Phil Pucci has a running list of “rules” he sticks to when he sits down to write a song for Pullover. One of them is that no song can be over three minutes long.
But another one that popped up since the five-piece rock band Pullover began their recording journey in the fall is that Pucci must write the lyrics when he writes the song.
Seems like a no-brainer, right?
Well Pucci, the vocalist and guitarist for the band — comprised of drummer Alex Smith, bassist Caiti Mason, guitarist and vocalist Nicholas Holman, and synth player and vocalist Brooke Weeks — hasn’t really been singing actual words to some of their songs during live performances.
“A lot of the lyrics for the songs I wrote in the last six months, have been songs that we’ve been playing for a year and a half,” Pucci explained. “I would mumble gibberish and the music we would play in small clubs, we play loud and nobody can understand anyway.”
So when Pucci wrote the lyrics to the songs the band had already been performing, he found himself boxed in by the vowel sounds he was emitting into the mic.
“It was very difficult to write lyrics because I mean, it’s like if you were given a prompt to write a poem but this line had to be eight syllables and then had to have this vowel sound here and this vowel sound here, it’s like a puzzle,” he said. “And not like a good one that makes you feel super creative.”
However, he was able to break out of that uncreative box and Pullover is in the final stages before releasing their new album, still yet to be named. It’ll be the band’s first release with the current members and the first the band has dropped since Repossession Blues in 2016, when the band was named Melt.
It’s OK that Pucci wrote the lyrics as almost an afterthought to the actual sound, as he revealed that the true focus of the album is not on the words, but on the music.
“The emphasis on this album is all on the melodies and stuff like that. Any time there’s a melody that I think is really strong, we double it with guitar, piano or something,” Pucci said. “So it’s a very, very melodic album.”
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