Cocoon

Song Notes

“Cocoon” was the first taste of the bands first album in eight years Kablammo!. It was first released as a free download on Ash Wednesday 2015. In the press release that accompanied the release Tim and Rick said of the track:

Rick: “It’s Ash at their frenetic best: a wall of guitars and a shot of adrenaline with a sweet melodic chaser. One of the earliest songs written for the forthcoming album, you can hear how excited the three of us are to be back in the same room. Having this much fun crammed into two and a half minutes is probably illegal.

Tim: “We chose it to come out first because it’s really short and snappy with that driving Ramones beat, It ticked a lot of boxes for something that might get across the idea of Kablammo!, which we wanted to be explosive and have a sense of fun about it.

In a track by track breakdown of Kablammo! with culturecollide.com, the band had the following to say about the track:

Tim: “We were toying with “Evel Knievel” starting the record but there’s something really great about “Cocoon”. We announced the album on Ash Wednesday along with “Cocoon” and it got a great response straight away. It ties in, somehow it sounds like early Ash. It’s weird because I wrote the music on ukulele. I think that is the secret. We needed to return to some sort of simplicity and the ukelele is a very simple instrument. And amazingly it translates very well to writing pop songs, which was a good new discovery. As soon as we started playing it, it was like ‘oh, this feels great.’”

Mark: “It came together in five minutes, couple of run throughs, get it down. It instantly sounded great. Coming back to it, it has all the elements of Ash that people relate to, melodic, up-tempo, full of energy.”

Tim: “Again, going back to the crazy drums. It hurtles along in a reckless way. The reckless way of Rick McMurray. Also it’s a song about re-emergence. It was one of the earlier songs written for the record. I’d done a solo album “Lost Domain” which is about losing my father to alzheimer’s. During that time I was quite depressed, a bit secluded, isolated. So it relates to that time. About re-emergence, being about to break out of that. Which worked as a nice metaphor for the band too.

Rick: “Someone said, when I played them the song - ‘It’s going to be a great opener for the set. You can all come out of cocoons.’ Haha. A Spinal Tap entry.

Tim: We’ll try it! Call Dave and ask him to order three Cocoons.”