When Foals decided to reinvent three of their own tracks for this Apple Music Home Session, they called in some old friends to help out. “The spin of this session was to work with the London Contemporary Orchestra, who we’re huge fans of,” says singer/guitarist Yannis Philippakis. “They’ve done some amazing scoring for Paul Thomas Anderson, worked with Jonny Greenwood, done all sorts of amazing orchestrations. We also worked with them on [2013 album] Holy Fire, and haven’t since, so it was a reunion of sorts. It was a lot of fun sending them the tracks and having Hugh [Brunt, the LCO’s co-artistic director and co-principal conductor] and the LCO transcribe and translate ideas onto different instruments, which were the bass saxophone, marimba, vibraphone, untuned percussion and cello.” It proved to be an invigorating session for Philippakis and bandmates Jack Bevan and Jimmy Smith, during which they reimagined two favourite songs from 2022 album Life Is Yours—“2001” and the title track—plus “Wash Off”, taken from 2019’s Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part II. “‘Wash Off’ has lots of instrumentation on it, so it felt good and it’s lyrically apt,” says Philippakis. “We did it in a small studio called The Firepit. We got to work with some amazing engineers, and it was a joy to be working with pro orchestral musicians, and to come up with new ideas on the spot in the room. We tried some extra approaches and it was just a creatively liberating experience. The last couple of years have taught me that I need more music more than anything. And that the power of live music in particular is something that should never be taken for granted. It’s central to being a human being.”