MY INSPIRATION: Picnic – Tell Me You Love Me

Image by Daniel Potts

With their sax-driven funk, danceable tunes and undeniable charm, multi-limbed irrepressible popsters Picnic have unveiled a brand new single, Tell Me You Love Me. It’s a relatively melancholic release from the Sunderland-based band, kicking off with a marching beat and restrained vocal from Robyn Walker, turning into a full-blown torch song replete with delicately used strings.

Here, Picnic’s lead songwriter and guitarist Eddie Scott unveils the inspiration behind the track…

“Sometimes you know that what you’re doing isn’t going to help or change anything dramatically, but you just want to delay facing the truth. Ordering a kebab wrap and smashing a bottle of Jam Shed on a Friday night isn’t going to change the fact that you hate your job, but it’ll definitely make you feel a little bit better about it for a while. I wanted to frame that experience through the narrative of a breakup, that’s where the idea for Tell Me You Love Me came from.

“I think if you go through the lyrics it’s all quite self explanatory, everybody involved knows that this relationship is over but the standpoint of the narrator is very similar to the kebab wrap/Jam Shed/hate my job analogy: ‘I’m not dealing with this right now.’

“The whole track and concept was built around the title, I just couldn’t think of a scenario in which you would beg someone to tell you that they loved you that wasn’t heartbreaking. ‘Before you walk out that door, tell me you love me once more’ is probably one of my favourite lyrics that I’ve ever written. I love simple lines that just get to the point and aren’t muddied too much by clever metaphors… I mean I love the clever stuff too, but nothing punches you in the gut like cutting through the bullshit and saying exactly what you mean.

“I’m a big fan of using songwriting as a way to tell short stories, Randy Newman being a personal hero of mine and master of this; his track Guilty is probably a good example of what I was going for, like you’re listening in on a real time conversation between two people. You pick up little crumbs of context, just enough to make up your own mind on what the bigger picture is beyond those three minutes but never enough for the full story.

“I was listening to a lot of Cory Wong when I wrote this and I think that comes through in the chorus. I love his Live in Amsterdam album, with a full orchestra, from start to finish and it was definitely a huge inspiration to the direction I wanted the band to go for our next release. Ellie is probably the song that bears the closest resemblance to Tell Me You Love Me, but it manages to say so much without a single lyric.

“This is definitely my favourite track from our EP But I Like It (released 28^th April) and up there with one of my favourite songs I’ve ever written.”