Back The Way We Came: Vol. 1 (2011 - 2021)

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Ever since Oasis first swaggered into view, Noel Gallagher has presented himself as one of the most self-assured personalities in rock. But working on 2017’s <i>Who Built the Moon?</i>, his third album as Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Bird, taught him that vulnerability could be creative fuel. “[Producer] David Holmes used to say to me, when we were doing ‘It’s a Beautiful World,’ ‘This is right where you want to be, a little bit frightened, a little bit unsure, and be prepared for the ridicule,’” Gallagher tells Apple Music 1’s Matt Wilkinson. “He said, ‘Artists like this always come out on top.’” A best-of compendium, <i>Back the Way We Came: Vol. 1 (2011 - 2021)</i> is essentially the story of Gallagher—a bit frightened, a bit unsure—steadily stretching his horizons after the fractious dissolution of Oasi. If early HFB tracks “The Death of You and Me,” with its Kinks-like stomp, and the aching and widescreen “If I Had a Gun...” recall Gallagher’s old band, it’s not surprising. “I didn’t want it just to be my version of Oasi,” he say. “I guess that’s what the first album wa, though, because some of those songs were written, intended to be on the next Oasis record.” But from that same self-titled debut, “AKA… What a Life!” reveals his adventurous impulse, galloping along to a house beat. Gallagher pursued those urges further on <i>Chasing Yesterday</i> in 2015, threading a psychedelic shimmer (“The Dying of the Light”), sax solos (“Riverman”), and some Johnny Marr-assisted dance-floor urgency (“Ballad of the Mighty I”) into his expert mix of yearning and melody. And after hooking up with Holmes for the vibrant <i>Who Built the Moon?</i>, he suited up for space rock on “It’s a Beautiful World” and let a tin whistle call the tune during the boisterous psych-glam of “Holy Mountain.” “David said, ‘Look, why don’t you just make the music you listen to?’” says Gallagher. “I was like, ‘But I don't write krautrock at home.’ You kind of got to jam that out in the studio. David said, ‘Look, whatever songs you’ve written, I’m not interested. Let’s do this in the studio. Let’s just see what you’re capable of,’ and he’s just throwing things at me. It’s probably my favorite period of recording, because you didn’t really know what we were doing. Then, bit by bit, we started to knock them into shape. I actually didn’t know what kind of record it was going to be until it was virtually finished.” .

via Apple Music

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