Let me start this out by saying that I can only speak about my experience working on this song and I do think a little backstory is deserved here: Roy and I grew up in the same area, went to high schools down the street from one another and spent our teenage years being in bands and hanging around the same music venue. We had a lot in common but didn’t become friends until later on when we connected in LA, through music and photography. When Roy went on tour last summer with 5SOS, he asked if I wanted to tag along as his photographer for the tour… So I did and it was dope.
After that he got super inspired and asked if wanted to go to Joshua Tree for a month to write a bunch of new music. In that month we made a lot of solid stuff, some of it Roy already had ideas for but hadn’t quite finished, and others we started from scratch. For HOTEL POOLS he had the chorus already and that was kind of it. Once we started working on it writing the rest was pretty easy because we were both pulling from similar life experiences. I know Roy has his own meaning to it, but for me, the song means this:
When you come from a place where there isn’t much trouble for kids to find, you make it. HOTEL POOLS is about when there’s nothing really else to do when you’re a kid with the keys to a car, so you make shit up. You sneak into HOTEL POOLS, you blow stuff up, and you definitely never listen to what you’re parents tell you.
PRODUCTION STUFF
When I was first starting to write and produce full-time, I lived in a loft in Downtown, LA. One night I stuck a microphone out the window to catch some city noise for something I was working on and some police sirens started to go off, it was perfect, I recorded the whole thing. A couple years later that recording finally found a home in HOTEL POOLS. When we put it over the piano in the intro, it fit perfectly.
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