After a five-year break, ex-Afghan Whigs frontman Greg Dulli has resurrected his Twilight Singers project for a fifth album, Dynamite Steps, out February 15. SPIN scored an exclusive track from the LP, “On the Corner.” Listen below!
Dulli, who also records as the Gutter Twins with former Screaming Tree Mark Lanegan, tells SPIN that “On the Corner” is the oldest of the Dynamite Steps material and was spontaneously written about a year ago at Eagles of Death Metal guitarist Dave Catching’s home in Joshua Tree, CA. “I accidentally turned on the drum machine on his organ and I couldn’t turn it off,” says Dulli, 45. “So I just wrote a song on top of it.”
As the song builds with piano, live drums, strings, and gritty electric guitar riffs, Dulli paints sexual visuals — “Spread your legs”; “Lick your lips”; “Desire!” — in his gravelly voice. But Dulli says even he doesn’t know what, exactly, his lyrics mean.
“I try to find words that sound good and that my mouth enjoys saying,” he says from his home in Los Angeles. “But their meaning usually doesn’t come to me until later, if it ever comes. I’m like Jay-Z in my approach; I’m big on the flow. I’ll come up with a melody and then freestyle, picking the words that work best in the process.”
Dulli, a movie buff, says his lyrics in “On the Corner” have a cinematic feel: “My lyrics are very impressionistic and that song sounds like a movie. When I hear it, I think, ‘Wow, I don’t know what’s going on or what that’s about, but I’d like to be a part of it!'”
Listen to “On the Corner” below, then sound off in the comment section.
LISTEN: The Twilight Singers, “On the Corner”
