OnThe Walls
The Red Paintings
And now for something different, The Red Paintings are not your typical band nor are their songs regular radio fodder. They take the listener on a journey and not always to comfortable places. The have just released an EP called Walls and I had to get in touch with the band and get comments on these seven unique tracks.
Walls
Colour - back shadows with glimpse of sky blue/white
“This song was written on a late Sunday afternoon. I had just finished jamming with the band and we were going through a real ruff patch. Our drummer and I were not getting along at the time. All he would talk about was Creed and Nickleback (which was annoying the hell out of me) and he was playing our songs with overloads of terrible double kick and then to the left of me I had issues with topics like Buddhism and Christianity which at times don't mix well in the same boat. I was feeling weighed down and yet we never actually spoke about these things in the open. It was as if there were these walls around us not allowing us to let things out because if we did, the walls might have fell down and toppled on top of us, which may have meant the end of all. Well, certain things did come to an end but it turned out to be the best for all. Anyway this song was written pretty much in a whole afternoon and night. All the colours were inside me brewing up and this song was my therapy, my way of saying goodbye and telling myself that I was never going to give up no matter what. A huge thank you to Wayne (cello) and Ellen (violin) for their support at this time as they and the band helped me to make the song what it is today.”
The Streets Fell Into My Window
Colour- Red/White
“I love playing this song every time. Josh and I were spending a lot of time jamming together without the rest of the band to fix up all the songs and get prepared for The Big Day Out. He came to me one of these practices with what I thought was an amazing drum part that he mentioned he had been playing for some time. As soon as I picked up my guitar I knew exactly what to play on top of it and before I knew it I was yelling at the top of my lungs "It’s a doorway, a doorway sent from above". At the time, the world had just been hit with the news that an enormous tsunami had hit and killed thousands and I wondered about what it would be like to experience such a crazy event. I put it all these thoughts together and came up with the title. It makes sense waking up in the early hours of the morning to find your letterbox and rubbish bins etc crashing through your living room. What a fucked up crazy thing to witness. I remember asking Wayne to create something special for the intro and we decided on a piece from Through The Looking Glass. Which was an Alice in Wonderland type of spiraling event that seems to make the song so colourful yet so daunting. All the lyrics in this song speak for themselves. It starts with a calm morning and finishes with the death of many souls drifting away.” 
Dead Adults
Colour - Green/yellow
“The greatest gift in life is your imagination, once you loose that you have nothing! Funny, the only song I have ever written that I can see yellow in is Dead Adults. I'm not sure if this is a happy yellow. The yellow in this song brings hope, a beaming sunshine with a colour that warms you delightfully. This song is the outro to Dead Children (which I wrote last year) and will be recorded for The Revolution Is Never Coming album. Ellen says she hears a large journey in this song and I agree. Its about the time after you realise you are an adult and choose to loose you imagination. You think toys are silly and you find it hard to communicate with children and begin to talk to them like alien beings. My greatest fear is to loose my imagination, to stop wondering about the universe and the adventures on the yellow brick road. This is the song to bring back smiles and the joy of being little and not having to bow down to the daily routine of a nine to fiive job. Humans really are strange little creatures. We all make the choices.”
Mad World
Colour - Grey. The feeling of a cold day
“I've always said to myself that we should never do covers, let alone record one for a major release. But then one day I was sitting watching the movie Donnie Darko and listening to the movie's version of the song and thinking, wow these lyrics are so deep and meaningful they should be sang loud and with frustration. Well, that’s my personal take on it anyway. I love all the versions of this song I have heard and I think the covers I do of other people’s songs suck but when I play this song and think of my life and the story of Donnie Darko, I can’t help but feel good about what we do with this cover. When we play this song live, something happens to me and from what I feel and hear it also grabs the audience. I get to see them singing at the top of their lungs. It’s incredible. So it was decided, let’s record it live in the studio close our eyes and seem what happens.”
Portrait Of A Dead Soul
Colour- Its all over the place. This is a true painting
“This song is sad. Humans scratching themselves to the point where they’re drawing blood but are so far away that they can’t sense the alarm going off in their heads. How many of you have felt like this? I wrote the title to this song many years ago just before I became very sick and had to move back to my mother’s house. I always knew someday there would be a song to do this title justice and I finally wrote it. I started putting it together before the tour to China and finished the majority of the lyrics and last guitar parts while I was traveling through China's amazing roads. It was completed the day before the recording. The lyrics and string parts feel very jagged but that’s what it’s like when you create a portrait of a dead soul I guess. To me, this song sums up a person’s life from when they first sense and realise they’re alive to the day their soul curls up and they go to hiding in caves.
Walls - Alternate ending
Colour - back shadows with glimpse of sky blue/white
“Same as opening track but with a different ending. I would have preferred to have had this as the radio version because it makes more sense to me visually with this ending. It completes the song nicely and illustrates what I was going through at the time. No words, just instrumental crashings and the beginning of the end. Damn radio and their time limits. I despise time. Time should not exist.”
Signals From The Frontier
Colour - All the colours of our solar system
 “My major goal for The Red Paintings is to take an intergalactic tour with aliens across our solar system and beyond. This song is that journey and some of the things I hope to encounter. Maybe death will be the time the tour posters arrive for this tour but until then my imagination is running wild.”
Thanks to Trash McSweeney for the comments.
Rob Hudson
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