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.
music and words by Andrew Eaton Lewis 