Savage Garden "Affirmation" Second Studio Album To Be Released On November 9, 1999 The First Single - "I Knew I Loved You" - Released In October, 1999 Australian-bred Savage Garden defies ease of definition in a modern-day music world where acts are packaged into one of a handful of neatly - and yet often limiting - niches. Instead, the duo of singer/songwriter Darren Hayes and tunesmith/ instrumentalist Daniel Jones harkens a day when intelligent lyrics, gloriously accessible melodies and crafty production illustrate music for the masses in their most illuminated form. Through worldwide sales of 11 million of its 1997 self-titled debut, Savage Garden has conjured a definition of pop music with the most positive connotations, thanks to their worldwide hit singles, "I Want You," "To The Moon And Back," and "Truly Madly Deeply." With the release of their emotionally-charged second studio album on Columbia Records, the 12 -track, "AFFIRMATION," Hayes and Jones are embarking on a brave new journey, more intimate than ever and yet with a reach that's universal via its prevailing themes of love and love lost, despair, and the hope and faith that come from learning to channel emotions into lessons learned. The album, which was recorded in San Francisco and New York, was produced by the Grammy-winning, Walter Afanasieff (Ricky Martin, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Michael Bolton), with Hayes and Jones co-producing and writing all songs. "Musically, lyrically, and performance-wise, we wanted this album to grow out of something natural," says Hayes. "It's almost beautifully sad, in a kind of bittersweet way." Hayes practically forced himself into emotional upheaval by transplanting from his home in Australia and moving to Manhattan for a year in 1998, to feed off of the city's ironic mix of intoxicating adventure countered by its sometimes consuming loneliness. "I placed myself in very adverse conditions because I was intent on making a record that could be a soundtrack not just to my life, but to everybody's lives," Hayes says. "I experienced very real things, where I had to make new friends, to miss my family, to carry six bags of groceries from the corner market to my apartment without a car or a trolley - just the normal day-to-day struggle of being in a new place." And while there are themes of loss and emptiness, Hayes says that lyrically, the project consistently focuses on looking past such despair. "This is hopeful sadness. I don't wallow in self-pity. Elation and pain are experiences that make you realize you're alive. Thank God you feel them; otherwise you'd be numb. That would be the worst thing," he says. Musically, "the horizons really opened up for us in terms of sound," says Jones of Wallyworld Studios, the cutting edge San Francisco-based complex owned by Afanasieff, where much of the project was tracked. "The expertise of his people and the quality of the equipment allowed us to experiment with sounds and techniques that weren't accessible to us the first time around. We wanted to infuse some elements of techno and keyboard sounds with guitars and still get the emotion through with the vocal on top. We were able to play around with a lot of samples and do some obscure editing with a lot of loops." "It was important to make sure every song sounded different, so one of the biggest things we achieved was bigger, better production with a whole new bag of editing and instrumental tricks," Jones says. Among the tracks on the album is first single "I Knew I Loved You," a sweet, scintillating ballad. The song glitters with devotion and the joy of true love: "I think I've found my best friend/I know that it might sound more than a little crazy but I believe/I knew I loved you before I met you/I think I dreamed you into life." "It's a very simple love song," Hayes notes. "Nothing else on the record is as pure as that one, and I think it was essential for this album." "There was a sense of innocence that was missing between the first album and this one," Jones adds. "We needed to find that place we started from and be able to identify again with 'Truly Madly Deeply.' I think it turned out beautifully." Other highlights include the hitworthy title track, a free-wheeling romp of nearly two dozen one-line life lessons, learned through both adversity and good fortune; "Two Beds & A Coffee Machine," a startling and tragic piano-based take on spousal abuse; "The Animal Song," the percussion-soaked anthemic roust also found on the soundtrack to the recent Diane Keaton/Juliette Lewis film 'The Other Sister'; and "I Don't Know You Anymore," which tells of visiting a loved one from the past and recognizing that they have moved forward with their life ("The picture frames have changed/So has your name"). In addition to a more personal lyrical palette and the increasingly textured instrumental presentation, "AFFIRMATION" also brings on a clarification of the roles that most comfortably fit the pair of longtime collaborators and friends - who wrote their first album holed up in a one-bedroom apartment in a rural section of Australia, armed