Happy Ears: Are We, Are We Not by Band of Silver
By Band of Silver
We wrote “Are We Are We Not” with producer and songwriter Mike Green back in February of 2020. After producing our debut EP, Always, we had a few studio days left over so we decided to write some new songs in that time. This one was a bit slow to get started, but clicked once we got the ball rolling.
We had exhausted a lot of topics writing the EP a few months earlier and didn’t have a ton of new ideas. We bounced thoughts around until Mike asked about how things were with the guy we’d written “Closure” about. I informed him that we’d broken up, but it wasn’t some explosive fight, we just didn’t work as a couple. We still sent each other memes occasionally and had recently chatted over online videogames. This gave Mike the idea “Are We, Are We Not,” as if the relationship could possibly recover.
I was hesitant about going that direction at first, since that wasn’t what I was experiencing. However, when Mike sang those lyrics over the track we’d put together, I couldn’t argue with how good it sounded. The stabs of the guitar and drums mixed with the aggressive melody and attitude were right up my alley. I could see myself having a lot of fun singing this one.
To avoid any confusion, we decided to make the lyrics pre-relationship rather than post-relationship. Mike had a great idea for a post-relationship line that unfortunately did not make it into the song, “Will you still send me memes? Can we play on the same team?” It’s probably for the best, since we would never be able to top that in our writing career. The rest of the song came together pretty smoothly afterwards.