Songwriter Luke Elliot had a beast of a song on his hands and wasn’t quite sure how it would fit into the rest of his latest record. How interesting it is to base the completion of the whole off of a piece but this is the same principle that guided Elliot on his record The Big Wind when it came to fitting in the beast known as “All on Board”.
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“The whole process began and ended with ‘All on Board’. The biggest trouble was knowing when to stop,” said Elliot. “I feel like we walked away at just the right point. When I listen to it now, it’s just the right amount of huge.”
“It took me a year to finish this song. I went into the studio with an idea on the piano and it evolved and then it evolved some more into something we were all watching, but not really molding ourselves. It felt like this song was too big for us to get our arms around, so we just watched it grow, occasionally guiding it left or right. We would go into the studio while making the rest of the record, and just go back to this track once in a while and see how it was developing. But it stayed with us through the whole process. When it was ready, the rest of the album was.”
What comes forth is a bittersweet pop song with a haunting quality, raised by the strong and compelling vocals of Elliot. Elliot writes lyrics heavy on imagery, creating a seamless picture of the story and individual scenes. Additional choral style vocals support Elliot’s fierceness adding to the size of the sound. What lays underneath are well place string arrangements, utilized as an accent, never overshadowing the vocal essence of the single, paced by simple yet never faltering percussion.
The music video that accompanies the single is equally cosmic. It follows the narrative put forth in the lyrics scene by scene. It’s not just a bunch of pedestrian visual bait. The video is cleverer than that and will definitely leave you scratching your head afterwards. The production quality of the video is also of high caliber, featuring director Alex Herron.
“I met Alex at a commercial shoot my wife was modeling for,” recalled Elliot. “He was directing and we just started to talk about music. Then we met for coffee, he listened to the record, and asked who was shooting the video for ‘All on Board’. We discussed filming in Europe, but really wanted to get an American feel, so we went to California. He was an absolute gem to work with and was very focused and to the point. I’m a musical guy, but not so much visual. He was really able shape that part out of me. Left to my own devices, I would have just blindly wandered off into the Salton Sea”.