only with complementary talents and few ideas of the complexities that fame would soon bring them. "I've always wanted to be more of the Dave Stewart than the Annie Lennox of the band," Jones explains. "I'm more comfortable with the musician side, so I will be moving into that arena a lot more - like band rehearsals, remixes, things with the music. I've never been comfortable with being any kind of celebrity, so we decided that Darren will act as more of the spokesman of the band." "At first, we felt like we were supposed to homogenize ourselves like Frick and Frack, this team that always did everything together," Hayes adds. "But it's true, I enjoy being the public face of this band, where Daniel is more interested in designing sounds and producing. We sat down and agreed, I'm good at this, you're great at that. We'll continue to write music and come together on stage and make videos, but the rest of it, we'll play it the way we know it and prefer it." It's this inner growth that so ably allows SAVAGE GARDEN to demonstrate tangible steps forward on "AFFIRMATION," an album whose tight, well-executed songs demonstrate command of a destiny replete with many a shining moment to come. "I think there's a tendency for sophomore albums to topically come out as a reaction to success or fame, but I think that's boring," Hayes says. "What people do relate to is what it's like to have their hearts broken, to fall in love, or to have that occasional bad day. Those are things that continue to affect all of us every day of every year." Chuck Taylor - Billboard Magazine August, 1999 "AFFIRMATION" - The Album Release in the words of Savage Garden members Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones AFFIRMATION DARREN: I was walking around the Village in New York City, where there are always little graffiti statements. This one week, someone had written things in chalk on the sidewalk, and there was a line that read "beauty magazines promote low self-esteem." I thought about how cool it would be to just spew forth all of these things that I think about life. "Affirmation" pretty much sums up the whole record: It's quite positive, but it's also brutal and to the point. Sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down. I wanted to be that literal. DANIEL: This song is like "I Want You" on an adrenaline rush. It's just a high-energy, big synth pop, positive-sounding kind of song. The instrumental is so in the pocket for what Darren is trying to say: Life can be really damn good if you know how to play the game. HOLD ME DARREN: This is a song about the moment where you're ready to give up the fight in a relationship. We don't understand why, but something's not working, even though we wish it could. We really love each other, but why do we keep doing this to each other. We're destroying one another, so maybe being together isn't the best thing for us. It's as if you no longer have any defenses and you agree that things just can't be fixed. It's like a Rubik's cube, where you finally just give up, and that's OK. DANIEL: This was my least favorite song for a long time, sort of a four-chord musical thing that didn't turn me on that much. But once it was all put together with Darren's vocal, I went, "Wow." I KNEW I LOVED YOU DARREN: This love song is very simple. Nothing else on the record is as pure as this song, and I think it was really essential to include. When I wrote it, I wasn't feeling that way at the time, as opposed to "Truly Madly Deeply," which I was absolutely living and breathing. I was there. I didn't know if I could write this one without having that same feeling, but I did and it actually puts a lump in my throat. DANIEL: This song is beautiful with Darren's falsetto and the rise of acoustic guitars. It has a lot of innocence. It was important that we find that place on this album again. THE BEST THING DARREN: This song represents my favorite kind of pop. There's this big keyboard riff, everything I was raised on musically. Lyrically, it's about those relationships that are really bad for you; they're crazy and they're obsessive, but they're like an addiction. The song is basically saying, it's probably going to kill me, but I love it and I just want to say what you mean to me. It also expresses fright that the person is becoming the best thing about you; about how sad it is that the best thing about you is someone else, but what the hell, it's fun. DANIEL: For me, this song was inspired by guitar pop with a very riffy bass. When we started working on this project, Darren and I used to jam with that riff, which really made us feel like a band again. That's the way we created that song, just trying different things with the riff, Darren's singing along, and myself trying different instruments. CRASH AND BURN DARREN: There are some pretty heavy places that this record goes, and I wanted this song to be something that says, look, everything is going to be OK; it always is in the end. It's like a lullaby to myself and for the people that listen to this record to see us through the dark moments. DANIEL: "Crash And Burn" is my favorite