Into The Ark have 25 songs written for their debut album.
The duo – Dane Lloyd and Taylor Jones – finished as runners-up on the last series of ‘The Voice UK’ being mentored to the final by Sir Tom Jones.
The boys are now getting ready to go into the studio in the New Year to lay down tracks for the LP but songwriter Dane admits it’s going to be hard to pick 14 songs for the final tracklisting from the ones he’s written.
Speaking exclusively to BANG Showbiz, he said: "I think I have about 25 songs, and I’ve got to get that down to 14. We are due to start recording it at the end of January or the end of February. It’s hard to pick because I feel as though I’m getting stronger as a songwriter so the songs I’ve written recently are better than the ones I’ve written in the past, you have to kind of live and breathe the songs too, it’s easy to like your own stuff but you have to be critical. We have about six ready to go on the album."
The pair – who spent the summer touring the UK and US with ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ singer Tom, 77 – intend to copy their idols, who include Ryan Adams and James Brown, and record their album completely live.
Dane thinks there is too much music on the radio which sounds "autotuned" and "too perfect" and he hopes people will appreciate their live approach to recording, something which they’ve already
He said: "We’ve actually just recorded an EP in Valencia. It was done completely live with a band, it was just like how they used to do it back in the 60s and 70s. It’s a five track EP and we did everything in one take. I know people just don’t do this anymore, there’s a lot of electronic instrumentation, and the vocals are autotuned, it all sounds too perfect. But some of our biggest inspirations are people like Ryan Adams, James Brown, Otis Redding and Tom Jones and they would have had to do it live back then. We managed to capture a bit of that magic on our songs and I hope people will be able to feel what we’re singing about and get a little experience of what we were doing. There’s a lot less production on this EP than on most of the tracks that are out there in the charts at the moment.
"It’s like Damien Rice recorded his ‘O’ album like that, and it’s one of the best albums ever. On some songs he sings out of key or his voice cracks but that shouldn’t bother you. The songs are here on radio are so polished and so perfect, I think it’s good to have a bit of a flaw in a track."
Into The Ark have just released new single ‘Straight To Your Door’ and will follow up that track with ‘Burning Love’ on January 5, 2018.