#but as a fellow synesthete i get it. it's sooo hard to describe the actual image in your head

[mrschwartz]

Alex Turner most likely has synesthesia: a compilation

“She floats like a niccy rush and stings like a B-flat” (The Blond-O-Sonic Shimmer Trap)

“When you’re experimenting with more genres, it’s so delicate. It’s like a chemistry set: you got like all the boiling tubes and pipettes and you add one or too many drops on the whole thing and it falls apart and you get the wrong colour of the smoke.” (x)

"If desire would be liquid, then it wouldn’t be something you easily sail through, but a rough sea that whirls you around. The rhythm of [Fireside] has those wild motions of desire. If desire is something liquid, it is a rolling boil–like when you’re boiling potatoes." (x)

“That sensation of longing for something or someone, if it were a liquid it’s not something you sail smoothly along in. It’s gotta roll and boil, or it bubbles and coughes and splutters, and I think we wanted the rythm to reflect that in the tune Fireside.” (x)

“I love the color of them shows, [Thunderbirds] and 60′s Batman as well, that technicolor thing. If I could make a song sound like the Joker’s laugh, when it’s all angled and pink... for me it sounds like that, technicolor. [...] I’d love to have drums that sound like that looks.” (x)

“Jamie’s doing a lot of that icy plucking in the background, adding a texture.” (x)

“Alternative Endings was [my idea for a bar name]. [...] You can see that in pink neon light.” (x)

“It was what became a line in a song called 'Aviation'–'The Colorama in your eyes takes me on a moonlight drive'–not completely unremarkable written down but when appropriated by this particular melodic idea and backlit by its chord progression it permitted me to glimpse into what seemed like a new constellation in my imagination, one that every time I heard the demo recording I was encouraged to try and traverse.” (x)

“Franz Schubert the composer said ‘there’s no such thing as happy music’. I always got a kick out of that. Not because I think that music has to be sad but because I think when it most effective there’s an element of it operating within a spectrum that has neither ‘happy’ or 'sad’ at either end of it. Music with lyrics in a language you don’t understand or no lyrics at all has the power to send vehement shivers through your body. It’s almost as if the melody or something else in there has an invisible direct line to the depths of the subconscious. This interests me greatly. I always wanted to use the word 'Colorama’ in a song ever since I saw Antonioni’s Blow Up. It was an unplugged neon light at the back of my mind for years. Some lyrics are declarations of love or hate written in blood or carved in a bus stop, in need of little or no melodic illumination. Some, I believe, are there almost entirely to facilitate it. If I ever thought about it at all I’m sure I used to think the melody was the vessel that carried the lyrics but more recently it has occurred to me that the opposite is often true. The problem with the neon sign analogy is that neon signs are invariably bolted to the wall and full of gas. Melody seems as though its poured rather than sprayed and doesn’t feel as though whatever holds it ought to be fixed to anything. I sometimes imagine each word to be made using a three dimensional open-top glass alphabet. Each letter built to harness and transport the mirror ball liquid marble of the melody. When the 'substance’ fills up the syllables they seem to shimmer and become weightless. With the addition of close harmony I see colours swirl together, parts of the lyrics glow and the way in which they float suggests that something like the 'star gate’ sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey is happening deep inside them out of view.” (x)

“The types of sounds, or the chord progressions, or the music I was composing, let’s say on the piano or on these recordings I was making, definitely informed the lyrics, I feel, as much as the films I was watching or anything that was going on in front of me. It often does seem like it really just comes from the music. Like, that seems to suggest things to me as much as, if not more than, everything else.” (x)

“I like what you say about the pieces in the puzzle. I like the idea that the other part of that puzzle is the music, that the melody completes the lyrics, that you can feel that harmony between lyrics and music, a whole. The lyrics are just a piece of the puzzle, not something you have to decipher, but something that goes together with the music…” (x)

“Because you hit a couple of things on the way there. One was Bond villain–that went off in neon in my mind.” (x)

“Lego Napoleon movie / Written in noble gas-filled glass tubes / Underlined in sparks” (Hello You)