San Francisco based, indie pop duo Cathedrals recently dropped their latest single “Behave.” The track and its video premiered in a feature on Consequence of Sound where the band’s Brodie Jenkins shared, “We are so often told to repress, tame, hide, hold back. But it’s so much more fun to break the rules. So the lyrics morphed into an expression of self-empowerment and a cheeky celebration of sexuality and love, the voice of the song is confident, irreverent and fearless.”
We spoke with Johnny to learn more about the song’s production and inspiration. Keep reading for more!
Johnny Hwin: The song started out as a trip-hop-inspired beat with gibberish vocal hooks that I had forgotten about in my library of unfinished files. Brodie came over sometime a year later to lay down the foundational lyrics that would end up becoming most of the vocals you hear on the track today. I ended up producing an electronica version around the vocal stems with my buddy N2N who lives at Agape (the co-op that houses our studio) before Brodie and I stripped everything down to just voice and piano as a way to really get down to the essence of the song as we were having trouble structuring the production.
With this fresh start, the bass line melody for the verse popped up randomly one day on a snowboarding trip and somehow worked perfectly atop a variant of the original trip-hop beat—but it wasn’t until that February in LA did everything come together with my buddy Danny Garibay (who helped pair down what would become the intro and the bridge) and also Josh Jacobson, who I had randomly met at School Night and jammed with a week later on what would become the bass-line groove of the chorus of the song.
With this new production direction nearly 4 versions in, we finally finished the song with our close friends Tim Wood (who played guitar on Unbound) and Max Savage (former engineer/co-producer of our EP) who helped us narrow the scope of the track by focusing on the best parts of each previous iteration. Big love to our friends, old and new, for helping us get this one across the finish line.
