The Story Behind The Song: Friction – Freak (Ft Josh Barry)

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Friction returned to his Elevate imprint earlier this month with the soul-coated vocal roller Freak. His grand finale wheel-up since last summer, it’s been squeezing the feels from the biggest of crowds for a long time… So WHY has it taken so long to end up in our paws?

Currently working on an album with over 30 ideas stacked up, ready to complete and chisel down into his debut body of work, Friction’s never been busier. We grabbed five minutes of his time to learn the story of Friction – Freak.

While some tracks take a few days to complete, it seems Freak had a much more dramatic development. This is what he told us…

Friction – Freak: The story behind the song…

“The story goes a bit like this… I was asked to produce a song for someone. I wasn’t up for producing the track, but I was up for nicking the acapella. So I built a whole new track around the acapella and thought it sounded pretty good so I started dropping it in my sets to see how it went down.

“I shouldn’t have really started playing it so early because it wasn’t finished, but the reaction was strong so I knew it was worth persevering with. I tweaked it and tweaked it and eventually asked Josh Barry to come in and re-sing the vocal. He tweaked the words himself and put his own stamp on it and it came together really nicely.

“Josh was the final piece in the puzzle. When he worked his magic on it something clicked and I was like ‘okay! This is working!’ It’s just one of those tunes that took ages to get right! I’ve got about 40 versions on my computer and have been playing it for about eight or nine months. That’s why we put it out so quickly… “

The story behind the video…

“90 per cent of the time this has been my closing tune, especially at festivals, and it always had the feel good factor with loads of people singing along and girls up on shoulders and everything. Those lyrics really captured some emotions. So we wanted a video to reflect that.

“The idea is so simple but works so well. The production guys got loads of actors in and asked them to show a range of emotions. I thought it was a fantastic idea to get Linguistics in; he hosts the majority of my shows and introduces the track so it made sense for him to be in the video. He told me when he walked into the film studio the first thing he saw was this woman screaming and crying her eyes out. He thought ‘what the flipping heck am I doing here?’ That old guy is the don, too. Everyone involved in the video smashed it.”