Nate Ruess Details Every Track on ‘Grand Romantic’ Solo Debut
For the first time in his career, Nate Ruess is on his own. Following stints with the Format and fun., the singer is preparing the release of his solo debut Grand Romantic, out next week via Fueled by Ramen. From songs that sample old fun. lyrics (“AhHa”) to features from musical heroes Jeff Tweedy and Beck, Grand Romantic is the end of an era that catapulted Ruess’ band into the Top 40 and the launch of one he is helming all on his own.
Part subdued and part theatrical, the LP’s creation and subject matter was influenced by a serious romance with designer Charlotte Ronson. Many of the album’s lyrics deal with love and commitment, and Ruess takes a deeply personal look at his own life in the process. Before and after a train ride from Paris to London, he spoke with Rolling Stone about each song, picking apart how they were created and what they mean to the new Nate Ruess.
1. “Grand Romantic (Intro)”
That song used to be a whole different thing when we first started the album. I always had that melody, and I figured it would be a whole bunch of interludes throughout the album. As we started to work through and record strings for the song “Grand Romantic,” I started freestyling over it. We always had that big choir.
We had finished the album, and we decided that we didn’t need any interludes. It felt pretentious to do, and it already felt like adding too many tracks. I like to keep albums usually at 10 [songs], and we ended up with 12. Interludes would’ve brought it up to 14, and it would’ve felt a little too conceptual. We finished the album without the intro, and “AhHa” didn’t feel like it set up the album properly. It was the very last day before we had to turn in the master, and we were up until 5 o’clock in the morning recording in my house and rearranging that intro. It was supposed to be turned in three hours later. We just reached a wall at the end of the night, and I woke up in a panic and called my engineer and said “Can you please do whatever you can to make this sound better?”
Between him mixing and mastering it, I love the intro. If you listen, you can hear James Gadson. He’s this legendary drummer who played on all the Bill Withers songs. [Producer] Jeff [Bhasker] had recorded him playing drums for the Beck song, and he just got all these great James Gadson, 70-year-old drummer beats. You can hear the drummer singing and one guy talking, and that’s James, which is pretty exciting.
2. “AhHa”
I wrote “AhHa” about two or three years ago, and I always knew that I wanted it to be the first song on whatever the next album I’d make would be. I was on tour with fun., and I think Some Nights was pretty big at the time in the States. I was laying in my bunk, and somehow I started hearing this laughing. I thought it would be interesting to freestyle over the laughing. A lot of the stuff I’m singing on the song is from the first take and off the top of my head. Not only melodically, but lyrically. I went into the studio by myself and recorded the laughing. I did eight different voices of me laughing, and then just started singing over it. Because I heard this song as an evil twin to “Some Nights,” I heard this song as an outro to “Some Nights” but a prequel to my new music.