Travis announce upcoming album '10 Songs', reveal new hand-drawn 'A Ghost' video
After a four-year wait for Travis fans, the Scottish rock legends are back as they release their new single 'A Ghost' from their upcoming new album '10 Songs'. The new record is their ninth studio album and is due out October 9 via BMG. Along with the LP's announcement, the band have shared the new single with its accompanying music video.
Directed and drawn by Travis lead vocalist himself, Fran Healy, with his son Clay leading the stunning cinematography work, the new visual sees the frontman dressed in red as he is followed by ghosts. Notably impressive, the 'A Ghost' music video was done in its entirety whilst in isolation. Healy spoke on the video's inspiration and how it came about. "The video for ‘A Ghost’ started out as a mocked-up picture of me and 3 ghosts playing the last chorus of the song in a deserted alleyway. It looked cool so I took that image and back engineered a story out of it," he said.
"Just when everything was ready to shoot, the world went into lockdown, so we had this great song with no way to make a video. Frustrated and in an act of desperation, I decided to draw it," Healy explained.
"Before I was a singer in Travis I was a student at Glasgow School of Art so I am a good draughtsman, but I'd never done animation. I did a test to calculate how long it might take me. 16 hours for each, 10 seconds of footage. It worked out that it would take around 30 days which landed exactly on the deadline date. So I drew and drew and drew and drew. 2,500 drawings later, it was done," he shared.
Healy continued, "One day, I was watching a sequence back and when it got to the end of what I had drawn, it flashed and went into live-action. It looked great. This was the moment I realized I could shoot the mock-up picture of me playing with my band of ghosts in the alleyway. This helped in 3 ways. 1. Filming the last 47 seconds would save me 10 days of drawing. 2. I could recruit my 14-year-old son, Clay as the cameraman. He has a drone camera so could shoot it remotely and could use it as part of his school video project 3. Most importantly, we could film it socially distant. It was the most bizarre video shoot I have ever worked on. You realize how important proximity is to getting things done when it's taken out of the equation. But we did it and it turned out great. Clay has to wait till we release the song to hand in his video project."
Co-produced by both Fran and Robin Baynton (Coldplay, Florence & The Machine), and recorded at RAK Studios, the new album follows the band's 2016 studio album 'Everything at Once'. "As 2019 turned into 2020, ’10 Songs’ is an album about the way life comes at love and what love does to weather those challenges. It’s grown-up. There’s sizzling synergy in abundance, and many of its songs benefit from the almost psychic sense of mutual attunement that comes from being in a band whose line-up hasn’t changed in its entire collective lifetime," reads a press release statement.
There will also be cameo features on the upcoming album, including synth work from Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, lap steel from Greg Leisz (Beck, Emmylou Harris, Bruce Springsteen) and vocals from Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles that came about from a chance exchange on Twitter.
'10 Songs' Track List:
1. 'Waving At The Window'
2. 'The Only Thing (feat. Susanna Hoffs)'
3. 'Valentine'
4. 'Butterflies'
5. 'A Million Hearts'
6. 'A Ghost'
7. 'All Fall Down'
8. 'Kissing In The Wind'
9. 'Nina's Song'
10. 'No Love Lost'
