I approached Laura Theis rather randomly a few years ago at one of her gigs, and told her with regret that I was going to need to produce her next album. Regret because I knew quite what an undertaking that would be. But what could I do? (It’s okay, Laura is an old friend, or this would obviously be weird and rude in equal measure.)
We sat down and worked out a collection of her songs that seemed like they would sit together well. And right from the beginning the strange and sparse ‘How To Spot A Traitor’ was going to open the album. Somehow it just seemed to set the tone of the album.
We recorded it (and much of the album) in the SAE Institute under the graceful assistance of Mr Dean McCarthy, and with vocal assistance from Ms Rosie Caldecott and Ms Ditte Elly. Laura and Rosie and Ditte have been singing together long enough to be able to harmonise like sisters, and without them the album would have lost a lot of its personality.
A radio presenter recently referred to this song as the kind of song that gorillas might dance to. In my mind, it’s the song that mysteriously plays in entirety on your car music system late at night on a winding hill road, just before you mysteriously drive into a canyon and explode into flames.
This track is from the forthcoming album ‘Badass Snow White’, which will be released on 28 October 2016.