News Track By Track: GRMLN - Empire

first work, ‘Empire’, is the product of Yoodoo Park experiencing the best of life first hand. That involves the Kyoto, Japan-born scuzz-specialist studying in California, and doing what everybody else ends up doing by watching ‘The Notebook’ countless times. Beyond finding time for some Gosling action, GRMLN’s been a musically prolific project since 2011. We profiled his work when he was a relatively mysterious new entity, and ever since he’s gone from strength to strength, landing an album on Carpark Records. It’s out 3rd June. We’ve got an exclusive stream of the debut, below Yoodoo’s own penned guide to each track on the record.

Teenage Rhythm
This song was about the naivety that I’ve seen in young love through watching other people’s relationships. Constantly moving from one crush to another, teenagers can obsess over someone intensely, until they are consumed by thought of that person. But the fact that a person’s interest can shift so drastically for another person as easily as they fell for the first person was idea of this song.

Blue Lagoon
This song was about how people are always wasting time remembering and recollecting their memory of the past when they should be living in the present. Whether it was a significant other or an experience, its better to live in the moment than re-live the same situations in your head.

Hand Pistol
The hand pistol was just a metaphor for people who become too attached to their partners/friends. It’s symbolic of a weapon that is used for protecting your relationships, but also as a detrimental weapon that can contribute to your own fatality/downfall. More like a modern day, double-sided sword.

1993
The idea of this song was that people shouldn’t hold back on their first instinct. Going out of your way to talk to someone, or being impulsive in nature can help spark new relationships as well as different situations one normally wouldn’t have experienced without doing so.

Coastal Love
This song was written in the eyes of a person who’s ever experienced a one-sided relationship. Everyone’s experienced this at least once in their life, and if they haven’t, they must be really, really, really attractive for this situation to not occur to them.

Do You Know How It Feels?
People are always unhappy and complain about their materialistic or current situation(jobs or status), but it is in their own hands whether or not they want to better themselves or to change their course in life. Instead of complaining about their problems, why not be different and do something about it. When I was writing this song, I felt that I needed to take action and do something with my time and not be static,
because time was running out.

Cheer Up
This was another song about naivety, and how people are constantly searching and falling for the wrong people. It shows how hard it is to fulfill equity in a relationship because the reality that a lot of relationships tend to lean more towards one-side.

Summer Days
This was a song I wrote in high-school that was just about moving away from someone that was inspired by the warm feeling of summer. But this was probably written during the peak of my naivety towards relationships because of the way my mind romanticized everything. It was definitely implanted from the countless hours of watching ‘The Notebook’ and ‘A Walk To Remember.’

Dear Fear
This was one of my most sentimental songs that I had written during that time because I wrote it during a conflicting time I had about myself as well as my life in general. It was a constant conflict of happiness and sorrow that I thought about. There would be instances in my relationships with other people that I would be in pure joy and ecstasy, but the constant bickering of reality that it wouldn’t last forever made me feel really woeful. And it led me to making this song.

Stream GRMLN’s ‘Empire’ exclusively on DIY below: