Karra Rhodes on Being a Mum, Dog Mum, Musician and Her Love for Country Music
I had the absolute pleasure to have a chat with upcoming Christchurch-based country musician, Karra Rhodes. All photos provided by Karra.
Recently, I caught up with the uber talented, lovely Karra Rhodes for an interview about her busy life, her upcoming album and how she is delving into the Scottish music scene, as well as the New Zealand music scene.
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Hey Karra! Thank you so much for coming on Welcome to the Gig for an interview. How are things going since your newest release of your single, Why Can’t I Love You Less?
Karra: It should be me saying thank you for having me! I love your writing and the time you have for us artists; it means a lot.
Honestly, things have been great, chaos, but great! I am loving the journey and the connections with other musicians I have made along the way. If you’d told me I would have been here a year ago, I would have been shocked. Songwriting is my biggest crux, I love it! So the opportunities just this one song has opened and created has been almost overwhelming, in the best of ways.
Tell me about the inspiration for Why Can’t I Love You Less and what the feedback has been like since release!
Karra: When I write, I tend to write metaphors / analogies etc – Why can’t I love you less was about stripping it back to the storytelling aspect – mentioning songs on the radio, mentioning literal activities (put on that little black dress… throw back the shots…). This song was inspired by the thought of listening to a radio and it not feeling how it should when you aren’t singing along with that special someone anymore and how you should be out moving on, but it’s hard when everything around you just doesn’t quite sit right.
You've so far released four songs in total. How do you feel your music has evolved since your first single?
Karra: I still feel connected to the first three songs, in particular, My own Mind is very personal… but the genre it fell into wasn’t me. It was produced fantastically by an awesome EDM producer, but my heart and soul are country all the way. Working with Greg Haver on the new music (fourth single onwards) was just a ‘yup yup yup’ moment knowing it ticked all my boxes of what I was looking for in my music. I used to want to be edgier and cooler, but to be honest I have given up on that... I like writing what comes to my mind and what feels right. If you listen to the music, hopefully you’d see a natural evolution of confidence and just believing that I can, and should, write about what matters to me.
You’re a pretty busy lady! What do you do in your spare time away from creating your magical music?
Karra: Oh boy my life is busy! I love music so it does take up a lot of my time creating it… But apart from that, I love writing too, especially fantasy books – such a nerd for anything to do with writing! I also study a lot now which is no fun at all but it’s a must to get onto that next stage of my life. And I have two beautiful, wonderful little kids who keep me busy as well as my dogs and fiancé.
I know that you’re originally from Scotland, which is so exciting! Had you attempted to delve into the Scottish music scene, or is that something you’re just doing in New Zealand?
Karra: I have started to dip my toes into the Scottish music scene but not nearly as much as I would like to, it will be something I will work towards in the future as it is so important to me that my family and friends back home can sort of share that experience with me and have part of me back there.
I hear you have an album on the way! Are you able to share anything regarding that?
Karra: I am terrible at keeping secrets aren’t I!? I probably should have kept that under wraps… But I get too excited! I have so many songs and melodies and lyrics that have just been bursting to get out of the little shadowland of songs I put them into, so it’s very exciting that they will now have a home… You will definitely have regular music coming from me and you can keep that full album on your radar! And after that, I can guarantee it won’t be too long before there will be another album in the works… There’s no stopping at this point!
You’ve had some awesome radio play across New Zealand and Scotland, what’s your reaction like when you hear your own music on the radio?
Karra: I am quite an awkward person, like seriously, if my song comes on – I love it of course – but it’s like when you hear yourself talk, you’re like oh boy this is strange ha-ha so if you’re with me, I will be like ummm should we listen to this, or I can turn it off right?? But gosh I did love the response, and to hear that my music is out there, and it is enjoyed, means more than words can actually express.
What does a typical day off look like for you?
Karra: Like there’s a zombie apocalypse and it’s a scramble for survival… I am joking, but in all seriousness, it’s full on during this period of my life. Trying to be the best mum I can be, while working full time, trying to always make sure my dogs are loved and walked and played with, while studying and making music…. There’s very little down time (for now) but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!
If you could liken your music to any country in the world, which country would you choose and why?
Karra: I would like to think even though my music falls under the country genre (USA), that it has its own sound and doesn’t quite fall under any country… I have moved and lived in many different countries, so I feel I have taken inspiration from many sources. I’d hope so anyway!
What do you hope that your music brings to the world?
Karra: I was talking about this with someone recently. Honestly, I want the lyrics to mean something. I want someone to hear it and think – I can relate – or just feel part of the song. I want it to be something that means something – corny and cliché right? But if it can help someone or if it can be someone’s ‘song’ that resonates with their life and is their song, well that’s what I want.
You’ve got this beautiful country sound! Is country always the way that you knew your music would go and are you considering adding in other genres in the future?
Karra: Country has always been my go to music! Throughout my teenage years I think I was the ONLY one in my friendship group who was obsessed with country music and I think subconsciously I adopted that tone / style. I just feel that country music has stories – and I feel with a lot of other songs they lack that. The realness that country music has – that was always what I wanted. However, in saying that, I love exploring other genres, I am not a closed book to any genre (maybe except rap, although to be honest you’d be surprised how many rap songs I know every word to hah!)
Thank you so much for your time, Karra, I’m very excited to hear your album when it’s released! Is there anything else you would like to add to close out the interview?
Karra: One thing I want to do in the future – is primarily be a writer for other musicians or with other musicians (co-writing). I will always have my own music, but there are far too many lyrics and melodies in my head to be just for me, it would be a waste! I am always open for collaboration…
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Make sure that you keep up with Karra’s exciting adventures at the below links -
Daily Routines, Dreams of Collaboration and Two Truths and a Lie, an Interview with Castaway
If you don’t know these fellas in Castaway, you will be hooked after this interview! L-R (from top to bottom): Austen, Joe, Jackson, Jack and Rhys. Photo provided by Castaway’s Instagram.
Intoxicatingly charming, university-born Christchurch band, Castaway, are not only best buds, but creative geniuses in their field who haven’t stopped revolutionising their crafts ever since they emerged onto the music scene, capturing the attention of listeners both in New Zealand and worldwide.
I caught up with the band via email for a chat and let me tell you, the Castaway lads have some absolutely fantastic answers to my questions, so, without further ado, let’s get into the interview!
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Congratulations on your newest epic release, Supernova! I love how the song came about - you've said it's a mix of shared nostalgia from the band, wishing to break free with your high school sweethearts and looking at going on big adventures. How does it make you feel knowing that they are able to hear these words within Supernova? Have you had any feedback from said high school sweethearts yet?
Castaway: Jee, thanks so much Ash! We are beyond stoked with how the song has come out and that people are vibing it. We haven’t heard from any old flames yet, maybe we should send it through to get their thoughts (the ones that we haven’t blocked, that is)! We’ll keep you posted…
But in all seriousness, we have had some awesome feedback from everyone so far and we’re truly thrilled with the positive reception. It’s extra special when something has been in the works for so long, and you believe in it so strongly, but don’t know for sure if it’s going to resonate with people. So, hearing our mates sing along at parties and seeing new fans all over the world streaming it is seriously humbling for us!
Supernova brings you back to the early 2000s and I've noticed that as a band, you have this kind of old soul vibe, which is unique in the NZ music world. How do you feel that this sets you apart from others?
Castaway: We all come from different musical backgrounds, and collaborating to bring these together is the essence of the Castaway sound. We all love the music of the 60s, 70s, and 80s such as Toto, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Journey - and of course, the 2000s! Bands like The Killers and Coldplay have played a huge part in forging our musical identity. Something that we feel blessed about is that we have two lead singers, and weaving Jackson’s silky smoothness with Joe’s big, powerful voice is a big part of our sound. We love harmonies, which is central to the old soul vibe you mention, and love playing with the contrast that we can create with two such unique voices. This is something we’ve worked hard on imbuing into Supernova and our upcoming releases this year.
It's been quite some time since we have heard any new releases from Castaway, what's been going on for you guys since the release of your EP, Chaos and Order, back in 2021?
Castaway: Although we haven’t had any music out since 2021, we have been non-stop busy developing and crafting our songwriting. We enrolled in the SOLE Music Academy artist development course in 2022 which focused on songwriting and music business. This was a huge step for us as we decided to take the band seriously and give it a good go. We learnt a lot about the industry and met some incredible artists and mentors such as Tiki Taane, Will McGillivray, and Prins. This began our journey transitioning from a university band to something more.
In the artist development course, we were tasked with writing 20 songs across the year. It pushed us hard, but these songs have laid the foundation for our sophomore EP, “Nondual”. In 2023, we started working with producers to get these songs off the ground and met the legendary Greg Haver. We travelled up to Auckland to record in The Lab Studio with Greg and his A-team, and Nondual started coming to life.
What kind of differences do you feel you have implemented into your music since Chaos and Order?
Castaway:
Incorporating synths - we got a gorgeous red Nord Lead 4 and the sounds that come out of the thing blow our minds. We take a lot of notes on how The Killers and Coldplay use synths to create emotion and soundscape - you’ll hear a bit of that throughout Supernova and our upcoming songs.
More intentional and crafted song and lyric writing - our first EP was authentic and youthful, which definitely left some room for our next body of work to be more deeply iterated and refined.
Sounds and production - Our first EP was squarely in the indie rock genre which represented us and our taste at the time. As we’ve explored wider inspirations for our songs we’ve been paying close attention to the nuances that really make the difference. We’ve had a lot of fun trying to incorporate these elements into our new music and we hope that our listeners pick these up too.
Mastered our craft - we’ve all spent heaps of time slaving away to the master of music, the humble Metronome. Being tight is key to feeling cohesive and locked in as a band, so the endless hours of tick tick tick really pay off in the studio.
For those true Castaway fans, you might pick out a widely infamous instrument in some of our upcoming work… The elusive triangle.
As Castaway, you guys seem to be very in tune with each other and that comes across not only in your songs, but also in your stage presence. How did Castaway come to be; how did you know that the five of you would all fit perfectly together?
Castaway: We found each other in our first year at the University of Canterbury. We all went to Rochester and Rutherford hall of residence and ended up in the same building, “Wilson House”. Not long after someone brought a guitar out, we all started jamming together and our drunken nights of yelling “Wilson!” down the hall corridors lead to the formation of Castaway. We mostly played for fun at a few university society events for the first couple years but we each grew to find this hobby becoming a real passion. Castaway’s formation was never a conscious decision, it just naturally fell into place through a combination of sheer luck, a supportive community of mates, and a love for playing music together.
A real turning point for us was when Jackson was looking online for some vocal lessons and discovered Sacha Vee at the SOLE Music Academy. Soon enough, we all started going to SOLE for music lessons and artist development courses. Sacha has been a huge supporter of our band and helped nurture our artistry into what we have today.
How amazing do the lads look with their makeup though? I, a female, can’t even rock makeup like this! Photo provided by Castaway from their EPK.
What does a standard day in Castaway look like?
Castaway: If we are talking about a weekday:
7 am: Triple S.
7.30 am: Gym.
8 am: Loud smoothie making in the kitchen - thanks Jack.
8.30 am: Get to work (sigh).
9 - 5: Live the dream one nightmare at a time.
6 pm: Get home, if on dinner - cook, if Austen on dinner - marvel at the culinary wizardry of the man.
6:30 - 9 pm: Music mahi.
9:01 pm: Cuppa tea.
9:05 pm: TV show of your selection.
10 pm: Sleep and do it all again.
As far as the weekend goes:
10 am: Get up.
11 am: Coffee + food.
12 pm: Chat the smack and chew the fat in the lounge with boys & co.
1 pm: Musical muck around.
4 - 9 pm: Self entertainment. High likelihood of a nap.
10 pm: Get ready for the gig, makeup for select gentlemen.
11 pm: Pack the Castawagon.
11.15 pm: Shot (None for sober driver).
11.20 pm: Leave for gig.
12 am: Start the show.
1 am: Get me a red bull.
2 am: Settle the punters down, finish strong.
3 am: Let’s go home.
4 am: McDonalds.
4:30 am: Bed.
You've all finished your respective studies and are now out into the world with jobs other than music. How do you ensure that you are able to find the time to still make music together?
Castaway: It feels like it was only moments ago that we were hanging out in the halls together but here we are now all working full time. It certainly makes practise and band meetings more challenging not having the flexibility of the uni schedule, but it almost feels like we’re still in the halls as we’ve been flatting together for the last two years. Granted, there are less people complaining about us playing music late at night now (sorry to the management team at R+R hall, please forgive us!).
Living as a unit makes organising practise and meetings a lot easier as we often chat over dinner, or knock on each other’s doors and say ‘hey bro, get your guitar and get in the garage, it’s jamming time!’. It still does require a good routine and we have practise/meetings booked out every Monday and Thursday. We tend to divide and conquer most of the jobs and just make time for these throughout the week around the rest of our lives. Sometimes it can be challenging committing so much time and energy to the band, but we need only remember why we do it - to make music for all you wonderful people!
They may be always busy bees, but they’ve incorporated having fun into their routine, as shown here. Photo provided from Castaway’s EPK.
Over on your Instagram, you've started a little series called Aotearoa's Finest, which is where you cover other NZ music (and do a damn fine job in the process). What inspired you to do this and are there any artists in particular that you would choose to collaborate with in the NZ music scene if you had the opportunity to?
Castaway: Our formation in Ōtautahi/Christchurch meant we were heavily influenced by local acts such as The Butlers and Mako Road in the formative years of the band, and have always looked up to these guys as legends. On one of our very first gigs we opened for The Butlers at the New Brighton hall and it was such an awe-inspiring moment seeing these guys only a few years older than ourselves doing the real life thing, and doing it well! Our early influences is something we haven’t forgotten even if we have moved away from our earlier sound. We wanted to pay tribute to those people who have inspired us and spread the awesome kiwi music that just keeps coming. What better way than to make some covers of some great local tunes.
If there was one artist in the NZ music scene that we could collaborate with it would undoubtedly have to be L.A.B. - true kiwi legends! We LOVE their music and the fun energy they have on stage. They’re so tight as musicians and write such catchy but still creative songs. To spend an evening jamming in the garage and sharing some beers with them would make us a bunch of very happy lads. Maybe one day we’ll get there, we could have never imagined getting to where we are now, so anything is possible!
What fascinates me personally about Castaway is that everybody gets to kind of rotate around, someone will be playing one instrument for one song or someone else singing and then the next everyone has switched and is playing a different instrument, or the singer has changed. It keeps it quite enticing and adds an extra element of surprise for newbies who may have never seen you live before or heard your music. Had this always been something you'd wanted to do as a band, to keep it fresh, or did it somehow accidentally happen like this one day and you went from there?
Castaway: It’s become intentional as a performance element, but it started out from our naturally collaborative style - we’re really passionate about sharing the spotlight, and letting everyone express themselves in as many ways as they can. As multi-instrumentalists, this meant that it was important for us that everyone got to express their different musical characters on stage. Austen plays the guitar differently to Rhys, who drums differently to Joe, who sings differently to Jackson, who plays keys differently to Jack. Giving ourselves the freedom to explore all those combinations keeps it fun and authentic for both us and the audience.
When it’s studio time, it’s a bit more like playing in a World Cup Final - everyone locks into their positions. For recording our songs, we play our primary instruments. That being said, it’s pretty cool recording a part knowing that someone else will play it live. It’s like saying, “here you go bro, I got it for now, then it’s all yours”!
Back in the good ole days of 2021, not too long before their Chaos and Order EP release show. Photo provided by Castaway’s Instagram.
For those who have not heard of Castaway, how would you describe your music to them?
Castaway: Imagine that The Killers and Coldplay raised 5 children. The boys grew up arguing at length about which type of rock is best, even dabbling in grunge (we don’t talk about that song though, do we Austen?), before landing harmoniously on a high-energy, youthful combination of pop and rock.
Like us Castaway boys, our music is fun-loving, high energy, and full of stories about love and failure. We aim to write songs that are perfect for singing along, jumping up and down, and listening to late at night with just your thoughts and the stars.
To add on to the previous question, what kind of fun facts/interesting things can you tell us that maybe a lot of people don't know about you?
Castaway: We’ll give you two truths and a lie:
We all live together in peace and tranquillity.
We used to have a female lead singer.
One of our members has webbed feet.
OG Castaway fans who have been coming out for years may know the answer. Those who don’t - you may have to do some deep digging on our Instagram (classic musician plug!)
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Thank you so much to the Castaway legends for allowing me to interview them and for the wonderful answers.
To check out more of Castaway, make sure you follow along with them through their links below -
The Wonderful Beginnings of Thuryah
Thuryah is an up-and-coming artist who is about to release her debut EP, poetry i don’t write. Photo provided by Thuryah.
Thuryah is due to become a household name over the next couple of years with her well-thought-out vulnerability that will engage you into her music, her unlimited love for her ethnic background and how it plays into her creations, which is what we can all agree on, absolutely amazing. We are in need of a lot more diversity in the New Zealand music industry and Thuryah is here to prove that. The bubbly and kind-hearted Thuryah sat down and answered some questions for Welcome to the Gig about her unique EP that is soon to be released, how she drew on inspiration for her words and embarking on her journey in the industry.
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Hi Thuryah! Thank you so much for allowing me to interview you for Welcome to the Gig and congratulations on your first single, ‘bed’ which you released back in April. The song is sweetly melodic and heartfelt, which is a beautiful combination of things. What inspired you to bring ‘bed’ out as your debut single?
Thuryah: Thank you so much for having me! I had written songs before bed that I thought would be my start in music, but honestly that all changed once I wrote the first line. I recorded it on my laptop one day, completely forgot about it, and then a few weeks later, I went to start a completely different song when I saw a file called ‘bed’ on my laptop. That one line felt so different from anything I had ever written before, and once I continued to write it, I just knew it had to be my debut. It was definitely a gut feeling for me.
I’ve read that you started your progression of songwriting during the crazy times of 2020, which you took inspiration from diary entries and heartbreak. Has music always been something you were looking to pursue? If so, did you think the amount of vulnerability that you allowed to be heard would be as free flowing as it seems in bed?
Thuryah: Absolutely, ever since I was a kid, I knew I wanted to be a singer. My songwriting passion came a little later in life, but singing was what always made me the happiest. And because of that, I don't think there could have been anything that would have stopped me from releasing music one day. When I began songwriting, it was always just for me to listen to, so it allowed me to be vulnerable because I never thought anyone would hear it. Even though I had such a strong feeling that ‘bed’ would be my debut single, at that time, its only real purpose was for me to try to create something beautiful out of a really difficult situation for me. So, I accidentally fell into being a vulnerable lyricist, which I'm so grateful for.
You’ve got your debut EP, poetry i don’t write coming out on the 25th of October. What was the process of creating this EP like? What are listeners able to expect?
Thuryah: The process was a mixture of feelings. The entire EP was written while I was trying to heal, so actively writing was needed so I could process it all, but most of the time, it was really hard and draining. When you're trying to heal and move on from something in your life, the last thing you want to do is constantly dive back into it and try to remember and write down your deepest feelings about it. But that's how art works. You have to make those sacrifices, and if I didn't, this EP probably wouldn't exist. In the end, I am so proud of myself when I look at it all put together. I wrote each song in my bedroom by myself, and as someone who was always more passionate about singing than writing, I'm so proud of my work. Listeners can expect a big extension of the narrative from ‘bed’. You'll hear a deeper dive into the less romantic side of the story and a lot more self-awareness amidst it all.
Getting ready to give you all her musical goodness! Photo provided by Thuryah.
You’ve got a track titled The Nile on poetry i don’t write that you filmed the video back in Egypt and while the song is in English, you’ve got some lyrics in Arabic featured – first, that is incredibly special that you can pay homage to your culture and secondly, how important was it for you to bring that element to your EP?
Thuryah: Thank you so much. Growing up on the North Shore as an Iraqi girl, a lot of people had misperceptions about my culture and identity, so in return, unfortunately, a lot of my young years were spent not wanting to be part of my culture and refusing to identify myself with it at all. But as I got older, I learned to untangle this internalised racism and try my best to cherish my cultural and racial identity at every point in my life. I don't think my teenage self could have ever imagined I'd film a music video in an Arabic country or have Arabic lyrics so I’m just so proud that I could get to this point. I know this is something I'm going to be proud of for the rest of my life.
How do you feel that your music impacts others and what has the feedback been like since you released bed back in April?
Thuryah: Well, judging by all the sad girl playlists bed has been added to, I can imagine my music is something people resonate with when they're feeling heartbroken, reminiscent or just…sad. At first, I wasn't sure how to feel about that because releasing the song has been such a beautiful chapter for me. I forgot that I, too, was a sad girl when writing it. So, I understand, and I can only hope it's helping people validate how they feel in whatever they are going through. The feedback has felt magical. Sometimes, people compare the song to an artist I was listening to at the time, and I squeal inside. I always hoped it could be a song that would help someone, like my favourite songs helped me back then. So, I'm so grateful for such positive feedback.
How have you found your transition into the New Zealand music scene?
Thuryah: I think I’ve been transitioning well! With only one song out it’s hard to tell but I would love to be more in touch with other kiwi artists that’s for sure. Being a musician and pursuing musical dreams can feel very isolating at times so whenever I do find someone who’s on a similar path as me I get really excited. Hopefully when my EP comes out I’ll start to make more of those special connections.
The cover art for bed. Provided by Thuryah.
Besides music, what can you be found doing on your spare time?
Thuryah: Oh that’s a hard one, since the single has been out all I’ve been doing in my spare time is focusing on the EP! But in between my favourite thing to do is spend time with my loved ones. I often watch Disney movies with my family after work, have catch up dinners with my friends, or go see my boyfriend's basketball games. If It's not music stuff I try my best to stay present and not use any technology but spend my time with people I love and care about. Because otherwise all my time is honestly spent on my laptop planning my EP release so it’s important for me to be present in between and make those connections.
I hear you take a lot of inspiration from Lana Del Ray and Taylor Swift, both very prominent female musicians in the industry. What type of elements do you take from them and put into your own tracks?
Thuryah: I’m really obsessed with Lana’s melancholic yet epiphany-like melodies. I definitely took huge inspiration from her album NFR when writing the vocals for bed. The melodies in that album are forever inspiring to me. Taylor is obviously a master of story telling and her album folklore really inspired the opening track to the EP, intro. Although it doesn’t melodically sound very much like something she would put out, I think you can hear it in the lyrics how inspired I was by the ways she describes and values the small elements in a memory from what a person is wearing or how they moved when sitting next to you. It’s really amazing what they both can do.
What would your dream festival line-up look like?
Thuryah: Oooh, I mean Lana and Taylor have to be there but I would also love to see Madison beer, Arctic Monkeys and Sufjan Stevens! I’m an indie-pop girl for life.
What else is coming up in the world of Thuryah that we can expect?
Thuryah: I think people can expect me performing live a lot more after this EP is out. It’s always been something I’ve been very shy about but I think after this project is out I will be so excited to sing it live for everyone to see. But also I've been writing some new music that I’m so excited to share as well. I started writing this EP in 2020 so I’m definitely excited for a new era after the EP is out!
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat! I’m thoroughly looking forward to hearing your debut EP later this year! Would you like to add anything else to the interview?
Thuryah: Thank you so much for having me and for all the kind words! I really appreciate it!
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Keep up with Thuryah below -
The Most Wholesome, Humble Band: An Interview with Marmalade
L-R: The legends that make up Marmalade! Dean, Chelsea, Liam, Jem and Koen! Photography by Danielle Hao-Aickin, provided by Marmalade.
In the ‘burbs of Auckland, three friends moved in together to create something magical, which is where Marmalade was ultimately born! Having added two extra members to the now full band, I caught up with the five musical endeavourers via email to find out what they’ve been up to since the release of their first single, Bright, what they’ve been able to learn from getting opportunities to gig with other artists across the board and the question that is burning in everyone’s minds… When is this EP they speak of due to be released, will we find that out? Guess you will have to read on to find out.
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Hey friends! Thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed for Welcome to the Gig! How has life been treating you recently?
Jem: Course! Thanks for interviewing us! Life has been treating me reasonably all things considered. We are just gearing up for the release of our next single, but it has been nice to have a little lull in between Bright and the next one to recoup.
Koen: Heyo! Kia ora Ash, thanks for the questions! Life has been a blur lately; time goes by so, so fast! Life is full of fun at the moment; sometimes the music grind becomes a little too much but we’re learning to take our time between releases and touring.
A couple of months back, you released your uplifting, outstanding song, Bright, accompanied by the cutest video. Tell me about the process of bringing Bright to life.
Jem: Bright began in a flat that Koen, Liam and I shared at the time. The three of us fleshed out the bones of the song and then Dean and Chelsea have since then added their own juiciness to the tune as it has evolved. Once we had decided we wanted to release it, the real mahi began. For the first time as a band, we navigated the process of recording and releasing something. It took a lot more admin and time than I think we anticipated but we’ve been stoked with the reception of it so far. We wanted to make a music video that suited the song and also represented the debut aspect of it so we thought meshing together videos of us as children would encapsulate that nicely. It was actually a really joyful experience sifting through childhood videos of Liam, Koen and I (sadly Chelsea and Dean didn't have any childhood videos) and putting them together. Oh the nostalgia!
Everyone in the band is quite a prominent member of the New Zealand music scene, which is quite incredible to see what everyone gets up to. How does it feel to be that engaged in the scene and what kind of things are you aiming to improve on or change?
Jem: Thanks! That's actually really nice to hear as sometimes I experience a bit of imposter syndrome around that. I love being engaged with the Aotearoa music scene. In some ways it makes me feel like I'm part of a community and that I'm not the only one pursuing a career in this whirlwind of a creative world. But on the other hand I do think it could be more inclusive and slightly less cliquey at times. Being part of the industry in a media sense has also really helped with the admin side of releasing music as I’ve gained a lot of knowledge from being on the receiving end of releases that has been useful when releasing music for Marmalade.
Dean: The scene has been an interesting one to be a part of. For the most part all my peers are incredibly supportive and welcoming and I’ve got a great bunch of mentors who are extremely generous with their time and knowledge. My goals are to become a better musician and person which is a constant work in progress.
Having the opportunity to have played gigs with other up-and-coming New Zealand acts and well-established acts, what has been the biggest thing you have been able to learn from being around these bands or individuals?
Jem: Have a good team and be organised. I really notice that bands that keep the vibes high on gig day, understand everyone's needs and have their shit together make for the most enjoyable people to play alongside. It seems to really come down to practising your set and planning everything well before the day so that on the day, you can just hang out with your team and enjoy the process and that tends to influence both the actual performance and the all round experience I think.
Dean: There’s always something to learn from watching bands and artists perform and interact with each other and their audiences. I think we as a band have learned a lot about stage presence and our interaction with the crowd to keep them engaged from the very first note. It’s a work in progress but feels like it’s the right steps to take improvement wise.
Chelsea: Every single musician I have met has had their own sort of “shine” - there’s something very special in bringing that to different spaces and collaborating with other musicians to see what you can create together. Also another big thing I have learnt is that community is important! These people you brush shoulders or share space with often end up becoming good friends you always love to support and watch.
Marmalade just fit perfectly together! Photography by Flora Driessen/photo provided by Marmalade.
I hear you’ve got an EP in the works… What are you able to tell readers about this?
Jem: The next single is coming out in October 👀The EP is still in the works but Bright will be on there amongst a few other of our fave Marmalade tunes. It’s going to be a culmination of what we feel is the sound of Marmalade to give the best idea of who we are as a unit. We absolutely love the tunes that will be on it and we cannot wait to share it with ya!
Koen: Yep, at the moment we have 5 songs shortlisted for an EP, Bright and this next unannounced single included. They’re all cumulations of our tastes in music and indirectly our influences which make for 5 somehow cohesive tunes that can only be described as having that Marmalade quality to them.
Let’s go back to your debut single, Bright, for a moment. It comes across as this ultimate summery bop that really for lack of better word, brightens the darkness, especially through the hovering days of the dreary winter months we’ve been having. When writing Bright, did you think it would end up being your debut single? What felt right about having Bright as your first single?
Jem: When writing Bright I had absolutely no idea haha. However, we’d been playing it live a lot and it just seemed like it made sense as the debut single. It is super easy listening, catchy and we all feel like it encapsulates the Marmalade sound well.
Dean: Bright to me has the most “Marmalde-y” vibe. I reckon you can tell what we’re about before the first verse has even started.
Liam: When I first heard the bare bones of Bright, I felt instantly connected to it, and as we slowly incorporated more musical aspects to the song, it became this representation of Marmalade (in my eyes at least). It has everything that each of us bring to the table, and it just felt right for it to be our first single.
I’ve noticed that every member of Marmalade brings this infectious, vibrant vibe both to the stage and off the stage, do you ever have those days where you question whether music is your future and if so, how do you keep your head held high? I know that the music industry can be a bit of a bumpy ride, so it’s always interesting to hear what individuals have to say about how to deal with those moments.
Jem: Oh, for sure. It’s great to hear that we come across with that kind of energy as I do think that's who we are as individuals, but we definitely do go through the pits sometimes. As a group we hold communication to high value and if we feel doubtful as a band, we get together for an honest kōrero and usually come out the other side feeling a bit better about things. Personally, when I feel unsure about the future, I remind myself of why I'm doing it, make a cup of tea and just ride through it, or chat to a friend about it. Usually, those feelings come and go and sometimes it’s just about acknowledging them and being kind to yourself until they pack up and leave your brain. Sometimes there are some real shit days but as cheesy as it is, luckily, I have 4 Marmalade mates who can relate to the feelings, and we all take turns at picking each other up out of the pits when they inevitably come round.
Koen: All the time. I’m still looking for a way to bring sustainability to this music career we’re all trying to navigate. I suppose that answers question 3 as well; it’s what I would really like to bring to the music scene as a whole. Sustainability.
Dean: I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to do anything else and my drive to disprove the nay-sayers is what has really motivated me to try to leave a mark in this industry and have an impact on my peers. The industry for me has been incredibly fickle to navigate and there are days where I question whether there is a place at the table for someone of my ethnicity but the rejections I’ve faced have just motivated me to keep my nose to the grindstone and try harder, while trying my best to be a good person and serve the music.
Chelsea: Definitely! It’s hard to be a creative in Aotearoa, especially when your labour remains largely unseen and unpaid for a very long time until you finally can get a rhythm with it. The industry can feel a bit frustrating and honestly isolating at times. I’ve had to learn that the biggest thing is to just be present for the music, find like minded people and just enjoy the ride. Success looks different to everyone but I think we are doing our best as a band and being a musician is the most rewarding when we remember our ‘why’ - which is always going to be the music!
How do you feel that your music can make an impact of listeners?
Jem: I’d really hope that our music makes people feel heard and understood. Maybe that we’ve packaged a feeling or experience in a way that they relate to or feel they couldn’t explain.
Koen: This is another core question to why I make music. I don’t think it’s worth making music if it doesn’t impact listeners. Music is an artform and it’s much more important that artists make a mark rather than get a lot of pre-saves, playlists or big dollar sync deals; even though those are also nice.
Buddies for life! Photography by Flora Driessen/photo provided by Marmalade.
Tell me about how Marmalade was born!
Liam: Marmalade was born in the living room in our old flat. Jem, Koen, and I did the same music course at Uni and we were all looking to move houses, so funnily enough we were like “hey let's find a house together and also start a band!”. We were then lucky enough to find 2 incredible musicians, Dean and Chelsea, who jumped on board thus creating the Marmalade family we know today.
Which Kiwi artists are you currently listening to? Which up-and-comers would you recommend for the readers to pop on their playlists?
Jem: Balu Brigada, Foley, Muroki and Wiri Donna to name a few. I also really rate Fools Lagoon, Josette and Sam Bambery who are a bit more up-and-coming but definitely acts to keep an eye out for. There are so many cool kiwi artists though, including everyone Dean and Chelsea have mentioned, it's hard to pick!
Koen: We’re currently planning a tour with some of our favourite bands in tow!
Dean: Skilaa, Geoff Ong, Mazbou Q, Aunty Rae, Lisa Grace, Aro, Māia, Kyla Greening, Club Ruby, Ashy…
Chelsea: Cloak Bay, Leao, Summer Thieves and Club Ruby! The local Hip-Hop scene has been mean lately too. Diggy Dupe, LSJ & Brandn Shiraz, Mazbou Q and The YKK boys (Deadforest, Dera Meelan and Church & AP) are all doing some very, very special stuff.
What makes you most proud to be in Marmalade?
Jem: Apart from making music that I love and the achievements we’ve unlocked so far which I'm so stoked with, honestly, the way we work through the hard stuff. I think it’s really unique that at the end of the day we can sit down and have a mature conversation about whatever is going on. Plus, I’m really proud of what we can achieve as a unit without management or anything, it’s hard work but rewarding when it works out!
Dean: I love how a group of individuals with such diverse backgrounds and skill sets can come together to create something we’re all proud of. (Chelsea seconds this.)
Besides your upcoming EP, what other things do Marmalade have in the works?
Jem: Our second single coming out in October and A TOUR! We will be playing in Auckland, Waiheke and Wellington late October/early November this year and we can’t wait!
Thank you so much for your time! I look forward to hearing the next drop from Marmalade!
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Stay on the game by following Marmalade at all of their links below -
Spencer Coyle on What Music Means to Him and Collaborating with Drax Project
Recently, I got the chance to get in contact with up-and-coming Kiwi artist, Spencer Coyle to talk all things collaborating with Drax Project, his EP in the works and about the tour he is currently on with Mitch James. Photo: Provided by Sony Music NZ.
Spencer Coyle is a name that if you don’t know right now, you will know within the next week or two. Currently on tour with Mitch James, Spencer is on the way up with his catchy earworms in the form of music. Having recently released his newest offering, Castaway, with Drax Project, Spencer will have you hooked from the moment you listen to his music.
I sent some questions over for Spencer to answer, make sure to check out the below to find out more about this young, talented artist!
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Hey Spencer, thank you so much for coming on Welcome to the Gig! You’ve had some exciting things happening in your career recently such as releasing your latest track, Castaway, with Drax Project. Alongside quite a quirky video. How did the collab with Drax Project come about?
Spencer: I went to the studio one day and found out that I had a session with the Drax Project boys the next day. We wrote the song within a few hours of meeting. We all got quite attached to the song so finishing it was a given.
Castaway is this cool, calm, collected masterpiece that brings about these feelings of summer. Tell me about the process of bringing Castaway to life.
Spencer: At the start of the session, we all agreed we were going to write a summer song. I remember asking the boys what 3 things they would bring with them if they got stuck on a desert island. Somewhere in this conversation somebody bought up the castaway concept. We were all reflecting on the past few years with all the covid lockdown hysteria and felt like using the concept of “casting away” was a cool and unique fit.
Have you got any more future collabs with Drax Project in the works currently?
Spencer: Not currently. I am a huge Drax Project fan myself so I would love to collaborate with them more on future projects. All 4 of the boys are such incredible musicians and they have their recording process so engrained and on point.
I’ve read that you grew up inspired by the likes of Justin Bieber and others. Which of Justin’s songs inspired you the most and were there any elements that you took from his music and incorporated into your own?
Spencer: I have been a big fan of Justin since I was about 6 years old. I remember going to watch his movie “Never Say Never” with my cousin and leaving the theatre so inspired and since then all I have ever wanted to be is a musician. Obviously, there is no doubt he is a great musician with a truckload of hits but I think for me I mostly looked up to him as a fellow young male singer. Being a male pop singer in New Zealand surrounded by a culture of tall poppy syndrome wasn’t always easy but I could always look up to Justin as somebody who defied the odds.
You’re currently on tour with Mitch James for his Long Road Home tour. How are you finding that? Have you got any highlights so far?
Spencer: The tour has been an absolute dream so far. I've been a big fan of Mitch and his work for about 6 years now so it has felt so full circle to be sharing the stage with him every night. I’d say the biggest highlight so far has been the Dunedin show. It is hard to describe the feeling of hearing a crowd of people singing along with you and absolute strangers knowing all the words to your songs.
A capture from the Castaway shoot. Photo: provided by Sony Music NZ.
What was your reaction when you found out you were going on tour with Mitch?
Spencer: It was kind of hard to believe at first because as I mentioned I've been a massive Mitch fan for many years. It still feels very surreal stepping out on that stage.
What does the value of music mean to you?
Spencer: I honestly have no idea what I'd do without music. I'm either listening to or making music from the minute I wake up to the minute I go to sleep. From a very young age, music has been pretty much my only interest and passion. So, to answer that question plain and simple, music means everything to me.
For those who have the luxury of getting to see you on tour, what can audiences expect?
Spencer: Audiences can expect an intimate and acoustic set of original music, both released and unreleased as well as a cover or two.
What emotions do you hope to evoke with your music?
Spencer: Honestly, I just hope that my music can resonate with people. As an artist, there is nothing better than audiences creating memories to your music.
What’s the next step in your quickly evolving career?
Spencer: I am currently sitting on an EP which is set to come out in the very near future. A definite next step is just to play as many live shows as possible and hopefully have the ability to start playing headline shows and growing my audience.
Thank you so much for your time, Spencer! I appreciate that you have a busy schedule and am excited to see what your next project is. Do you have anything further to add?
Spencer: Thank you for having me. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what the future has in store for me.
Follow along with Spencer below:
Chasing The Silent Era: An Interview with Chris Schwarten
The Silent Era have a lot to offer and are quickly rising to make their music known across the UK! From L-R: Chris Schwarten, Jo Eiffes, Nicolas Zappa and Bri Macanas. All photos provided by Chris from The Silent Era.
While in London at the end of March, I caught up with legendary Australian, Chris Schwarten, who is the guitarist in London-based four-piece, shoe-gazey, alternative-rock band, The Silent Era.
We spoke about how different the music scene is between England and New Zealand (Chris has been involved in the Auckland music scene previously), what animal he would liken the band’s music to and the long process of recording.
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I’m here with Chris from The Silent Era, hello!
Chris: Hello!
Thank you so much for coming on Welcome to the Gig, it’s awesome to meet you.
Chris: Thank you so much for coming down on this lovely day in Kings Cross.
How’s your day going?
Chris: It’s good, good, I’ve just been working most of the day which is fine, you’ve got to do something to pay the bills.
As I mentioned, you’re from The Silent Era. Tell me about the band a little bit, what’s your background, how long have you been going for?
Chris: We’re an alternative rock four-piece, we’ve only really been together for the last two years, but the core of the band has been playing together for at least four years now on different projects. We’ve had at least two bands that we’ve been in prior that have fallen apart or have changed line-ups, then we’ve ended up with what we’ve got now, which is a little bit shoe-gazey, a little bit goth-rock… We’ve also got a really powerful female vocalist up front, which is kind of not really common for either of those genres.
I noticed that when I first listened to your single that, oh, you’ve got a female vocalist! That’s so cool. I love the diversity that you guys have.
Chris: That was one of the awesome things to me, I wanted to do something with a female vocalist, especially if we were doing something heavy and sometimes the guitars can get so noisy that they’re almost like white noise at times, so I wanted to juxtapose that with something really strongly melodically and I think that when you’ve got something really heavy, not that I think we are really that heavy, but when you’ve got something and you put a strong melody in and strong vocal on top of that, I think that’s when you can get interesting results. Which is what we’re trying to do.
I think you’ve achieved that with the first single that you’ve got out. Speaking of your first single, Heavy Cure, was released mid-January, tell me about the process around recording and writing, how did it all come together?
Chris: We started working on that song just after - in the middle of our worst lockdown - basically, our previous band, we’d just started recording an album and our singer decided he didn’t want to do it anymore and we basically didn’t know what to do with ourselves and we had recorded all this music and we couldn’t really do anything [with it]. We just decided because we couldn’t go out, we couldn’t see anybody, we had our rehearsal room, we could technically go and play in, so we decided, “okay, that’s within the rules, so let’s go down and just play music for fun” and we just started working on the songs together on our own, just the three of us and that was the first song that we starting working on. Our bass player, Nick, just demoed it up and bought it in and we got it out. That’s what it was. It was just an instrumental for a year or something while we were looking for singers and there were about four or five different singers until Bri reached out to us one day and said “hey, do you want to a female vocalist?” and it was like, “yes, that’s what we were looking for!”
Amazing, so it all came together quite well.
Chris: Yeah, it came together, but it took quite a long time. We recorded it last August and we’ve only just got to putting it out now.
Good things take time and you hear that with a lot of bands that they record something a year or two prior whichever and it doesn’t come out for ages.
Chris: Yeah, I never wanted to be one of those bands. Our other singles, we were hoping they would have been out last month [February 2023] and we only just got around to doing that now and they were recorded at the same time [as Heavy Cure], but everything takes longer with us.
Do you have someone who mixes and masters all of your work for you?
Chris: So, our bass player has been mixing our ones for this. He’s got a background in sound engineering, he’s a real whizz with the studio stuff. We recorded the next single in a studio in Brighton called Small Pond. We also recorded extra parts in his studio at home. We kind of recorded all over the place. I think that’s something we will probably do a bit more of, as well.
So, you’ve got bits of stories from different parts of England where you’ve recorded them, which is pretty awesome.
Chris: We’re probably going back to Brighton, it’s a pretty cool recording studio at the Small Pond. I had a really cool amp set-up for that, my amp was about £4,000 and I recorded about 100 guitar tracks. It was good to have that time to actually do that. I’ve done recording sessions in Reading and a couple of ones in London studios and some engineers aren’t that keen for you to take your time, essentially.
What was the inspiration behind going for the genre of music you make?
Chris: It kind of happened very naturally, it was more because of what we listen to, I guess. Nick and I, the first band we started doing, was this really experimental kind of industrial doom band. It kind of carried on from that. Him and I have quite a crossover in our musical taste, we’re both massive fans of Nine Inch Nails and Deftones, so those are the two big ones that come through, also The Cure. I mean, there’s probably 100 different bands that we’ll talk about at different times. Sometimes it’s The Cure, sometimes it’s Rage Against the Machine. It kind of varies. When we do our demos, I think, sometimes we’ll even call one song The Queens of the Stone Age song or something like that because it’s got a riff that’s like that, or that’s the Tool song, or that’s that. Nick used to do this thing where he would name his songs after cheesy things from the 60s and he has had some where Bri has taken inspiration from that and the lyrics end up in the choruses. I won’t tell you what they are, but you’ll hear them in good time. They come from all over the place.
I hear you’ve got a gig coming up at The Finsbury on the 15th April (editor note: for context, this interview took place back in March), what can anyone who hasn’t been to any of your live performances expect from that show?
Chris: It will be loud.
Maybe bring earplugs?
Chris: Definitely bring earplugs. You will end up with tinnitus if you don’t. Other than that, it’s kind of… We just sort of, rip through our set. We have a lot of songs to play and we just get through them basically, but we always have a curated set and we always try to have our visuals. We have a visuals guy who has done visuals for all of our songs. Everything transitions to another, so there’s basically one break in the show where we say “we’re The Silent Era, thanks for coming out” otherwise, we’re just going through it, which is good in some ways and bad in other ways because you sometimes find yourself changing guitars and going, “okay, alright. We’re coming with the next one.” But anyway, it’s good fun, but it’s a very fast 40-minutes or so.
If you’re non-stop, how do you deal with that?
Chris: It’s ah… It’s not too bad. It’s just because we rehearse it that way. We’ve got twelve songs or something to choose from and we change our setlist every time we play. We always plan that out before, so I guess it’s just a case of being prepared and knowing we’ve got cues to go with.
Is there a particular song you like to open with or close with? I know you did say it changes every time…
Chris: Yeah, we always close with Scorpio, which is our next single, so that kind of always ends up being the last one because it’s the highest energy one. We started opening with a brand new one… The single, we’re going to have an A side and a B side and the B side is going to be a cover of Mazzy Star’s ‘Into Dust’ and we like to open with that. That’s a standard opener and we don’t always open with it, but the reason we do that is because it starts off very soft and melodic and it stops people from talking over the top of us when we start playing. It’s kind of a good way of getting everyone to shoosh each other and getting everyone to pay attention.
I would love to be at one of your shows eventually, but of course, I don’t live in London.
Chris: Unfortunately, our drummer left last month, so we would have had a show lined up this month, because we tend to play three times a month. Next month, we were supposed to be playing four times, but things got in the way of that, as well. We are currently trying to get a drummer, our new drummer, up to show status. Unfortunately, the Finsbury’s the next one. It feels like it’s been ages since we played a gig, so we feel like we don’t remember how to do it.
I guess you’d miss it, when you haven’t played a gig in a while?
Chris: I didn’t think I would. I used to dread doing gigs and now I’ve gotten quite used to doing it. I start getting a bit, not antsy, but whenever I go and see a band, I’m always like “ah, I wish it was gig night tonight.” Hopefully we’ll get to go on a bit of a run after I come back from New Zealand. One thing we sort of started doing last year was playing outside of London. It’s very boring, but there’s regulations that you can’t play in London too often. Promoters don’t want you to play within two or three weeks of a gig because they want to ensure they get a good crowd for their gig. So, we started looking out and playing gigs elsewhere to get out of that. It is a bit of a slog when you have to go out to Reading on a Wednesday night or something. Anyway, it’s good. We keep cracking at it, though. If we could do it, we would probably play four times a week.
If you could choose three relatively unknown bands to open on support for one of your shows, who would you choose and why?
Chris: How relatively unknown is relatively unknown?
Just whatever you think, obviously not big hot shots out there.
Chris: There’s an excellent, actually, there’s two great Brighton bands I’d say right off the bat - I’d say Clt Drp, they’re a super interesting band. It’s really interesting because they’ve got the most amazing guitar player I’ve seen live and he doesn’t play in a traditional sense and he basically plays techno on his guitar. They also have the greatest drummer as well, they’re a super good band. So, probably them. Another Brighton band is InTechnicolour, they’re a really cool stoner metal band. They’ve been progressing in their latest album and you can kind of see there’s a bit of slickness about them, they’ve taken off the rough edges a little bit, so they’ve got a stronger sense of melody, but they’ve still got a grittiness to them. For a third one… How popular are Wet Leg in New Zealand?
They just have been to New Zealand, so they’re pretty popular. They can be the third answer.
Chris: Nah, I’ll say Wolf Alice. Let’s go Wolf Alice. They’re a big band here. We’d be a good fit for a Wolf Alice line-up. A very good band.
How do you find the support here in London, is it quite difficult or quite easy to get support from the public?
Chris: It’s easy to get gigs here. I also was trying to get into the Auckland scene. When I was in Auckland, I found it hard to play with people who had the same interests and tastes as me, whereas in London, there’s just so many people and you’ve just got to find people, so there’s a lot more opportunities in that sense. There are so many more pubs and we’re just in a random one in Kings Cross that just happens to put on gigs. It’s very easy to find places to play and I get promoters emailing us good offers from venues that I’ve never even heard of, it’s like, “oh, I didn’t know that was even a place in London!” whereas in Auckland, I know of all the places, I went to them. I find in Auckland, they’re a lot better at curating line-ups, so we’ve played with some jazz bands and folk bands. We’ve played with kind of a marching band last time we played at the Water Rat. It was a bit weird. They’re a bit like America’s Got Talent kind of thing. They played at Glastonbury. It was weird. You wouldn’t get that in Auckland and I think that’s probably a good thing.
