Tom Chaplin remembers standing by the mixing desk at Heliocentric Studios in East Sussex, England. There, Keane recorded their 2004 debut Hopes and Fears. While listening to an early mix of “Somewhere Only We Know,” Chaplin felt the band had “come up with something that had an extra bit of magic” back then. Now 20 years after the release of the band’s breakthrough album, the band reissued Hopes and Fears with a collection of early demos and unreleased tracks.
“Making music is so often a process full of doubt,” said Chaplin in an earlier statement, “but on this occasion, there was something undeniable about what we’d created. Clearly, a lot of people felt the same when the album came out.”
Carried by hits “Somewhere Only We Know” and “Everybody’s Changing,” Hopes and Fears sold more than 2.5 million copies in the UK and more than 10 million worldwide. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the band’s milestone album, the box set reissue of Hopes and Fears features a remastered version of the original album by Frank Arkwright at Abbey Road Studios, along with a collection of previously unreleased demos and rare tracks, including “Snowed Under,” “Fly To Me,” “Something In Me Was Dying,” “She Opens Her Eyes,” “To The End Of the Earth,” “The Way You Want It,” and more from the original sessions, along with other memorabilia.
In January 2024, Keane also kicked off a worldwide tour to commemorate the album and will continue crossing the U.S. and UK before wrapping up dates in Bogota, Colombia on November 23.
Videos by American Songwriter
“When I think about these songs, I still picture us playing them in little rooms in pubs around the UK,” said Keane’s keyboardist and songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley. “I remember how exciting it was watching the crowds start to grow. Those songs opened the door to another dimension for us; everything that has happened in our lives since then was born out of that moment. It’s an incredible privilege for us that people are still listening after all this time.”
Rice-Oxley recently chatted with American Songwriter about living with Hopes and Fears for 20 years, the perils and joys of songwriting now, and figuring out what to do with four years’ worth of new Keane songs.
American Songwriter: Does it feel like 20 years have passed since the release of Hopes and Fears?
Tim Rice-Oxley: It’s like so many things in life. Sometimes your childhood starts to feel like it happened to someone else and becomes increasingly distant, in time. It’s a bit like that with Hopes and Fears. It’s been lovely to revisit it with intention, because obviously, we’ve been playing a lot of the songs throughout those 20 years. I think you stop thinking about them a little bit. You just think it’s “Somewhere Only We Know” or “Everybody’s Changing” and you put it in the set, and you start to take them for granted as things that Keane fans enjoy. So it’s been interesting to go back and scrutinize that time and where the album came from, and delve into where we were in our lives at that point.
I was a bit reticent about the whole concept because it feels a bit like a nostalgia trip, and it’s sort of looking backward, which I hate to do creatively. But it’s been lovely because it puts the rest of what we do in context, and I think it reminded us what we’ve been through together how much we love each other, and what a massive journey it’s been.
AS: Listening back to some of the old demos and revisiting the album again after 20 years, what is your connection to these songs now?
TRO: I think people always think of Keane as a romantic band and associate emotional songs or love songs. But I realize now that a large part of the album is much more about ourselves and the band and trying to get to where we wanted to go or get somewhere, to get out of our little town and living our life as a band and as friends on that journey.
“Somewhere Only We Know” is really about the band. And “Bend and Break,” to me, is almost the heart of the album that powers through Meet me in the morning when you wake up and that whole theme of “Let’s go again tomorrow and keep trying to get your music heard.” And there are love songs on the record, but so much of it is just about us and our friendship.
It’s funny because even when you’ve written the songs, you start to think of them as a certain thing. You start to perceive yourself almost through other people’s eyes and what you were actually trying to write about. Another thing that I had forgotten was that a third of the album comes from a place where we were trying to be a bit more electro in our set. We started off as a guitar band, and after the guitarist [Dominic Scott] left, we were floundering a bit and trying different styles. We went through a whole phase where we were all of our electronic influences, like Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, and Kraftwerk were really coming through. And you can hear that a lot in the demos, and in some of the finished album.
A significant chunk of the album with songs like “Untitled 1,” “On a Day Like Today” and “Sunshine,” they’re much more meandering, slightly grippy, sort of spacey, atmospheric, dreamy songs. And I always forgot this, so it’s been really nice to remember that there’s that whole side of our music, even in the early days.
AS: Thinking back to earlier days of Hopes and Fears and Under the Iron Sea (2006), how has songwriting shifted for you? Do songs still come together for you in the same way?
