All The Hits is a short song of consolation. As with We Just Make Music For Ourselves and Come On, Let’s Go!, the idea was to subvert a clichéd pop music phrase and try to find profundity in it. ‘All the hits’ here are actually ‘all the punches’ – the emotional and physical knocks you endure throughout the course of your life. My original idea for the lyric was a list of 20 forms of suffering, counting down from 20 to one, like on the Radio One Chart Show, in which descriptions of suffering would somehow become exhilarating and hopeful. I still quite like that idea.
The music for this one was entirely written by Hamish. In fact it’s pretty much his original home recording (with a melody and lyric added by me), which is why it sounds a wee bit rough in places. I think it works, though, and it was nice to do a Swimmer One song that we could finish in less than a day; sometimes the arranging and mixing process would go on for months.
I also think this is one of my best lyrics. It’s a song about the way that pain and failure can often end up being the making of you, sometimes by creating an opportunity to do something different and better. I was particularly pleased with the closing line, ‘everything will be ok, just not in the way you expected’, which has frequently been my experience.