If you could liken your tunes to an animal, which animal would you choose and why?
Chris: Dog. I just love dogs. My dream is to one day have a random patch of land that I have all these retired animals on and I’d have rescue dogs and rescue horses. I just think that dogs tend to bring so much happiness to life.
Scorpio/Into Dust is now available to listen to on Spotify and Apple Music and you can also check out The Silent Era’s Bandcamp to listen, too.
What’s next for The Silent Era, apart from the singles and the gig?
Chris: We’re going to start working on an album once I come back from New Zealand. It takes us so frigging long to do anything, we were hoping to start recording it this month, but we weren’t anticipating having a line-up change, so that’s kind of thrown things out, so it might be July when we start recording. As I say, we’ve got twelve songs so far and there might be two more singles out before the end of the year and hopefully some festival shows. That’s the plan. There are always opportunities that come up and there’s opportunities that we don’t necessarily always know about. I mean, we just started getting other bands who are just coming into town asking us to support them, so we are just getting those offers now. It’s exciting, just kind of getting opportunities coming along.
That’s great news that people are reaching out and asking you to support them. That’s huge!
Chris: Yeah, I mean, we kind of take things seriously, but I think in previous bands, we’ve taken things too seriously and it’s kind of taken the fun out of it. We try and be a bit more chilled out about things now because of us having been a few different bands at this point, so we’re trying not to lose sight of the fun aspect. We’re doing things we want to enjoy. If we have a shit time, we are not going to do it. If we play a terrible pub, we’re probably not going to play that place again. We’re just trying to take it one day at a time and have the best time that we can.
Where can people find your music and your social media?
Chris: Definitely follow on Instagram, I don’t have anything to do with it. Our singer, Bri, does all of that and does a good job of it. We’re going to try and be a bit more active on it. We’re trying to do a bit more behind the scenes sort of stuff. Spotify, Apple Music… But if you also go to our Soundcloud, we release demos well before we put them out. We’re just going to try and do that, we’re not being too precious about it. We want to be as accessible as we can be.
Thank you so much Chris for letting me interview you. It has been a real pleasure, especially here in London, I’ve never done an interview outside of New Zealand before.
Chris: Thank you so much!
For more on The Silent Era, you can check out their links below -
Chats with Dean from Gibson XCVIII - What Country Their Music Would be, NZ Music Support and Genre Changes
Gibson XCVIII are made up of Mark (left) and Dean (right). We had a nifty wee email interview to chat about a few things we didn’t cover on the podcast. Have a read below to find out more! PC: Dean from Gibson XCVIII.
Hey guys, thanks once again for taking the time to be interviewed! It’s been a few months since you were on the show and I’m stoked to have you back, but on the blog.
Gibson XCVIII: Thank you so much for having us again!
How has life been since the show aired? What’s been going on for Gibson XCVIII?
Gibson XCVIII: Things have been going well! There's a lot going on in the background, and we can't wait to share what we have been working on in 2023.
You’ve recently released another groovy song, GAME OF LIFE, which is brilliant, by the way. What has the response been to that, has it done as well as you’d hoped it would?
Gibson XCVIII: Thank you so much!! We've been blown away by the response of GOL, honestly we are super stoked with how it has turned out.
The dynamic that you’ve got as a band was touched on during the show and I love the fact that you can just bounce off of each other. Has that bond gotten stronger the past few months?
Gibson XCVIII: This is definitely something that continues to grow as time goes on and we continue working together. It is certainly something that we both take pride in when it comes to working on new ideas / concepts! We are confident that this will only get stronger as time goes on.
Besides music, what else do you both enjoy doing?
Gibson XCVIII: Not a lot really! We both work full time which takes up most of our schedules anyway! I guess apart from that, it really is just music!
Do you have a turning point in your lives where you were like, “wow. Music is what I should be pursuing?”
Gibson XCVIII: I'm pretty certain that music has always played its part in our lives since we were young. I guess the turning point was the end product when we started writing music. As soon as we listened to what we created, I think that was then where we realized this was something worth pursuing.
If your music was a country, which country would it be and why?
Gibson XCVIII: Hahaha that's a great question! I'd definitely say New Zealand, because that's where we are from and where our stories originate from. But in saying that I'd absolutely count the countries our extended families are from, like The Netherlands and Thailand!
If Gibson XCVIII were to change musical direction, which way would you go?
Gibson XCVIII: That is honestly something that we've thought about for a long time, and to be honest it's really hard to put a finger on it! Perhaps if we were to go down the alternative/indie route sonically that would be the closest bet, but we would always continue writing honest music as much as possible!
The moodiness of this photo is far from what you get when chatting to the Gibson XCVIII guys. PC: Gibson XCVIII Facebook.
A question that I have been asking a little bit of late is how do you feel that as New Zealand musicians, you can be better supported? I think it’s important to get a standpoint from different artists on this answer as I don’t believe you get as much support as say, Australian, American or even British musicians.
Gibson XCVIII: This is certainly an ongoing discussion happening in NZ. It's awesome to see that there are steps made in the business regarding representation and funding towards musical arts, but there's always more room to improve on. I personally believe that the industry in NZ should follow similarly to what Australia does, where they have the Triple J Radio & Triple J Unearthed - perhaps something that could be done here in NZ is to link with an already established national radio like ZM, The Edge, More FM + others! It's also refreshing to see organizations like RDU & Big Fan stepping up offering programmes towards musical development, diversifying opportunities for all of NZ as opposed to always gunning for funding from public agencies such as NZ On Air or Creative NZ, who knows what else may be on offer!
Have you ever had any interesting moments during recording that kind of took you aback?
Gibson XCVIII: Listening to your playing back is always something that takes us aback! I know it sounds silly but one thing my dad used to always tell me "the biggest critic in whatever you do will always be yourself" - sometimes listening [to it] back it can be quite daunting yet I'll admit there are times where we listen back and are fully dumbfounded that we just did that!
If you could have an animal to go everywhere with you, no matter how crazy, what animal would you choose and why?
Gibson XCVIII: It would be sooooo cool to have a pet elephant - they are such beautiful creatures and are incredibly adorable! They have so much character to them and are cheeky buggers hahaha.
Current favourite musician/band?
Gibson XCVIII: JON BELLION! NUMBER 1 FAN HERE.
What’s next for Gibson XCVIII?
Gibson XCVIII: We're currently working on something new here (stay tuned) plus currently in the works to pack out our calendar to perform live! Maybe even a wee tour, who knows ;)
Anything else you’d like to add?
Gibson XCVIII: Stay positive!
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Big thank you to Dean for his time answering the questions. Stay up-to-date with Gibson XCVIII below -
Words of Wisdom with the Monk Seals
3/4 of the Monk Seals! L-R: Jono, Abel and Yannik sat down at Rollickin’ to have a chat with Welcome to the Gig last week. Spot that Monk Seals poster on the wall! Photo taken on the Sony A600.
Last week, I had the pleasure of sitting down with talented-as-heck Christchurch band, the Monk Seals, to hear all their pearls of wisdom of what advice they would give to up-and-coming musicians, how they make things easier on those bad days and how New Zealand musicians can be more supported.
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Thank you for letting me interview you and a huge congratulations on the release of Easier Now, the second single of yours.
MS: Thank you, it’s been a good time, it’s been a fun journey for sure.
How’s the response been so far?
MS: It’s been real good. Everyone who's listened to it has said it’s real catchy, which is what we’re excited about. We think it’s real catchy. This is quite a cool song, it’s something that people will want to listen to more than once.
I know you said last time on the podcast that you were seeking more constructive criticism, have you had that?
MS: We have noticed that people have said like… The transitions between some songs have been slower, but that’s more just admin. Since our last [set of] gigs, we took that into consideration and planned out our transitions so that it can just be a lot more smooth and just more professional, I suppose, than “here’s the new song”. We’ve been trying to make it more like a show, rather than just a live band playing music at a bar.
MS: I think a lot more feedback as a band as opposed to the music itself. At the end of the day, we’re the only ones who can you know… As far as music goes, we’re probably our own worst critics a little bit, which is all good. We know what’s great and we know what we need to improve on and stuff. Every song gets a little bit better, I reckon.
Absolutely. I mean, you’ve only got two songs out at the moment, but I’m assuming you’ve got lots more on the way?
MS: Ah yeah, for sure. We’ve got so many songs that we’ve written. Even newer music that we’ve written recently. We’ve just got so many original songs we don’t know what to do with them, which is great because at the end of the day, we play music first and foremost because we’re musicians. So, we can just pick out the best ones because we’ve got so much now. When it comes to recording, we can just pick something out.
Are you guys still working with TK?
MS: We just finished working with him. It was such a fun experience recording with him, but you know, he’s a busy man. He’s earnt himself a well-deserved break. We’d love to record with him sometime soon when he’s got the time available. He really understood what the sound was we were going for. We can record a song at the end of the day, but it’s the person who mixes and masters it that really makes it. He executed that brilliantly.
That’s a bummer he’s busy, but it’s good you guys can experiment with different producers and such.
How does Easier Now differ from Sex Disco?
MS: It was actually made by a different human being, which makes it a lot different. Our old bass player, David, he came up with the riff and that’s sort of how the song originated. We all listen to the same music, it’s kind of drawn from similar sort of people. Like artists, influences. It was made by David and then we’ve sort of, made it our own. That’s how it differs from Sex Disco.
MS: Also, Sex Disco it was just a fun song, a little bit of a piss-take and just like, woo, party! [With] Easier Now, it’s about getting, like, out of a tough period. It’s a happy song. Sex Disco was rocky, but this one is a bit more uplifting and meaningful, but still, we tried to maintain that silly element. I don’t know, could you say it was a little bit more melodic, as well? Sex Disco was more like a blues-y kind of song. It’s more sing-a-longy, I guess.
This segways into my next question, what do you guys do when you’re not finding life easy. What makes it easier for you?
MS: Good question, good question. Music helps! Definitely being in a tough situation, like a break-up, you can turn it into a song and make something out of it.
MS: First and foremost, we’re musicians, so music is the reason we get up in the morning and I feel like [it helps when] getting on with the day.
MS: When you are broken hearted, you make art with the pieces.
That was words of inspiration right there.
MS: We’ve got ourselves a wee Shakespeare.
“You make art with the pieces.” words of ultimate wisdom from Abel.
We were just talking about your gig before. Your sold out gig at 12 Bar recently, do you have any major highlights from that night?
MS: So much fun, eh. A highlight was just being able to play the brand new songs. Like, the brand, brand new songs. For me, it was really exciting when we were about to play Sex Disco, everyone was “yeah!” and that showed myself and rest the rest of us like, “wow, they’re familiar with the song”. We could see people singing our original music which is very exciting to see.
MS: It was fun getting the antics as well. Getting a little bit more like, theatrical with it. We want to get way more into that. Last gig I think was like, a good indication of the direction we want to move more towards when it comes to gigs, you know? Just getting more creative with it. Building more of a community with it. Our last gig felt like a real good community, everyone was just stoked.
MS: It’s cool to see, when planning a show, when it comes to theatrical stuff, it’s nice seeing something come to life. We played one of our new songs where I talked about Yannik being held captive by goblins, you know? That’s silly, but when he came out in his dishevelled, hunched over, gremlin persona, it was really funny because that’s just how I pictured it in my head. People thought it was funny. It wasn’t just some weird inside joke between all of us.
You bring such high energy to the stage, it always blows people away.
MS: It’s great, but it’s also kind of scary because you think “oh, wow, we’re getting more and more theatrical and outrageous” like, we’re going to have to keep getting more and more ridiculous. One day, we’re going to like, blow up or something. It’s great, but it will be our undoing, for sure.
I can’t wait to see your next show.
What do you think about Monk Seals appeals to the audience at your live shows?
(At this point I realised I had asked a very silly question.)
MS: We’d hope the music. We’re a very energetic band. We’ve had people say that they really like, as a group, our dynamic of personalities. I think when we’re all together, we have like, this alluring quality and you know. Maybe sometimes they want to come to see Yannik take his shirt off. They want to see Abel with his shirt off. They might just want to see me in my blue jumpsuit. There’s no real way of telling what’s going on inside of the audiences’ heads. They seem to enjoy it, so that’s cool. We’re just here to entertain.
MS: I think a lot of it is just something different, really. Personally, I don’t think there’s anyone else out there, well, of course there are, but not many people are doing the same kind of music we do, the same kind of live performance we do. It’s a lot of inspiration from when like, rock was really our main focus in the industry and we are just trying to incorporate what made it so good back then into today. I think people appreciate that because it is something that is so… That whole vibe, is just, I don’t know… People just like it.
MS: See, it’s a real throwback for some people with some of the sounds we use. Our song writing and structure is still quite different. It’s not like we’ve just looked at a textbook of 70s music or something. I suppose it seems that our music and personas are authentic because it’s not like we’re just trying to force what we do. It all comes very naturally to us. It’s who we are. We’ve just been like that for years. Even when we were younger, we were like that. We’ve always all about doing something that’s a bit out there. It doesn’t seem out there for us, but I guess for other people, it’s different. It’s organic.
Jono and Yannik performing recently at Loons, Lyttelton. Photo taken on the Sony A6000.
With New Zealand music becoming more popular both locally and internationally, do you think there need to be changes in the way New Zealand musicians are supported?
MS: Oh, absolutely. As an artist, it’s kind of hard to become more and more utilitarian, there’s not much support for the arts. Christchurch isn’t the most, you know, artsy kind of [place]. It’s not a place like Wellington where it’s more celebrated. Artists need to get a lot more support and recognition and be valued as contributors to society. What would the world be like without art or music? Otherwise, everything is just bland without art.
I agree with you there. I’m obviously not a musician, but just seeing what you guys go through to get enough recognition as international artists is a hell of a lot harder here.
MS: It is a big fight these days. There’s so much competition out there. To ask for more recognition, it’s like, yeah, but at the same time, everyone wants that. There is going to be a whole thing that there are some people that do get more recognition. It’s like, clawing your way to the top.
MS: It’s real hard to earn decent money through streaming, as well. You know, we accept reduced royalties, which in my opinion, is a bit like robbery. Artists need to be looked on more seriously instead of [being looked at like] a bunch of hipsters, strumming guitars… Because a lot of work goes into it.
MS: It’s not just all fun and games and grabbing ass, that’s for sure.
I don’t know how you can get ahead. As you said, Christchurch is not the most artistic place and there aren’t enough venues for you to play.
MS: It’s hard when you know, you have instances where people are complaining about noise control and stuff, that’s ridiculous. Bit of a Donny move. It does make it really hard for artists and business owners in general because you know, business and music go hand-in-hand, it’s entertainment.
Would you guys ever consider moving to a different city to pursue music further?
MS: New country, new cities. Aussies got it going on. They appreciate it over there. They appreciate more bands over there, you know? As opposed to here, it’s very D&B orientated. “What’s everyone doing in the weekend?” “D&B!” you know?
MS: It gets bland after a while.
MS: It’s a lot more supportive. The culture is more fitting for it.
How do you feel you can inspire upcoming musicians that want to do what you’re doing?
MS: Because we play part instruments and we don’t really use drum machines or things like that, I feel like that’s dying out nowadays. Real music is live. To all the up-and-coming rockers that want to start their own band, we want to inspire people to be like, yeah, bands can make it, you can play your instruments, you don’t have to go all, I don’t know, techie and stuff in production.
MS: You have to work for it. What I’d encourage a young, upcoming artist… Don’t try to be like anyone. Just be you. I’d encourage artists to be themselves. The best work will come out of doing what feels right for them.
MS: 100%. Love what you do, eh. Back yourself.
MS: Oblivion is bliss.
MS: We were like, 14, 15 when we started off. I joined Monk Seals in year 10 and we just wanted to play rock music and that’s how we’d spend our lunchtime. Every morning tea and lunchtime for the whole year. We weren’t great at first, but we had the ambition and the drive.
MS: We would just jam and it would sound pretty good. Obviously, we weren’t the best, just all those years we’ve gotten to know each other, we’ve just gotten better and better. Since we were all close friends, just having that strong friendship really helps as a musician. When you’re in a band, it’s all about relationships.
MS: But mostly, HAVE FUN! As cheesy as it sounds.
MS: At the end of the day, nobody is going to have fun for you.
This interview was just too much fun, I had to join in for a photo. Taken by the Monk Seals’ lovely manager.
I just wanted to touch on the EP, how’s that going?
MS: Coming along. To be honest, she’s pretty ready to go. For now, it’s just getting everything ready for it and some slight admin. Yeah, it’s pretty complete. Stoked with how it’s going. We are all fidgeting on our fingers every listen and we can’t wait to get it out there and see what people think.
Is the EP coming out sometime soon?
MS: That’s very hush hush. I don’t think you’ll need to wait too long.
Is there anything else coming up for you guys that you can talk about?
MS: Yeah, for sure. Two gigs coming up. We are going to be performing at Duke Festival which is on the 25th of March and we are also playing at The Village Inn in Sumner for the Tuawera Classic, both surf comps and that’s on the 31st of March, which is very exciting. Apart from that, there’s another song coming out. Just random stuff that’s going to be available.
MS: All in good time. A lot of music. Being in the music industry, a lot of it is just waiting.
Is there anything else you’d like to add to the interview?
MS: I was just thinking about young bands that want to become a thing, become a cover band before you say you’re a band so when you start off, you start jamming and don’t announce that you’re a band. You’ve got to test the waters.
MS: Thank you! We always appreciate a talk.
Oh, thank you guys!
MS: Always a pleasure and always great questions.
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A huge thank you to Yannik, Jono and Abel for taking the time to chat last week. Unfortunately, their fourth member was unavailable to partake in the interview this time.
Follow the Monk Seals below -
Greta O’Leary on Finding her Feet on Tour, The Release of her EP and her Dream Job Outside of Music
Greta O’Leary is an emerging New Zealand artist fresh to the scene that is already making her way through the country with an EP tour and a new EP already under her belt! Photo credit: Greta’s Facebook.
Just after the release of her debut EP in 2022, Treasure Horse, I sat down with Greta O’Leary to talk about how she is finding her feet within the New Zealand music industry, how she got her unique EP name and how quickly she has been able to adapt to tour life.
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Hello!
Greta: Hello!
How’s it going?
Greta: Good. How are you going?
Good thank you! Thank you so much for letting me interview you.
First of all, I want to say congratulations on releasing your EP, Treasure Horse, it must be super exciting that that is finally out in the world.
Greta: It’s a big relief for it to be finished.
How long was the process from start to finish to create Treasure Horse?
Greta: It feels like it has been a project over a full year. I recorded the first single on its own right at the start of 2022, the songs were already written when I began that process. Those were written… Maybe two years ago. All around the same time and yeah, the process of recording and developing it has been basically the whole of 2022.
So, it’s been a big year for you, then?
Greta: Yeah, it’s been really big. First year of this stuff.
Do you have any favourite memories from creating your new EP?
Greta: There were a lot of ups and downs. I get quite sensory overload, so it’s quite interesting when you’re listening intently for eight hours… But there are lots of good moments. There was one point when I was working on the second half of the EP, we were recording horns… Four women and one man in the studio and that’s very uncommon. It was amazing for me because I’m still starting to be around such prolific and professional female musicians and producers.
Where abouts did you record the EP?
Greta: It’s kind of in two parts because part way through, I got some funding, which changed things, so the first two songs Outnumbered and Body Now I recorded with Toby Lloyd who is with Tiny Triumph Recordings, so I recorded them with him in his studio and at different times as well. He produced, mixed and played some instruments on one of the recordings as well. The next three I recorded with Charlotte Yates. She was my producer and we got development funding from NZ on Air and so, we recorded in a bunch of different places, that’s just how it worked out. Partly at Massey Studios in Wellington, partly at The Surgery and partly at a home studio in Miramar. Yeah, two clear parts.
Did you have to apply for that funding? Were you put forward for it? How does that work?
Greta: You apply with a producer and the producer does most of the application because they kind of want to see that the producer has a strong track record of working with artists who are producing good work. It wasn’t too intense for me because Charlotte did a lot of that work and she was the kind of like, manager of everything. Any artist can team up with a producer and see if they meet the criteria and put through an application.
It’s good that there is some funding for New Zealand musicians, I can imagine it’s quite hard for people to get off the ground if there wasn’t.
Greta: A lot of people in the past have talked about the gap between sort of starting out and starting to get single funding. The main funding is so far from a leap and so this is something kind of halfway, yeah.
Who influences your alternative-folk sound?
Greta: Hmm, good question. I listen to a lot of sensitive music and really like lyrically driven music. That, I guess, plays a big part, the voice… The voice is the key weight. I guess because I get overloaded sometimes, I naturally go towards music that doesn’t overload me and it took me quite a long time to find full bands as opposed to more stripped down sets that I found calming or really yummy. My aim… Even though some of the songs I’ve made at the end are quite hectic, I made my aim as making music in a full band kind of way that still has that sensitivity.
[At the time of the interview, Greta was on a tour across NZ, hence why this question was about the tour] You’re currently on an EP tour across New Zealand, have you got any highlights to share so far?
Greta: I guess… Playing in Auckland was significant because it was our first show with the full band, so that felt like a really important moment. It was also the first time my parents have seen me perform, weirdly enough. Everyone is always shocked by that. That was a very key moment, having them come along and because I grew up in Auckland and got to connect with a lot of people and getting [to see them] at the show was pretty great.
What is tour life like for you? Have you found it easy to get into or has it been a little bit challenging?
Greta: Kind of both. I think it has been a little bit challenging. The week before the EP tour, I did a short tour at the top of the South Island where I played five times in four days and that kind of set me on the back foot a bit for the next couple of months of shows. I think because there has been a lot of sickness around, I think I’ve not been in a prime position to be pushing myself. Balancing rest and being able to rest with doing that work has been a challenge, but, overall, I find it quite easy to be going to lots of different places and adapting to different environments. I’ve travelled a lot in the past. I’ve noticed the similarities and so I do have some skills from having to think on my feet or deal with uncomfortable temperature environments. That’s been nice to discover that I can do things like that. At the moment, I can’t imagine delivering night after night with so few breaks.
When you talk to people about your music, what do you hope that you express?
Greta: I find it generally hard to talk about the music, it can be hard to sum up. I guess I want to be honest and show the honesty in the music. There aren’t a lot of tricks, it’s just very personal and open. I guess, I try to convey that in the best way that I can. It depends on the day.
If you weren’t doing music, what do you envision yourself doing?
Greta: I spent a lot of time, drifting around, travelling, working random jobs and spend a lot of time moving. I am no longer living that life, even though music kind of takes you into a circle where you are sort of doing that again. I guess, one of my fallback careers has been to be a sign language interpreter. I love sign language and have close connections in the deaf community. That is something I have become very, very close to pursuing. Then, the music… I can’t [forget about it]. Maybe one day I’ll be able to have both, but that’s probably the thing, yeah.
Greta is a folk-alternative artist who has recently released her debut EP, Treasure Horse. Photo credit: Greta’s Facebook.
That’s incredible. If you could go forward to the future, would you and if so, what would you hope you would see?
Greta: I would really like to… Now that I’ve decided to do this with my life and make records and play and tour, I would like to see that happening successfully, but, in a way that isn’t ruining me. I would like to make this a lifelong career, but not at the expense of family or my mental health. That maybe can be tricky as an independent artist. You’ve got so many hats all the time. Would I choose to see that? I think, I don’t know if I would. I think the mystery is important.
What was the inspiration behind the name Treasure Horse?
Greta: I was just going through important words from the collection, it just stuck out. It’s a little bit of a weird name and horses are an important theme and I just found and it and it was just the right balance of all the bits. I’ve just run with it and I love to say it.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Greta: I don’t think so. I am playing some festivals over summer, but not much because I really need a break and I would like to focus more on writing for a period, because I do my own releases, so it’s a lot of outward energy and I’m looking forward to getting back into that reflective space so that I can keep writing.
Definitely more music from you to come in the future?
Greta: Yup.
Thank you so much for taking the time to sit down and chat with me. It has been so nice to virtually meet you.
Greta: Thanks so much!
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Taking in the Simple Things, Changing Sounds and Dream Music Festivals: Edwin Judd from The RVMES
The RVMES are coming in HOT with their third album that you don’t want to miss out on listening to. L-R: Ronaldo Lima, Richard Moore, Edwin Judd, Logan Fox. All photos provided by THE RVMES.
Ahead of the album release, I caught up with Edwin Judd, frontman of The RVMES for a chat about Simple Things, growth as a band, personal inspirations and more. An interview for the history books, for sure. Read on to see what Edwin had to say!
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Hello!
Edwin: Sup Ashlea, how’s it going?
Good thank you, how are you?
Edwin: Not too bad, thank you.
Thank you so much for being interviewed for Welcome to the Gig and sorry it has taken so long.
Edwin: That’s cool. Cheers for having us!
Just to be sure, your band name is pronounced The Rooms, is that correct?
Edwin: Correct. Nice one.
You’ve just released your third album that came out on the 24th November, I noticed when listening to it, every track has a different vibe to it. Every sound is so unique to the next one. How did that uniqueness come about? What made you want to create songs that sound like different artists with every track?
Edwin: We’ve done it since day one, pretty much. If you listen to our previous releases, it is the same situation. When we were thinking and talking about making the band, we were wondering what it would sound like… For one, we didn’t know. Two, being a purely reggae band, eventually it would probably get old. I don’t know. I can’t say that for every band. Like, Katchafire are bloody awesome, but maybe at some point, they’re like “man, I don’t want to play reggae anymore”, but Katchafire’s so locked into it that they can’t really branch off. Every rehearsal and jam session would be different ideas and genres. It’s really fun to play with that kind of stuff.
It’s really interesting because like, I was thinking about it while I was listening and unless you were specifically told and you knew that you were listening to the new album, you’d think that it was different artists every time. I think that is such a cool way to approach an album. I reckon that’s super cool.
Edwin: Yeah, it’s a good surprise and what is nice is like, it does sound like different bands, but vocally, it’s the same lyricist, myself. The same singer-songwriter. So, it ties it all together. Different vibes all over the place.
Do you have a favourite song off Simple Things?
Edwin: I really like Who Shot the Moon, the second track. I’ve got high hopes for that one. I could see it on the start of a TV show or something. It’s very moody and stuff. Playing live, I think, What’s Troublin You is quite fun. That was one of our singles off the album. They all have their different thing. I like playing some of them live more than I like listening to them.
It’s a different thing to play it and listen to it, isn’t it?
Edwin: Yeah, and Who Shot the Moon is a motherfucker to play live.
Speaking of the album, to go along with it, you’ve got quite a hefty summer coming up as well, with a couple big shows and touring around the North Island.
Edwin: I’m super excited. I have my to-do list here. Absolutely rammed. It’s our fourth tour, we were trying to count this the other day. All self-organised, all self-funded, I pretty much do all the booking myself. All the graphics are done by our drummer. We have five festivals and I’ve booked five venues and it’s all around the North Island. I tried to get the South Island, but it didn’t work out. The budget is pretty tight.
You’ve got my friends, Odds & Ends and also Retro Valley on the line-up for some of the shows.
Edwin: Yup, big shout out to the team. Love them. We’ve got Makeshift Parachutes as well, DJ Bax. Camila Lenhart. I think that’s everyone. So keen, very keen.
How do you pick your support acts? Is it an easy task to do?
Edwin: There’s quite a few factors. It’s like, depending on who you want and availability, first of all. I had some other bands in mind, but either one or two of them were booked or they had releases of their own coming out, so you kind of have to hit them up way in advance. Band-wise, we like energetic bands… Another factor with choosing support acts, as well, choosing friends is amazing, very cool, we’re all about it, [however] getting support acts that are local rather than bringing someone from Auckland is that support acts will bring their crowd as well. Also, booking a more notable band will be better for you.
How does Simple Things differ from your previous albums, Lifetime and The RVMES?
Edwin: All three of these releases, they’re all self-recorded, so we did it all in our own studio. Well, my garage, the first one. I think Simple Things is a bigger step compared to Lifetime just in terms of how much we grew with production and stuff. We also grew as songwriters, so it’s more intricate songs and riffs. Also, lyrically, it’s deeper. We went with more topics that are real. Lifetime had a few happy-go-lucky songs, let’s just say.
You sort of touched on this, however, how much have you grown since the last two albums?
Edwin: Grown as a band, I guess, more with like age. We kind of matured a little bit, hence why those lyrics kind of changed and we wanted to produce different topics. There is quite a lot of mental health in this album and so, like, “the greedy corporate people”. The world’s crazy. The world is full of greed and whatever. Also, we’ve gone through a member change in the band, which, I guess you could talk about growth with that a little bit, maybe. It was quite scary to be honest because we didn’t know who we were going to get. We had about 10 or 11 people lined up to audition or who were interested… We did 4 auditions, the first guy, Richard Moore, the new guitarist, he absolutely destroyed it. He knew everything, he had the passion, he had the schedule as well and he was really cool. He was ready to go.
I’ve spoken to a few bands who have lost members and had to replace them. How does that affect you guys, apart from obviously the music side of things? Does that also affect you quite a lot personally?
Edwin: We were all very tight, Miro was amazing in the band and I knew that he wanted to go to Europe, even before we started The RVMES, so I had it in the back of my mind that he was eventually going to go over. We had four really good years with him. Richard has quite a similar style to Miro. It was quite a seamless changeover.
I’ve noticed you have done single releases and albums, but never EPs. Is there a reason you’ve chosen to go the longer route with albums?
Edwin: I think we’re just old school at heart to be honest. Albums are cool though, we take a lot of pride in the order of our albums, like the kind of energy it portrays… EPs are sweet, but they’re just a little bit too short. The length of Simple Things was really cool, because it’s to the point where if there were one or two more songs, it could’ve been too long. It’s quite a quick album - I think it’s like, 28 or 30 minutes in total. I think it’s a good bite to chew, you know?
You touched briefly on the recording process, I wanted to expand on that a little bit more.
Edwin: It’s going to change now because the home studio was Miro’s gear. I think this is a time for us at the moment where when we release, we want to go into an actual studio. When we first went from the garage to the home studio and [then back to the] home studio again, we had all these cool releases, we’ve done a couple of singles in studios, we won a competition with Parachute and we recorded at Earwig Studios in Birkenhead, which is all on tape… We wanted to record on tape. We did three songs in one day, I think. It’s crazy. We want to step up from now and just do studio stuff and lift the quality. When we were recording in the home studios, we had all the time in the world, so we would just sit around and track and experiment which was really nice because you don’t really have that leisure when you go into a studio. I think it’s going to be a positive going into a studio because yes, you can do it at your leisure, but that means you can nit-pick more and things don’t sit until they go stale.
What are your biggest achievements as a band?
Edwin: I think just how strong of a team we are. How well we get along. Having four people who are fully dedicated to the band, I think that’s quite a big achievement in itself. Achievements otherwise… Our last album release… I think we pulled 215 people at the gig. We kind of went big on the production side of things. We’re getting more into the festivals, which is another big thing we want.
