Influenza with Ryan Fly of Chairs in the Arno

Approach Influenza as a series which serves to help give insight as to where music is born; these are the thoughts, influences and the inspirations directly from the mind of the artists. Here Chairs in the Arno guitarist Ryan Fly expands on “Input Delay,” a song featuring a rare vocal contribution from him on the band’s recent File Folder. The song is just as much about finding and losing love as it has to do with the ills of loss in our age of digital cataloging. Not to call it lost love, but if you’ve ever lost a computer, its hard drive, or the cataloged memories held within you may be able to identify with the spirit of this song.

On “Input Delay”:

At the time, we were using one Mac laptop to perform the computing needs of four people and all the music recording. ‘Input Delay’ sort of came about over us dodging the pitfalls of recording and loving and hating our little computer at the same time. When you take it out of its shiny new box it seems so full of potential, and then ends up sort of destroying your life in a heartless, mechanical way. Basically, one day a bunch of recordings mysteriously disappeared, erased by the computer for no apparent reason, and we were all pretty upset about it. the song developed out of that. While we were working on the lyrics, it kind of had the sense of also being a song about a girl and a boy, love lost, or something like that; but it really is just a song about an overworked iBook and a love/hate relationship with machines.

Purchase | Official | MySpace

Also: Chairs in the Arno “File Folder” Review