Silk Screens: Erika Spring – “Hidden”

Jul 5, 2012 by PORTALS

The NYC-based singer Erika Spring (one third of the lovely Au Revoir Simone) opens up and gives us some personal insight on her new single, “Hidden”, from her upcoming self-titled EP out July 10 via Cascine.

This song blossomed out of a synth idea at my rehearsal space.

Here is an early demo of the song:

Erika Spring — “Hidden (Demo)”

I called it “Yama1″ because I made the demo on my little Yamaha. I remember the night I made the demo, I had to be in the city (as opposed to Brooklyn) for something and then I ate dinner by myself at Whole Foods on Houston and then walked up to 14th to take the L train home and I just listened to this on repeat trying to think of words or parts to add, etc. But I just remember being really captivated by the repetition and the beat.

The original beat in the demo was a loop that I downloaded from some freesounds website. But when we recorded we started from scratch and made something new and loud and rad. I like some of the funny demo lyrics that didn’t make it into the final version. ”blink one eye to make a sound / your drink is dry your moods are tactile” for example. Pretty weird. Weird to put the word tactile into a song. “too close to see you’ve blidden.” I didn’t think anyone would accept my made-up conjugation of the verb “to bleed,” so i changed that lyric. and then “found outside with fevers high / you picked this fight / you’re in one out one.” also just weird place-holder lyrics but also cool/random.

Some of the lyrics have to do with a guy I was seeing. The strangeness of being really close to someone for a short time. I don’t remember exactly what music I was listening to at that time, though I was DJing a lot and was drawn to more epic sounds, but I had just moved into a new apartment, was settling back into home after months of touring. Still feeling pretty outside of myself.

Here are some images of that place where I was living then: