary Chain coupled with the sonic sweetshop of daisy age hip hop. Coincidently I had been listening and dancing hard during this period to a lot of my parents' old 1960's and 70's Welsh language pop, folksploitation and progressive rock 7 inches whilst helping Finders Keepers Records compile an album of the period which was called 'Welsh Rare Beat'. With all these pieces of my past swimming around my brain I dropped a lot of slow-mo solo acoustic numbers and built up a bedrock of varied sounds, inviting my friend Owen over to add double bass, and Lisa Jen from the band 9bach - who comes from my home town and shares my Bethesda accent - to sing. The atmosphere at Gorwel's house was free and easy so I felt confident to mess around with the English and Welsh Languages; working in a 15 minute long ballad dealing with Skylon, master of the skies and even recording a duet with Lisa in really bad Patagonian Spanish which fits in with my eventual goal of killing off all the colonial languages with bad grammar. To finish it off I searched further afield and stopped by in Brixton for a day to add some strings courtesy of Sean and Marcus of The High Llamas and finally hooked up with Mario Caldato Jr (who mixed the last 2 furry records) at his home in Rio de Janeiro for a week to mix the thing and add some percussion and flute. I headed home with this record burning in my hand: Candylion, an album essentially of 11 songs for the acoustic guitar and voice. It was a joy and adventure to make and I hope it floats your boat along too for a while, wherever you may be going. " Gruff Rhys, November 2006
