Writing music is different for every band and every musician. Some have their traditions and routines and some don’t. It’s a matter of what works. For Hello Monster, their song “No One’s Going Home Tonight” was born after a slight change of plans from their normal process. Check out how the song came to life and what it’s truly about below and don’t forget to take a listen to their new album P.S I’m Home.
Background
This song was one of the most collaborative songs that Hello Monster has written. We’d just about reached the halfway point of songwriting for P.S. I’m Home, and were at one of our all-day Sunday practices. We’d worked on some of the other songs we had various stages of completion, and based on the momentum of the practice we decided to try to write a song on the spot.
Before then, we’d mostly worked on songs that one of us had started individually, but somehow this time it was different. We decided two things up front: it would be in the key of d-flat, and we would have a lot of background woahs that would kind of carry the song. We got an initial chord progression in place, so Paul and I left Sid in the studio with AJ, our drummer at the time, to hash out the feel.
Within a couple minutes, we heard this great rhythm just pounding through the walls, and looked at each other to make sure that it was our band making that glorious noise. So we ran back inside, hammered out a structure, and threw in a pre-chorus to break things up a little bit. I tend to write most of our bridges, and I knew almost immediately that I wanted this one to have a build where the drums did flams.
In the first week or so of working on “No One’s Going Home Tonight,” we probably played it fifty or sixty times. We all sang “woahs” until we were out of breath and our voices were shot. We knew we were on to something, and as things came together, it only became more and more apparent.
Paul generally handles the first draft of lyrics on his own and the rest of us help polish the finer details once everything is more or less in place. Since it’s an upbeat song, he wrote about something all of us in the band know well: going out and living it up on the weekends. Naturally, you can’t just say “go out, have fun, and party while you can” (though that line might creep its way into a song eventually), but we wanted to instill a sense of urgency, a sense of belonging to something bigger, something outside your daily life. When you’re out, you don’t want the night to end, and, in a lot of ways, that’s at the heart of what this song is about.
We think (and hope you do too) that we’ve been able to put together a song that is in keeping with the tradition of songs like The Matches’ “Audio Blood” or We Are Scientists’ “After Hours” where one song can capture the excitement and feeling of being out and having a great time, even if it is only over the course of a few minutes.
Verse I:
We break out for the weekend and now
We aren’t sure just what to do with ourselves
But we got a reason to be dragging this out
Pre-Chorus:
What happens now we wonder
Who cares for tonight
Chorus:
We got all we wanted
We got all we ever hoped to need
So drop the bottle
Girl, it’s finally time to leave
This is our best chance now
The moment where we finally say goodbye
To where we are now
No one’s going home tonight
Verse II:
Just in time for the crowd to break out
If we want more we gotta let it all out
‘Cause we know that’s it’s all messed up
But that’s sort of the reason we came
And we found out we were just bored
We never believed that we’d be ignored
Now, we know what it is
Just another mistake they made
That we are paying for