song on the album, and it's the last one we recorded. I love the angst feel of the guitars, quietly placed behind the rest of the sound. It's just a good feel-sorry-for-yourself kind of song. CHAINED TO YOU DARREN: I love this song about obsessive love. It's very real and is exactly what it appears to be. There's a nightclub, there's a Madonna song playing on the dance floor, there's a kiss, and it's all over. It's intentionally retro, with claps drums, a big '80s guitar solo and throbbing keyboards. DANIEL: We were thinking very '80s pop when we did the whole synth line and guitar thing you hear in this song. We wanted to make a statement with that. For a while, the song was sounding really ridiculous - totally cheesy - but after we added drums and sped it up a bit, it tended to rock more than crackle. It's a really fun song. THE ANIMAL SONG DARREN: This song was written for the Garry Marshall film, "The Other Sister." It's a surprisingly "up" song for an album that I at first thought was going to be very moody and very electronic. I find it infectious. It was written during the bleakest time of winter in New York, and I wrote it, in part, as an antidote to my surroundings as well as my reaction to the film. DANIEL: I love the production of this song. That big drum pop feel with the percussion is just amazing and huge. I sat down and created this drum loop, which was really jungly, then we added the bass line and Darren started singing over it. I'd have liked it if we could have made the drums even bigger! THE LOVER AFTER ME DARREN: This is about a haunting love that you probably shouldn't have left, but you did and it would be so much easier if you didn't still care about them. You're walking around the city with that feeling you have when you're free of something, yet you also miss it. You're reminiscing, where the buildings speak the person's name and how memories of love seep into the pavement and are everywhere you go. DANIEL: This was one of the hardest songs to record on the album. We had to be careful that we didn't suffocate the guitars with too much keyboards and vice versa. It's a really honest song with great lyrics. Emotionally, this is probably my favorite song. TWO BEDS AND A COFFEE MACHINE DARREN: This is a very raw song, about an uncomfortable topic: abuse in a relationship, from the perspective of looking back after the whole thing is finished. We wrote this very quickly in the studio. Walter Afanasieff is such an amazing musician that we asked him to play the piano part. It was about 3 o'clock in the morning, and I was in another room to him recording my vocals for the demo. We flew to New York to record all of the vocals for the album, but we ended up using the original demo vocal on this song because it was the best performance. It's not perfect... but we liked it that way. It has so much emotion, because that was the first time I'd sung it all the way through from top to bottom. DANIEL: It's a beautiful, pure, honest and sad song. There's really nothing else that needs to be said. YOU CAN STILL BE FREE DARREN: This is musically extravagant and is meant to take you on a bit of a journey. It kind of immortalizes two people that died - a really close friend's father and an experience that Daniel had. Everybody's life deserves to be remembered in some way and I thought this was an amazing way to remember the beauty of someone's life, in a song. Steve Smith from Journey played drums on this, and he gave an amazing performance. DANIEL: This song is about two people very close to us that died. One was the father of a very dear friend and the other was my next door neighbor when I was 12. He shot himself in our backyard. Afterward, this bird used to appear in a tree outside our house and just sit there, and I made up this story about how the bird was hovering over our place to ask for forgiveness. After the first album did well, I bought a house five minutes from where my Mum and Dad lived, and I looked out the window and there was this same kind of bird again, which I've never seen anyplace else. That's why the song talks about spreading your wings and taking flight. GUNNING DOWN ROMANCE DARREN: This is all about disillusionment with love, romance, the chase, just the whole game. It's wallowing in self pity, but very tongue in cheek, not the way I feel everyday, but just a way to deal with disillusionment. DANIEL: This is a very angry, intense song about what's going on in your head when you're not completely sane. We used an angry sort of driving music with a morbid trip-hop sound, and expressed the anger instrumentally through this guitar riff you hear. I DON'T KNOW YOU ANYMORE DARREN: It's a very literal conversation about going home and realizing that my whole life has changed and a relationship is over that consumed six or seven years of my life. Now, as I return, my things are packed up in boxes. My partner has put all of my clothes away, saying she had to get away from it. When I opened the suitcase, my life just came out at me through the smell of my old after-shave, and I felt the impact of no longer being in someone's life.