"Down To The Town" goes back to my 2010 album Get It Back — the title a nod to my favorite band, the Beatles. That album mattered for a bigger reason: it marked the return of me singing vocals on my songs, after 20 years of purely instrumental electronic music.
The album grew out of a pile of new equipment I had bought and was testing out — a new microphone, a new electric guitar, a new modern drum machine with pads that I could hit, and rack gear full of different vocal and guitar effects. I started by recording everything as I tested it, spontaneously making little songs about each effect and how they were sounding. Gradually, I started improvising actual good songs. For this one I really wanted it to be a swing beat song, but it just came across as a bare bones improvisation.
In 2025, when Suno was starting to get really good, I fed it in to do a "cover" and told it to make it into one of those swing hop songs — the old jazzy style, but with a hip-hop beat. For the video I found this interesting style, almost like a Japanese version of Art Deco, so I set it in what looks like New York if it was in Japan in the 1930s.
I often said with these videos that I never wanted to make any silly animal videos, but for this one I decided to put cats walking around the city — however, I wanted to make those cats look very prim and proper and dandy, like the old people of New York, walking around with their caps and canes in a very distinguished, proud way. And the cover turned out great, I think — the swing I wanted back in 2010, finally with the beat under it.
— Red Hector
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