Speaking of festivals, just to throw this question in there, if you could pick a dream festival line-up, and it doesn’t have to be just Kiwis, it can be anyone, who would you pick? There’s also unlimited musicians.
Edwin: Can they be dead?
Yup. Of course.
Edwin: That’s so hard, my God. The band is really inspired by Red Hot Chili Peppers. So, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sting, Allen Stone, Jacob Collier is really cool, IDLES… John Butler Trio, Odds & Ends, us, the list goes on… Bob Marley! All the Kiwi bands. All of them, basically. The Butlers. Park Rd is going real hard, which is real cool. Yeah, I could do this all day! It would be the most insane festival ever. Tickets would be like, five grand. You’d see like, a thousand acts.
Other than music, what are your interests?
Edwin: I fish. I don’t eat meat, to be honest, but I eat fish. Not too much, but when I catch it, it’s much better. My partner doesn’t eat meat and she’ll only eat fish when I catch it. I’ll get one fish for dinner and it’s really nice to get out and do that in the fresh air. I like to mosaic as well. Richard teaches parkour for a job. He can do crazy flips and stuff, which is awesome, he’s also learning Japanese currently. Ronaldo, he is a plumber and he’s a hands-on kind of guy. He loves gardening. So do I. We always yarn about gardening. Logan loves to surf. By the end of summer, he is like, bronze.
I always like to ask this one when I can. If you could claim someone else’s album as your own, which album would it be and why?
Edwin: Dan Auerbach from The Black Keys. His solo stuff. There is an album called Waiting on a Song and I blast this all the time. It’s just so, so good.
Is there a reason why, apart from the fact you really love that album?
Edwin: Instrumentally and vocally… It’s got great lyrics. When I record music by myself, it’s quite in that vein. I do a lot of sad kind of grooves and that’s like, a version of what I sound like. I need to tap in more to the upbeat kind of stuff. So, it’s an amazing album, I always take notes and stuff and ideas out of it. Short answer, he reminds me of myself in a way.
Who is your personal inspiration in your life as a whole?
Edwin: Don’t know. Probably my Dad. Mum and Dad because they’re amazing people and I love them both. My partner is amazing, as well. So, yeah, I just want to kind of, have a good life. I don’t want to be a carnage rock n roll star. I want to be a humble dude with my cats.
Thank you so much!
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I want to say a massive thank you to Edwin for his time, patience and for being a generally great person. Not only is he musically talented on a whole other level, but he is also genuinely kind and loves cats just as much as me. You won’t regret getting into The RVMES, so listen to them right now.
Follow The RVMES at the links below to keep up with their epic journey -
Feeling Restless, Challenging 20s and Career Developments: An Interview with Keeley Shade
While in Auckland recently, I sat down with Keeley Shade to chat about her new upcoming single, Restless and her show at Cassette Nine! Photo credit: Keeley’s EPK.
While in Auckland a couple of weeks ago, I sat down with the lovely Canadian-Kiwi, Keeley Shade, who is making big moves in her musical career to get to where she aspires to be, despite lockdowns and other 20-something challenges. With her upcoming single, Restless, on the horizon, Keeley is headstrong and is showcasing that females can do anything from organising her own music video shoots to mixing/producing her tracks.
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Thank you so much for meeting with me!
Keeley: Of course!
We’re just going to catch up as you have a new single coming out soon. What’s the song called?
Keeley: The song is called Restless. I wrote it last year in lockdown when all of our lives were a bit stuck and I felt like, last year, the second year of lockdown, I was like losing so much time that I could be developing my career, living out fun things… It’s about wanting to be somewhere else in the future, somewhere past all this. In your 20s, you lose friends, change jobs, get new friends, relationships end… You’re kind of told that it’s going to be the best time of your life, but I’ve found it the most challenging. I guess I put all that into the song.
Your 20s are a bit like that. You must be so happy it’s almost out, even though you’re still working on it at the moment.
Keeley: Yes. Very close.
You said you mixed and produced the song yourself, which is so impressive, well done! How did you find that process?
Keeley: On the EP, I actually mixed and directed Give Me Time, and going through that, I realised I like being in control of the outcome of the songs. I went to art school, where you make everything yourself. So, I have this relationship with music where it’s the same thing. Most musicians I know, they have a producer and they have co-writers and stuff… It feels less mine. I’m very about lyrics and about writing, having a personal place, so I love taking ownership of the whole thing, it’s really fun.
So, you said you’ve done it before on your previous EP.
Keeley: A bit. This time, it’s fully by me. I recorded, mixed, produced… The only thing I’m not doing is mastering.
That’s a lot. That’s so much to do. Congratulations on doing all of that! I’d have no idea where to start [if I was a musician].
Keeley: Oh, it’s a lot of self-teaching and YouTube videos and trial and error.
You’ve got a gig coming after the release of the song at Cassette Nine. Tell me about that!
Keeley: Yeah, so that will be at Cassette Nine on December 2nd. I haven’t gotten to play a gig since May I think.
Make sure to get amongst this show if you’re in Auckland! Epic music by Keeley and smashing opening acts. Photo credit: Keeley.
Do you have any support acts that are opening?
Keeley: We will do. I don’t have them locked in yet.
[As of typing this interview, support acts have been announced - Chris Bates and Bridges]
Your EP, Give Me Time, has been out for a year and a half, how has your music evolved since that was released?
Keeley: It definitely… I kind of fell in love with the production side of things. The last EP had more acoustic elements, this one is a lot more pop-rock, alternative, electric guitar, bass.
Amazing. Do you perform all of the music yourself or do you have a band behind you?
Keeley: Live, I have a band and on the track, I recorded most of it. I had my guitarist who played a couple parts because he’s really good at timing. Otherwise, I made most of the stuff myself. I got samples and messed with them, too.
For those who haven’t heard of you yet, what can they expect in terms of your music?
Keeley: A lot of like, ear candy, a lot of instrumentation and delicate vocals. Lyrics are really important to me. It’s really hard describing yourself! Yeah, I’m just really inspired by 2010 modern folk.
What are some random/fun facts that we should know about you?
Keeley: I’m a TV editor for Warner Brothers Studios, I also do graphic design and music videos for other people. I was born in Canada and I’ve lived here for almost 17 years.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Keeley: I won a music and venues grant to put on shows for female musicians who mix and produce their own work. So, that’s going to be happening next year with some very cool artists!
Again, thank you so much for having a mini-interview with me!
Follow Keeley at the below links -
Mellow, Sun-Soaked Sounds and Madison Square Garden Dreams: An Interview with Nathan Kruse and Jack Letcher of Haze Lane
Kruse and Jack from Haze Lane! So excellent to catch up with these legends the other day. Stream their single, Natural Feeling, now!
Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to catch up with two legends of your new favourite sun-soaked/indie band, Haze Lane, who are an Auckland based four-piece, formerly known as Mind Over Matter. We sat down to have a morning drink at a RAD little cafe (it was literally called RAD) in Mt Eden to have a catch up about where Haze Lane hope to see themselves in the future, Madison Square Garden festival dreams and of course, the classic, what flavour Haze Lane would be if they were a flavour.
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Thank you for coming out and having a chat with me, I appreciate it!
Kruse: Of course. Thank you for having us.
So, you guys are Haze Lane. Do you want to introduce yourselves?
Kruse: I’m the singer and rhythm guitar player for the band.
Jack: I play lead guitar for Haze Lane.
You were formerly Mind Over Matter, how do Haze Lane and Mind Over Matter differ?
Kruse: When we were growing up, we started as Mind Over Matter and we kind of… Ventured towards more cover gigs. We wanted to kind of pull away from that and find our sound, with our actual original music… We started to develop this kind of surfy, mellow sound and we kind of pulled away from Mind Over Matter and discovered a new sound with Haze Lane.
You’ve just released your first single [Natural Feeling] as Haze Lane back in July, what has the reception been like from that? I know that when we had you at the Welcome to the Gig showcase, everyone knew your old stuff and you were shocked at that.
Kruse: Yeah, no, it’s been great! There has been a little bit of reception, we’ve managed to extend our fanbase a little bit more, not heaps, you know. To sum it up, it hasn’t been as big as we had hoped, but it is our first single, so we’re definitely happy with how it has been received. We had a radio interview with Sun FM which was awesome, really cool. First radio interview as Haze Lane, so that was awesome. We were stoked to have that. We got onto JuiceTV for our music video, which was really cool. I’ve been sent a couple of videos from my mates of us on TV. My mate was at Denny’s the other night and was like, “hey, isn’t this you guys?"
Amazing.
How did you get onto JuiceTV? That’s pretty huge.
Jack: We’ve been working with a media company a little bit. They’ve helped us with Sun FM and just helped with [promotion of] Natural Feeling.
What are you currently working on, are you working on new music? New videos? What’s the go with Haze Lane?
Kruse: We’re working on a bunch of new originals at the moment, for some reason, the writing juices have just been flowing, which is really good for us. Yeah, so the creative juices have been flowing heaps, we are working towards our new EP-album, haven’t got a release date or anything. We’ve got some awesome songs, if I do say so myself. We’re working into that Natural Feeling theme as well; we’re going to get some high energy bits in there, too.
Jack: At the moment, we’re trying to kind of select what song that we want for the next single. If it’s going to be lower in energy as Natural Feeling or more upbeat. We’ve got two that we’re pretty set on.
The two men of the hour! Photo provided by Jack Mensah.
So, pretty big things in the works for you guys. How would you describe Haze Lane’s music?
Kruse: We’re kind of a mellow, sun-soaked sound. We try to think what the beach would sound like if it could talk. A bit indie. At the moment, we trying to put in more rock elements, something a bit more edgy.
Jack: Our band is a bit different because me and Cameron have a rock background, Taumata has a reggae kind of background and we have Kruse with his pop melodies, pop background.
A good mix. For those who don’t know who Haze Lane are, what are some things that they should know about you? Even random facts or anything.
Kruse: Well, Jack, Cameron and I all started out when we were… How old were we?
Jack: 12 or 13.
Kruse: We all worked under the same music teacher and he decided that he wanted to make some bands in our local area. Jack and I knew each other and Jack knew Cameron, so, we were like, “hey, let’s form a band!” So, when we first started out, Jack’s Dad was actually our bassist. So, we played some gigs with Jack’s Dad and that was awesome. So good.
Jack: Yeah, my Dad was the bass player for local event, Summer Sounds and yeah. We’ve had a few bass players and Taumata is a new edition from our High School kind of days, he just joined us in 2017. He’s been part of the redevelopment of Mind Over Matter to Haze Lane.
Kruse: It’s been great because he has bought in that different perspective, which has helped our sound, as well. Especially with his bass lines, he will put down this little funk. It’s awesome.
Besides music, what other things do you thrive on?
Kruse: I’m a Personal Trainer. So, I recently got my degree, last year. So, I’ve been doing that all the time. I enjoy helping people. Yeah, that’s kind of all I do, really.
Jack: I just finished an Audio Production degree, so music is pretty much all I can do. I’m starting to do a bit of producing and I work at the Rock Shop.
So, everything music then? That’s incredible! What about the other guys, what are their passions, what do they do?
Jack: Kruse, Tau and Cameron are all quite into fitness. Tau’s a landscaper and Cameron’s a builder.
Kruse: It’s Tau’s birthday today. He’s out doing a 21km run right now. He sent us a photo just before and was like, “boys, I’m doing it, I’m doing it!”
“Happy birthday! I’m on a 21km run!” I love that you’re all so motivated in different areas.
Jack: It really does help that we can come together and mould in different ways.
This one is a bit of a random one, but if you could be a character from a movie, who would you be and why?
Jack: Probably Iron Man. Just like his suit, eh.
Kruse: I think for me, Mater, from Cars. He’s so relaxed. All the time. He doesn’t care what people think. That’s really cool. Mater and Iron Man, coming soon!
I feel obligated to ask this, but back in August, you guys played the first Welcome to the Gig showcase. How did that go for you?
Kruse: It was wicked. We all talked about it afterwards and just the fact that everyone was there to support the music, you know? We had a couple of people come along and we played the first song and they started singing, it was a surreal feeling having people sing our own songs. Amazing.
Jack: Yeah, we really enjoyed playing the gig. I just really love those gigs where you meet other bands. It’s always cool to have more connections, especially in the music industry.
You guys were amazing, I was blown away. Did not expect that. Thank you for playing! I appreciate it a lot that you did come out and play.
Kruse: Let us know if you ever want us again. We’d definitely be keen.
Haze Lane performing at the first Welcome to the Gig showcase, August 2022. L-R: Jack Letcher, Cameron Cowper, Nathan Kruse, Taumata Lowe. Photo provided by Jack Mensah.
100 percent.
If you could perform anywhere in the world right now, where would you perform?
Kruse: Madison Square Garden.
Jack: Yeah, same, eh. Our dream is to play Madison Square Garden.
Kruse: On Thursday night, we had practise and we were practising one of our new songs and afterwards I said “thank you Madison Square Garden!” quite cheesy, you know?
Not at all!
Kruse: It’s always been a dream, since we were younger. It’s always been a place we want to get to sometime in our music career.
I guess, to go along with that, who would you want as your support acts at Madison Square Garden? You can pick like, ten people.
Kruse: Ten people? Wicked! We can have a festival.
Yeah, there you go, turn it into a festival. Who would you want on a line-up at your festival at Madison Square Garden?
Kruse: Personally, I’d have to say Balu Brigada. I actually really love them. Ocean Alley. Love Ocean Alley. L.A.B. To be honest, they wouldn’t open for us, they’re too big. They’re awesome. I really love Fool’s Lagoon, who we know. I’d love to be up there with them, it would be awesome. Kiwis take over Madison Square.
Imagine that! That would be the best festival in the entire world.
Kruse: Exactly. We’ve got to work on that! Get the crew together.
I’ll be there, supporting. Somehow.
Kruse: Great! We’ll need the interview.
Who influences you on and off stage?
Jack: [Collectively, as a band] Ocean Alley.
Kruse: I think Jack introduced me to Ocean Alley. I’ve never really been one for the loud instruments. When I took off into music, I went straight into the poppy stuff. The freedom of the lyrics and such is probably the bands biggest inspiration, I’d say.
What about off stage? Anyone you look up to?
Jack: Playing guitar, one of my heroes is Jimi Hendrix.
Kruse: Mine is probably The Weeknd. Each album is like a different story piece. So, when I write music, I now try to do it as well. I feel like it’s a lot more interesting if there’s a full body story as opposed to individual songs. So, you can be writing an album-EP, trying to keep in mind all of that, so I really look up to him. There’s a fitness influencer, Austin Dunham. He’s an inspiration as he says you don’t always have to be healthy or be defined by fitness.
It may not have been a performance at Madison Square Garden, but Haze Lane performing at Welcome to the Gig: Volume 1, really blew my mind. Photo provided by Jack Mensah.
I tend to ask this question a lot, but I think it’s a funny question. If Haze Lane were a flavour, what flavour would you be?
Jack: Would we be savoury or sweet?
Kruse: Sweet.
Jack: Cinnamon? No. Like a… chocolate boysenberry?
Kruse: I think like a dark forest chocolate, maybe! I reckon the dark forest cake from the cheesecake shop. It’s like a sponge, it’s very subtle.
I’m all out of questions! Is there anything else you’d want to add?
Kruse: Thank you so much and especially for having us for the first gig. It was wicked, yeah.
I’m so happy you played. Thank you guys so much!
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WTTG Volume 1 Gig Review (Ft. Haze Lane)
Op-Shopping Queen Becca Caffyn on her Yellow House, Upcoming EP and Working with Will McGillivray
Becca Caffyn is quickly emerging into the New Zealand music scene and shows no signs of stopping at any point. Photo provided by Becca.
She’s burst onto the scene quicker than you can say humble talent, however, Becca Caffyn is going places beyond imaginable. Having worked with some notoriously excellent names in the New Zealand music scene, Becca is taking her talent to new heights and putting her personal songs out into the universe for all to indulge in.
