“Pressure” came out of nowhere in the summer of 2016. Anne and I played a handful of shows as a duo in May and June, which was a bit of an experiment to see if we could pull it off so we could book more shows when our bandmates weren’t available. The experiment was successful and we considered becoming a duo full time, but decided to give it a couple months to make sure that we were happy translating all of our material to the new format. We also wrote a bunch of brand new songs, a handful of which make up half of the CoalescE album. “Pressure” was part of those writing sessions.
One of the primary changes for me when we moved from a four piece band to a duo was a permanent move to playing guitar exclusively when we play live. Up to this point I played mostly keyboard, with guitar on a few songs, but as a duo it just made more sense for me to focus on guitar. As a result, I began to push my own limitations and experimented with different chords and phrasings. Another change was that we put more emphasis on doing interesting things with our vocals. The duo arrangement constrained the amount of instruments we could use, so I started thinking of our voices as two more instruments that need to be utilized, rather than just a vehicle for the lyrics where we trade off lead vocals and the other sings backup. “Pressure” is a great example of both of these changes in our approach. – JM
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