But what happens when you sit with a beautiful idea even longer? They spent a significant amount of time with a song called “Tinseltown in the Rain,” which pays tribute to Glasgow with some of their most timeless imagery and some of their best refrains: “Do I love you? Yes, I love you!” But as they listened to the way the melody flickered and swayed, ticked anxiously and reached toward the skies, they started seeing the song itself as a landscape. “In a sense that was the beginning of something,” Buchanan explained. “The bass goes down like a fire escape, PJ is making noises like tin roofs, we wanted that feeling of standing looking over a city. Without discussing it, that became what we were doing.”
And so, four decades later, A Walk Across the Rooftops still doesn’t sound like any variation on pop music it’s ever been saddled with: sophisti-pop, synth-pop, ambient pop, or what have you. Part of this was how and when it was made—state of the art but on a budget, between technological innovations—but also because of the compositions.
You could spend days inside the textures of “From Rags to Riches.” The wheezing, accordion-like synth that shuttles one section to another; the twinkles that recur like a pure signal between static; the percussive hits clanging like an engine failing to turn. But then you pair it with some of Buchanan’s most triumphant lyrics: about his “hope and good intentions,” the “wild, wild sky,” a “coat of many colors.” It’s like he’s dreaming a future from deep inside the machinery.
On Hats, the band’s 1989 follow-up and their masterpiece, he would define a subtler form of writing that leans deeper into dissociated imagery and heartbroken confession. Here, he was just setting the terms for his new language, assuming a slightly more conversational tone like the seen-it-all protagonist of a noir film. On dating: “All this talking is only bravado.” On ambition: “I write a new book every day/The love theme for the wilderness.” And, my favorite, an insight into the loneliness of his fellow hopeless romantics: “You are pretending love is worth waiting for.”
This was masterful songwriting upon impact, and part of the struggle was living up to the material. To get his perfect, pained delivery of “Tinseltown in the Rain,” Buchanan worked deep into the evening, repeating himself and using nearly every available track on the studio’s multitrack recorder, driving himself to the brink knowing that the label would be visiting the next day to hear the record’s ostensible first single. Finally his exhausted bandmates permitted him one more trip to the booth to touch up a line or two. They recorded the whole take, and one of the band’s signature songs was completed more or less by accident. True moments of grace, after all, cannot be rehearsed.
Did they learn from this? Of course not. It would be five years and one scrapped album before the follow-up arrived, and the wait would only get longer between each record after that. (It’s currently been 14 years since Buchanan’s last solo album.) But Buchanan has long maintained that these gaps are crucial to his creative process, always in the spirit of preserving the integrity of the art: “If you’re going to call someone when you really have a problem, then you want somebody that you fundamentally trust, and we try to do that on our records.”