I sat down with Becca a few weeks ago after her latest song, Replacement Blonde, came out to have a little chat about her upcoming EP, her yellow house of 18 years and her favourite things to do besides music.
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Hey! How are you?
Becca: I’m good, how are you?
Pretty good thank you. How’s your day been?
Becca: Pretty good! It’s warm in Dunedin. It’s been like, 14 degrees [celsius] here.
Thank you so much for letting me interview you.
Becca: Thank you for having me.
So, Replacement Blonde came out recently, how has that been for you?
Becca: It’s my favourite song. So, it’s been good for me. I really like just having it out. I think I sat with it for a long time. Well, what feels like a really long time, so it’s good to just have it out.
You mentioned that it wasn’t actually meant to be released, it was just meant to be for your ears only. What made you change your mind about releasing it?
Becca: I think I like to write with the idea that no one is going to hear it. Sometimes I will just play over things that I’ve written and I kept coming back to it and I really liked this one. I showed it to some people at Parachute [Studio] and they liked it and then, I think I just came around to the idea that sometimes things are really personal, but it’s also what is good about it them. Yeah, I just kept coming back to it and I wanted to put it out.
That’s so cool the fact that you can be that vulnerable and be like, “hey, this is part of my story, I’m sharing it with you”. I really applaud you on that. How’s the feedback been since it was released?
Becca: Pretty good. Definitely a bit different to the first one because it’s not as fun, but I think that there are quite a few people who have connected with that and who say it makes them feel something, so it’s always nice to hear that people resonate with your experiences, so that’s been really cool to hear with this one.
Some of your influences include Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan.
Becca: Yes! They’re my original folk influences, I think.
They’re some of the great musicians of the world. How did you get drawn to them initially?
Becca: I don’t remember exactly how, but I do remember being shown Joni Mitchell when I was probably in year nine and thinking “oh, I don’t really like it” and then I came back a few years later and I was like, “oh, okay, I get it now, this is good”. I think I used to be really into country music and there were aspects that I really loved about it, like, the story telling kind of lyricism and the acoustic instrumentation, but there was also a lot about country music that I didn’t like. A lot of the things that I liked about country music, I found in folk music without all the things I didn’t like about country music. It played a part for me I think, country music. It wasn’t - it never really felt exactly like I wanted to do. I also never felt like I wrote songs that were country songs.
How did it come about that you worked with Will McGillivray? That’s pretty huge.
Becca: So with Parachute, I was on their artist development program and we did a few recordings at the end of the year and they pair you up with a producer and I didn’t really know heaps of producers or who would be a good fit and the person who ran the program, she had met Will years and years ago when he was in Nomad, they were managed by Lorraine Barry and her office is in the Parachute building. She thought he might be a good fit. He produces BEXY and There’s A Tuesday, so she sent me a playlist of some of the songs and it was basically my favourite New Zealand music. I’d never met Will before, but I went to Christchurch and we recorded the songs and it was great.
Did you get to many any of the other artists like BEXY or There’s A Tuesday while in the process?
Becca: Not on that trip, but I have met them at other times, just around the studio. It’s so much fun. I always wanted to have a community of creativity around me or people who liked the same music and I never had that until I went to Parachute, then I just met all these people who just love the same things that I do.
Tell me more about how you got to be at Parachute? I know you said you were hand-picked to be on the artist development program.
Becca: I applied near the end of High School and I didn’t really have a plan, I didn’t want to go to Uni straight out of High School and I saw an ad on Instagram and I thought “oh, that looks cool” and I’d heard of Parachute before with the whole festival and I’d never been. Then I went up and did an audition, played some songs and had a chat and then got an email saying “do you want to be on artist development next year?”, so that was really great. I didn’t have a plan and I think that was the perfect thing for me.
Make sure to stream all of Becca’s music right now! Photo provided by Becca.
You moved from Hamilton to Auckland to pursue that, didn’t you?
Becca: Yes. I’m really grateful I got to go, it’s the best.
You just hear so many good things about Parachute all the time!
Becca: It’s such a good little community.
You’ve lived in different parts of New Zealand like we’ve briefly touched on. How would you say each cities music scene differs?
Becca: Ooh, well, Auckland, there’s a lot more - there’s just more of everything. So, whatever you’re into, there’s probably going to be a little bit everywhere. There’s the Devonport Folk Club, things like that. Auckland has venues for everyone, there’s always something happening there, so that was great. Hamilton… Much less. There are some cool things happening in Hamilton, they’ve got a few venues and you do have some cool little bands and things. Rockquest really help with that. I have one venue, Nivara Lounge is quite a popular venue in Hamilton and I used to do open mics there, that was fun. That was about it in terms of places I played in Hamilton. I struggled a bit to find places to play. Nivara Lounge were really good, they were really great. Dunedin, I’m still figuring it out. There used to be a lot of venues, not so much anymore, which is a shame, but I still think there’s some really cool stuff down here, so I’m going to find it.
Besides music, what do you like to do in your spare time?
Becca: I’m a big op-shopper. I like that. Both my Mum and my best friend are really into op-shopping. My Mum actually volunteers at an op-shop with my best friends Mum. We all go op-shopping together, we find some good stuff. I like minor upcycling, I’m not very good at selling and things. I like to dissect things and put them back together.
What are you studying down in Dunedin?
Becca: I’m doing a bachelor of music with a criminology minor.
I noticed on your Spotify, there’s a mention that you grew up in a little yellow house in the suburbs. Is that quite significant in terms of your music?
Becca: I think I lived my first 18 years in the same house and so a lot of things were written in that house, a lot of memories in that house and I think it comes up in songs as well. I wrote a song recently and it mentions one of the rooms in the house and my best friend was like “ah, I know that room!” so, there’s a lot of things that happened, essentially my entire childhood is in that house.
Did you write either Stair Kids or Replacement Blonde in that house?
Becca: Neither of them were written there. They were both done in Auckland. Stair Kids was written at Parachute because it was during song week and Replacement Blonde was just in my bedroom at the time in the house I was living in.
What was the inspiration behind Stair Kids?
Becca: Stair Kids was just about that phase where you’re kind of growing out of people a little bit, you’re kind of heading in different directions and you still have a lot of love for people and the part they played in your life, but it’s kind of okay to grow out of people. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just people move on and when you get your own freedom to choose what you want to do, you might pick different things to the people you grew up with.
Your debut EP is coming out this year, too. Are there any details you’re allowed to spill on that one at the moment?
Becca: Stair Kids and Replacement Blonde are on it and there will be two more songs. It will be fun to put out a little collection. It will be out before the end of the year.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Becca: Stream Replacement Blonde and Stair Kids!
Thank you so much Becca for chatting with me, I really appreciate your time and know you’re super busy with everything.
Becca: Thanks very much for having me!
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Follow along to keep up with Becca below -
A Tasty Chat with… Koen Aldershof from Odds & Ends and Marmalade
The man, the myth, the legend… Koen Aldershof himself!
While in Auckland a few weeks back, I sat down with my friend, Koen Aldershof, to have a chat about things we may not know about Odds & Ends and Marmalade, touring with Skram and how multi-faceted himself and the other members of Odds & Ends are. Koen’s talented partner, Jemilah Ross-Hayes also jumped in and I loved chatting with her, also.
Grab your cuppa, your Odds & Ends merch, sit back, relax and warm up with this Tasty interview.
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So, you’re from Odds & Ends and Marmalade!
Koen: That’s the one. Odds & Ends and Marmalade are my two main projects, yes.
Do you have a favourite of the two?
Koen: No. It’s kind of fun though, because Odds & Ends has been around for four or five years. We have released a few songs and are releasing and we are gigging, but Marmalade is fun because it’s only been around for a year and we kind of started that with a lot more knowledge and it’s really cool because two of the four members live with me, so three of us in total live together and it’s a blast. Good times.
It helps obviously that you’re in close proximity to each other.
Koen: It’s not like a, “oh, let’s meet up then and try and write something”. Sometimes with Odds & Ends it’s so hard to make the stars align because we’re all individually crazy busy and then to all meet up and be together for more than two hours is sometimes even hard to do. Whereas, here, we might be hanging out in the living room after a day of work and there’s a guitar around and before you know it, we have a song.
Jemilah: Liam will be going to have a shower and I’ll be like, “can I quickly play you a song?” and because we work next to each other, we’ll go into each others rooms and be like, “oh, I just wrote something, do you want to hear it?” It’s so easy to show what’s going on.
Very musical household. I love that. Speaking of Odds & Ends, you released Something Else about two-ish months ago, was it?
Koen: Yeah, April 1st.
How long was that song in the works for?
Koen: The drums were originally recorded when we had just started out in Uni… It was for a University project and we totally forgot about it, but we got to record those drums in Roundhead, which is Neil Finn’s studio, so it was an amazing studio. The drums sounded incredible. It wasn’t even Max Earnshaw playing on that, it’s Angus Granger who played on that. Another friend of ours who was already at the time more of a seasoned drummer, who was easy to work with. It’s actually quite a different sound on drums compared to the other songs that we do. I found them in a Google Drive when I was going through some files and I found this folder with like, Something Else - Roundhead, Drums and it sounded amazing. We were like, let’s get the rest of this together and over the Delta lockdown last year, we were all obviously at home and had our own home setups and we just recorded the parts individually and sort of ended up sending it back and forth to each other and then Jonathan Mayer, he mixed it and Max mastered it and then it was done, so we all did it ourselves. That was a ton of fun and I suppose four or five years of back and forth.
You said that you recorded to drums at Neil Finn’s studio?
Koen: Yeah. Actually the drums and some of the vocals as well. At the time, vocally, I was singing quite differently and it’s funny how much you develop over time. Even after, say, we did three years of University essentially learning how to find your own voice and what you want to do. So, four years after, I was like, wow, I don’t sound like that at all anymore and I don’t want to sound like that anymore. It was way too forced, pushed… Let’s bring a bit more intimacy into the song and then I just recorded it at home.
I love the lyrics, obviously they’re quite positive like “I’ve got bad news in my ears, I wish for something else” was that about current events?
Koen: Well, the song was written in 2017, when I used to have a different band called Small Trinkets and that was fun and all, but it was quite messy and there was a bunch of drama going on. The bass player left and the guitarist was a diva, there was loads of drama going on and eventually, the whole thing just broke up and that’s when I wrote that. It’s essentially about the band breaking up. It’s like, oh man, this sucks, I wish it wasn’t like this. The fun thing is that I don’t specifically say that in the song, so the song could be, to anyone, it could be anything. I wish for something else could literally be anything. You’re stuck at home in a three month lockdown, man, I wish for something else. It’s cool that it stays relevant.
You mentioned you’ve been in Odds & Ends for about five years, how has your music changed since you first started out?
Koen: Something Else I wrote by myself, so that one doesn’t really count, but Tasty is the first song that Max and I wrote together. That was back in 2016, that was a hot minute ago. That was our first year of Uni. It’s actually funny because I was just cleaning out my Google Drive and I found some stuff from University days, first year stuff and I found a version of Tasty that doesn’t have that weird bridge and that second verse isn’t that funky and it’s kind of just the same as the first verse. The words are completely different… It’s so funny how that song itself has changed. Don’t Look Down also had a huge breakdown bridge and it just doesn’t have that anymore because it didn’t work in a recording sense. We don’t even play that live anymore. I suppose the songs themselves change until they are recorded and put out, then with the writing style, Picture is one that we sort of wrote together, I did most of that, but I always give the boys total say on their parts, if they want to do something on the bass or the drums or whatever, the guitar, it’s all them, it’s their style. I remember in early days, Jono was a lot more crazy on the bass and he would go wild and do all these funky things, but now it’s more like, let’s just keep the bass simple and make it really good. Everybody’s personal style just changes, as well.
Jemilah: As an outsider, this is an interesting perspective, your original writing was definitely more rock-based and the writing you’re doing more recently, I would say, not more thoughtful in the way that you didn’t put thought into stuff before, but it comes across as focusing on different elements of the song and taking a little bit more from other genres.
Koen: Also lyrically, because if you look at Stay for the Night, which is that blues song, is a lot of people’s favourite because it is heartfelt, but really I just wrote some random words about this made up person, I didn’t experience that at all. The more recent song, Picture, is my experience. A lot of people can relate to [Stay for the Night], but I personally relate more to other songs I write, for sure.
What has been your most memorable gig you’ve ever played?
Koen: It’s got to be the Tuning Fork. So, we just played the Tuning Fork in April and that was the most memorable organising that one as it was somewhat of a milestone for us as we got a grant, which really helped, if I didn’t have the grant, I would have still broken even, but it’s a really big risk to take to start with. It was really cool, we had a sick turnout, we had some really cool bands play, we had Coast Arcade, Flaxxies and Borderline, it was a really cool gig. We headlined that and it was epic. Playing-wise, the most memorable one was Galatos downstairs last year, it was the only gig we headlined that year because of covid, apart from an acoustic one. That sold out. It was a fairly small room, 150 people and crazy good energy.
You guys are into second-hand clothes replenishment, your merch is on different op-shopped pieces. How important was it for you to make merch on pre-loved clothing?
Koen: Hugely. To throw it back to Uni again… One of the papers we did in University was building a website and I was taking inspiration from Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chili Peppers, which is way too big - I am not hoping to sell as much as they do. Their websites at the time were kind of like this drop shipping model where you put in an order and it’s that print, that size, this is my address. So, I set it up the same way, my website and it was quite cool, it was easy to order… However, because of that, it was incredibly expensive because it was in American dollars and it would have to ship from I think China to the States to New Zealand. I was hoping to, before the Tuning Fork gig, to have a bunch of merch that I could sell on the door and stuff, so over the last six months, I started looking around… I mean, I go op-shopping regardless. I don’t think I’ve first-hand bought a piece of clothing since 5 plus years, for a good reason. There are a bunch of clothes in op-shops that are fantastic and it’s funny because I go anywhere with a funky shirt on and people go “oh, where did you get that?” In the op-shops, you’ve got a bunch of these As Colour t-shirts that most of the merch is printed on in New Zealand and people go crazy over them. I saw a bunch of these types of shirts around and beanies and stuff that was totally all good. These sort of common sizes, but cool colours and rather than having just a white and black version of a t-shirt, I wanted to have unique pieces of clothing that I then sew a patch on of three different designs. It also meant that I could sell it for a lot cheaper, when I was doing the whole drop shipping model, it was something like $50 for a t-shirt and $40 for a cap or something and now I can sell the hats and beanies for $15 and the t-shirts for $25, which is cheaper than Cotton On or whatever.
For band merch, that is very affordable.
Koen: I love the whole patch concept because it’s not going to wear out. We’re even shipping them in compostable bags now. Merch is definitely the biggest revenue for artists, we don’t get anything from Spotify. It’s okay, I’m not hoping to change that anyway, but stuff like BandCamp is really cool and vinyl is coming back. I’d love to, if we do an album, to put that on a record, that would be really sick.
Jemilah: It will be even better when CDs come back in fashion, less expensive to make.
You’ve recently been on tour with Skram, have you got any fun stories from those shows?
Koen: We’ve only done one show so far, we were supposed to do one in Gisborne last weekend, but we’ve postponed that until October. The first time I saw Skram was at a ski lodge and I was just snowboarding and I knew there was a gig on, I was like, I’ll go check that out… It was the Skram boys and it was such a fun night. We kind of got talking afterwards and my partner was doing an internship at NZ Musician…
Jemilah: That’s me!
