100% Endurance

Album: The Overload (2022)
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Songfacts®:

  • After eight tracks of snarky finger pointing, Yard Act complete their debut album, The Overload, with three reflective songs. The last number, "100% Endurance," finds singer James Smith woken with a bang. After all the anti-capitalist sniping he'd engaged in at the previous evening's party, the new world feels the same as the old. "Everything you talked about changing last night feels impossible with a hangover," he told Consequence Of Sound. "But you get up and you make your body move, because deep down you know that something is better than nothing. Always. We move until we don't and we exist because we do. That's beautiful, and I find it humbling."
  • "100% Endurance" provides an emotional, spirit-lifting finale to The Overload. "Overall I'm an optimist," Smith told Mojo magazine, "and I quite like people. I am trying to find a bit of enlightenment and purpose. What are we doing here? What is the meaning of life? I like chasing those questions."
  • Yard Act had planned on ending The Overload with "Tall Poppies." Then, at the last-minute, bassist Ryan Needham sent the demo for what became "100% Endurance." Smith wrote all the lyrics to a WhatsApp video loop of it playing on Needham's speaker in the studio. That is the audio the band used on the recording.
  • Yard Act's longtime collaborator James Slater directed the video. Shot in Blackpool, it stars the actor David Thewlis. "I've told my agent I'm only doing Yard Act videos from now on, though next time on a tropical island or a big yacht," the Fargo and Harry Potter actor said.
  • Yard Act released a new version of "100% Endurance" featuring Elton John on July 1, 2022. The collaboration came about after the Rocket Man praised Yard Act in the press. Smith and John chatted on the phone, and a few calls later, the Yard Act frontman asked John if he'd like to come to the studio and play piano on a tune.

    "We wanted to shine a light on '100% Endurance' a bit more, now the album had been out a bit and we felt we'd established the one side of Yard Act," Smith explained to Matt Wilkinson on Apple Music 1. "We wanted to highlight the other side of it a bit more, which is explored on the back end of the album. It felt like there was more we could do with that track. It felt like there's ways we could accentuate and highlight the melody and the emotion of that track without over egging it, while still sling in a string section and loads of lush Elton John piano all over it. And then, obviously, because he'd been so kind about us and he'd been calling me a little bit, we thought why not ask him?"

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