TRO: I don’t know if you’ve seen that interview of Bob Dylan, where he’s talking about his sort of early songwriting, how he had no idea how he ever wrote those songs. We feel a bit like that, especially with a song like “Somewhere Only We Know” that’s probably our best-known song. Over time, looking back with a bit of the benefit of hindsight, or rose-tinted glasses and the distance of 20 years, it seems like we were just sort of churning out those songs with our eyes shut, and it was all so easy.
I don’t know if that’s really true, but you do find yourself thinking, “I wish I could be turning out those songs like that every day, again.” I think the big thing that changes—obviously this is a bit of a truism and a bit of a cliche—but you do have that thing where you’re only writing to try make catchy songs that are going to connect with people in a pub in London, get people to stop in the bar and listen to you for the rest of their pint, rather than wandering off again. And you never have that same feeling again because you’re worried “What did the last album sound like? What’s the next album gonna sound like? What are the critics gonna say? What are the fans gonna say?”
AS: Did you fall into that mindset?
TRO: I don’t know if anyone can avoid that sort of self-consciousness. I always work really hard on my songwriting, but it has gotten harder. The other thing I love about that album is that your vision is so clear. We were so single-minded. What we wanted in life was to make our music, get out on the road, and live that life and that dream. And obviously, as time goes by, everything just gets more and more complicated. Or maybe you don’t feel things in such a simple, passionate way.
But simple is good in songs generally, because you want to distill some strong feeling that you’ve got into three minutes in a direct and uncluttered way that can relate to. The more your own life, your own mind, and your own emotions get more complicated and nuanced the harder it is to pack those powerful punches into a song. You have to work harder work to think clearly and write clearly.
AS: Where do songs come from now for you at this point in your songwriting?
TRO: I was talking to Tom [Chaplin] about this the other day. There’s something thrilling about being at the start of that journey where you’re thinking “What’s going to happen? What do I want? How can I get to where I want to go?” If you’re lucky in life, you end up somewhere vaguely around where it was you wanted it to go. And life hopefully gets a bit more comfortable in a lot of respects. But even if it doesn’t, your time and experience teach you to be more reflective about everything, and you don’t have such intense responses to everything. Whereas when you’re young, you’re like “I want it and I want it now,” and there’s no other story to it.
I don’t feel jaded, but you become more reflective and that doesn’t always make great music. It’s not that everything is super smooth-going in my life but for some reason, I find it harder to articulate stuff. There’s part of me that’s always thinking “I’d be nice to write more positive songs.” I think our songs do have a lot of positivity, but it’s not always obvious, I think the truth is it’s just boring.
Who wants to hear a song about how great your life is going? I’m pleased for you, but it’s not of any interest, and I always feel conscious of that. When you do get into something, and you do dig in, you manage to pull something out of yourself. Then it gets interesting because you do have that much more experience and see things in a different way. Personally, I find it a little harder to do, but I’m happy to work hard on it and to be patient. The other thing is, when we were younger, we just didn’t do anything else apart from trying to earn some money here and there.
Basically all we were doing was writing, rehearsing, and gigging every day, so you’re just in this flow all the time. As a writer, it starts to come without thought, and I think that gets harder as you get older because there are just so many other distractions in life. You start thinking about priorities. You can choose to spend all day every day in the studio, but you’re probably gonna have to make some big sacrifices to do that.
When I listen to it now, it just seems like those lyrics are so instinctive. I don’t really remember sitting down and laboring for months over one song the way I do now.
We do this thing, the 20-song game where you basically have to write 20 songs or 20 ideas in a 12-hour session. I can be sitting there for months thinking, “I just don’t know what to say,” but if you force yourself into this zone, things start to come, and it starts to bubble up to the surface. You have to make space for that as life goes on.
AS: Is there new Keane music on the way to follow Cause and Effect (2019)?
TRO: That’s the plan. We’ve got a lot of songs. When we had to abort our tour because of [the pandemic] as soon as I got home in 2020 I started trying to write, so basically, I’ve got four years’ worth of ideas and Tom’s been writing. We’re trying to write together a bit more, so there’s a lot of stuff floating around.
The other nice thing about this anniversary is that it really made us realize—because we’re sort of typical British people, full of self-doubt—and be confronted with the reality that a lot of people really love us. We’re not Coldplay or Taylor Swift. We’re not massive, but we’re big enough that we can go on tour and people come and see us. And we had incredible moments this year at Glastonbury and the Isle of Wight Festival and on our own tour. There’s this inescapable feeling that people value whatever it is that we do that’s really kind of energized us to do more, so we’re in a really good place.
Photo: Alex Lake / Courtesy of Reybee, Inc.
Leave a Reply
Only members can comment. Become a member. Already a member? Log in.