Koen: Jem was doing an internship at NZ Musician and she was setting up these interviews and was looking for some artists and I was like, maybe Skram would do it because they have an album coming up that I knew about and was excited about. I ended up doing the interview, which went to print… So, we had a Zoom call and that went on forever because we were having good yarns and I offered Odds & Ends to play support in Auckland and a couple of other spaces. We’ve played with them in Hamilton, that was in May. Henry kind of, gave us a whole list of dates and was like, which ones do you want to play and you know, San Fran is on there and Gisborne, Smash Palace, I really wanted to play there and Napier as well, so some really cool spots. We kind of said yes to six of them… So far, so good. We’ve only played the Hamilton show and we didn’t stay the whole gig because we were pretty close to home and we had stuff to do the next day, but I know that Skram always pulls the supporting acts on for their last song, spoiler alert if you’re going to their shows, which is a bunch of fun because you get ten, fifteen people on stage all shaking tambourines and five guitarists, it’s crazy cool. They have a ton of fun on tour.
With festivals coming back, what would you most like to play? I know you commented on the Soundsplash post!
Koen: Soundsplash is definitely the right vibe. I personally am quite outdoorsy and I know Max is as well. We’re really keen on anything that involves anything outdoors. We still haven’t played the Yot Club [in Raglan], we want to make that happen. RnV, R&A, I think around the time of New Years, I’ll be in the South Island, I’m doing a big road trip with a bunch of friends coming over from the Netherlands, so Rhythm and Alps would be epic because I feel like Rhythm and Vines is a doof-doof as well. For me, R&A feels a bit more rooted. I love those winter kind of festivals eh. You hear a lot of ‘no’s from festivals and it is what it is. Splore would be pretty epic. Any festival is a good time to be honest. I reckon Soundsplash and Splore, R&A and Homegrown would be amazing. That’s definitely the goal, those four festivals. Nest Fest and Tora Bombora, put those right at the top.
Do you ever wake up and think you’re dreaming, getting to do what you love on a daily basis?
Koen: Sometimes. Definitely. A lot of the times actually. I’m really grateful. My full-time job is in the industry as well and it just means I’m doing music and music and music and music, which is the bomb. Yeah, it’s great. Of course, standing on stage, singing my heart out and hearing people sing your lyrics back to you is number one. Being in a room on a daily basis with people making music is a whole other form of bliss, absolutely.
Marmalade doing their thing. PC: Marmalade’s Facebook.
What are some interesting things about Odds & Ends and Marmalade that your audience may not know?
Koen: Odds & Ends… We’re gamers. I know Jono, when you’re gaming with him, he wants to win. I’m more of a, “let’s roam around and build shit” and go on little adventures and [I play] all those medieval fantasy games, I love those. Josh Johnston, who has been drumming for us on and off since we started, he’s the first drummer who I asked to be part of Odds & Ends, he was crazy busy at the time and Max is a fantastic drummer as well. The amazing thing about Max is that he is also a guitarist and a songwriter, he’s creating his own music in that way. At the moment, for this Skram tour that we’re doing, Max is on the guitar and Josh is on the drums, which usually Max would be on the drums… Anyway, Josh, he’s constantly playing and going on about D&D as well. People probably don’t know about that. People don’t know Josh, he doesn’t get enough credit. He’s quite happy being in the background and being like, don’t worry about it guys, but he’s fantastic. Max is sort of similar to me, play a game here and there. Then, a bit of outdoors… Anyone who knows me personally knows I’m an outdoor freak. I love mountains and oceans, anything surfing and snow, diving and stuff. All that hiking, camping. I’ve been doing that my whole life and will continue to do that my whole life.
Jemilah: I will say that you guys being multi-instrumentalists is pretty interesting. You also play the bass, Max also plays guitar, Jono also plays guitar.
Koen: Going forward, Jono, who has been on bass for the whole five years is actually moving to lead guitar and he is actually an animal. He is a beast on the guitar. He releases music with Underscore as well, with Josh on the drums. Max releases music under Max Earnshaw, Josh plays drums for that, Jono releases music as Underscore and Josh plays drums for that. Then, now we’re touring with Josh as well. Max’s guitarist as well as our guitarist has moved overseas, he needed a bass player because Jono was on bass, but jumped on lead guitar… This is a bit of a twister! I jumped on bass for Max in two gigs, so the line-up in Max’s band at the moment is Max at the front, Jono on the lead guitar, me on bass and some backing vocals and then Josh on the drums. Whereas, for Odds & Ends, it’s Josh on the drums, Jono on the bass, Max on lead guitar at the moment and me singing and playing guitar, so it’s the same line-up. We were doing a gig for Max and someone in the crowd was like, I didn’t know Odds & Ends was playing! I suppose a lot of people might not know that we’re a University band. A lot of these songs were written to assignment standards. I wrote this personification about Auckland and I just called the song City of Sails. I never say Auckland in the song as that would be really cringey.
Marmalade On Toast will get you going! L-R: Dean, Koen, Liam and Jemilah. PC: Flora Driessen.
What about Marmalade?
Koen: One thing is that we all live together, except for Dean, our drummer.
Jemilah: I think that people might not know that we often all write together. I think that’s quite a unique thing about the band, even though we all have different aspects of it and sometimes I’ll write most of a certain song and Liam will write most of a certain song… The three of us, Liam, Koen and I, will usually write together and then go to Dean Rodriguez and workshop that with him.
Koen: We sort of give Dean free reign on the drums because he is an animal.
Jemilah: Most good bands are all friends. We were definitely all friends first and then I personally decided I wanted to be in a band and I didn’t have enough reliable musicians around me. Koen and I were already sort of playing music together and we didn’t really think about a band and then I was talking to Liam, we went to Uni together, and we were like, we should be in a band maybe. We share the hats, as well. Things people definitely don’t know is that we’re working on recording stuff at the moment for Marmalade, we currently don’t have anything out yet. We have some demos and we are working on recording them.
That’s not Odd… That’s… Odds & Ends! L-R: Max, Koen, Luan and Jono. PC: Flora Driessen.
Do you have anything else to add to the interview, what’s next?
Koen: We did Something Else because it was lying around and then did the Tuning Fork gig because we really wanted to and that took so much out of me. For about a month, I didn’t think about Odds & Ends at all. Now, we’re doing this tour, which is great, we’re supporting on the tour because that means we don’t have to organise anything, which means we can come along for the ride, so that’s a lot of stress off my plate. We’re super in the middle of deciding what’s next and I think we’ll write one new song, release that and probably head towards an EP because we’ve got a couple of songs we play live, but haven’t gotten recorded yet. I don’t know. For Marmalade…
Jemilah: I think for Marmalade, we have such a clear idea because we’ve all wanted to do these things for so long. We’ve just not had the space. As soon as we got together as a band, it was incredible how many songs we wrote. We’ve got about ten songs, probably, and that’s within in a year.
Koen: We’re doing five songs on the EP.
Jemilah: We don’t have a plan, plan yet, but we have a clear idea that we want to record, release, play live for those releases and we want to play more opening for other acts and playing at small festivals and working our way up from there.
Thank you both so much for partaking in the interview!
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Make sure that you’re following along with both Odds & Ends and Marmalade On Toast at all of the links below! Thank you again Koen and Jemilah, it was wonderful getting to meet and talk to you both!
Odds & Ends:
Spotify
Instagram
Facebook
YouTube
BandCamp
Something Else Review on WTTG
Marmalade On Toast:
Bubble Tea and Car Chats with Coast Arcade
Bubble tea interviews in a car: 3/4 of Auckland-based, Coast Arcade! From L-R: Bella Bavin, Nate Tims and Chris Tims. (Thom Boynton was at Glastonbury the time this interview was done, we missed you, Thom!)
On Friday, I caught up with three out of four of young and very talented, exceptionally hard-working, Auckland-based Coast Arcade to talk about their new song, Tattoo, Rockquest and who they would love to play with in a dream line-up. We had an unconventionally fun car interview, topped off with Bella’s favourite, Gong-Cha bubble tea! It was great to get to know them more and the interview was an absolute blast. Read on to get to know more about your new favourite band.
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How are you guys all going?
Bella: Yeah, we’re good. We’re just chilling… In the car.
Chris: Having fun.
You just released your new single, Tattoo, last week! (A week and a half prior to the publishing of this interview).
Bella: Yeah, we did. Tattoo is out into the world now.
Nate: Very exciting.
How are you finding the feedback, has it been pretty positive?
Nate: Yeah, I’ve been telling all my friends at school - showing them and telling them to listen to the song and to watch the video. They’ve all said it’s good. Positive.
Bella: Heaps of positive feedback from people, we’re really lucky that our support network is quite large, so we’re just watching the streams and things go up and sitting there excitedly waiting for it to hit certain milestones.
Has it hit any milestones so far?
Bella: We hit 2k the day before yesterday, so pretty quickly, which was really cool. It hit 1k within the first day or the second day, so we were kind of stoked with that and our music video is nearing 1k, it’s not heaps, but it’s heaps for us. We’re happy.
The video is really cool! So, you made that homemade?
Bella: Yeah, so we kind of got the car…
Chris: Yeah, we got a mates car…
Bella: We got this really cool vintage red VW Beetle and I was determined that we were able to do it ourselves, I was like, “it can’t be that hard, it really can’t, we’re shooting a summer song in the middle of winter, can’t be that hard…” so, we planned out all the shots and my Dad works in film, so he’s got a bit of background knowledge in that. He doesn’t work behind the camera, but you know, he’s got a rough idea of how things should go and so, we kind of set up the tripod and stood in front of it, he made sure we were all in frame and we just rolled with it and that was it. It was a bit intense, trying to dodge the rain.
Chris: The tripod was the real hero.
Bella: The editing was the least fun. Things kept coming out of sync, it was a nightmare, but we got there in the end.
It’s so cool, I love it. It makes you feel warm, because obviously it’s cold outside and it’s a warm video and a fun song.
How long was the recording process for Tattoo? Did it take quite a long time?
Chris: I think we had about four recording sessions in total with our recording producer. I mean, that took over a month just because everyone has their own things and we’re all a little bit busy, so to find a day we were all free, it was pretty like, quick. I mean, last time we recorded the song with Rockquest, the drums took probably three or four hours…
Bella: They did, they took forever!
Chris: It was good because this time, I guess, after recording that song, we learnt from our mistakes.
Bella: We were less nervous. Like, Thommy, because he’s an amazing drummer, I think he just got a bit spooked having to play to a metronome, but keeping the same energy of like, a live performance. So, it was that balance of getting that energy and getting into the song and also playing on time. The recording process was fun, like, I wrote Tattoo the start of last year and from there, the song has become like, our song. It’s the song we always play last and it’s our go-to. Going into the studio, I knew exactly what I wanted for the song. I knew how I wanted it to sound and so, it was a fairly quick process in terms of recording, just because we knew exactly how we wanted it with the tones and Christian helped tweaked it here and there, just with adding more layers, but overall, the song has not changed at all since we wrote it last year.
You’re pretty stoked with it then, to not change too much about it, which is amazing.
Bella: I think there have been a few mild changes in the second verse and then just the bridge part and that was it. It was fun.
Where did you record the song?
Bella: Parachute Studios with Christian. Christian is really talented and we knew that he could deliver for sure. We were super excited about working with him and Parachute is such a nice studio.
I guess this is an individual question for everyone, did you always think you’d be in a creative field?
Nate: Not always. Since I only joined about 2 months ago, I don’t know… It’s just been so awesome and I get to join this band and we’ve already got a single out and stuff.
Bella: Yeah, for Nate, I feel like he is in a good spot because, obviously he is super talented and we’re really lucky to have him, but coming into the band, literally within the first week, he was jumping into the studio to record and so Nate has just gone straight into the stuff we’ve all kind of worked on for a year and a bit. He’s just living! He’s in gigs, studio, he’s recording, he’s in a music video… I think for me, I’ve like, I’ve always wanted to do music. I’ve been playing since I was 7, but it was always just guitar for me, I never wanted to be a singer or songwriter because I hated being compared to Taylor Swift, I love Taylor Swift now, but when you’re younger and you’re this little blonde kid who is kind of shredding on the guitar, just being compared to Taylor Swift was like “seriously?” but being compared to her now is actually very cool. For me, I’ve been in and out of bands since I was like, 11 and I think Coast Arcade is definitely, you know, got the potential to go somewhere and I’d really love to stick with it and make it a career - I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do with you guys.
Lots of band love!
Chris: I think for me, I kind of always wanted to be in a band, but I never knew where to go or never really had people to do it with. Because my brother would always be in a band, I was super jealous, he was always playing all these new songs and stuff, he’d be like the only person that I could practice with and so then, when I joined Coast Arcade, I was like “aha!”
Bella: That’s so funny, when I started Coast Arcade, it was Thom and I because my old band Ragaire had split and I’d been tutoring Thom in another band and I was like, okay… I know Thom is a good drummer and then I actually went to Nate first and I didn’t ask him to be in a band, I kind of said “hey, how’s your music going?” because I knew that Nate was a killer bass player and had been in bands, so I was like, he’s got experience, but I was like… Ooh, do I want two 16-year olds. Then, I remembered that Chris did play guitar and Chris and I had been at school together since we were like, 5, so we all know each other and we’ve all lived in Glendowie really close to each other for our whole lives and so, after talking to Nate just about his band and stuff, I was like “okay, cool” and went and asked Chris as I knew he had a friend who played bass and it’s so funny that now it’s worked out that both of them [Nate and Chris] are in it.
Chris: Yeah, it’s cool having the bro in it.
It’s come together really well then, eh.
Bella: It’s worked out weirdly well.
I think it was just meant to be for Coast Arcade.
Tell me more about your journey in Rockquest!
Bella: I guess Nate can’t really take that one. We got together basically for the sole purpose of doing Rockquest because it was my last year of Rockquest, I’d done it pretty much every year before and I was like, “I really want to do it this last year”, got to the national finals last year, it was almost like a test for myself, can I put a band together this quickly with people who kind of have zero experience playing in a band or in front of people and get to the national finals. When we got together, the vibes were just so good and everything just kind of gelled. We had to put in a lot of work, we were practicing eight hours a week, if not more and then, I think it was about six weeks after our first band practice we were in the heats and we kind of smashed the heats, eh. It felt really good. We went through to regional finals, again, practicing super, super hard because we had time to make up… All these other bands had been together quite a while and then, the regional final was fun, we came first, which was kind of cool, we didn’t expect to because the calibre of bands was super high.
Chris: A lot of bands that you look up to.
Bella: Some real tight bands and so we were stoked, we’d literally been together like a month or two. To get to that was fun. That’s where we played Tattoo, that was our heat song, that was our regional finals song, the video submission was… sketch.
Chris: It was pretty average. We watched it the other day to practice to it and it was so bad.
Bella: It was one of those days where nothing had worked out, I’d done a video submission before with Rockquest, so I knew what needed to be done… It wasn’t an issue with the songs, it was that we were brand new, playing these four songs in one go and I had laryngitis, so it was so bad. We’d get a really good take and then at the end, I’d just have a coughing fit and we’d have to start again. It took us all day. By the end of it, the boys were like, at each others throats and we were like, I don’t want to be here anymore, but we got it done and then we somehow got into the national finals with that video. It was quite the ordeal, but by the time we got to the national finals, we were like, this is so fun, this is so cool, we got some recognition from our friends and that, it was cool. We were like, we should just keep this going. There was no reason why we shouldn’t. We know we want to do music, so… That was kind of Rockquest for us. Rockquest have done so much for us as well in terms of just supporting us, so, 10/10, would recommend.
It’s good that we have that in the country because the younger artists coming out of High School or who are in High School, they need that. We don’t have opportunities for people otherwise.
Bella: I am 100% a Rockquest advocate, I have no shame in saying that, either. For me, I did Bandquest first when I was 11 and I did that 11, 12 and 13. It gave me this thrill of, oh my God, I get to play with this awesome gear and be onstage. We were awful, but it was so much fun. When I got to High School, I was like, I want to do this again and if I didn’t have Rockquest, there is no doubt that we would not be doing band stuff. You know, the support for it in the NCEA curriculum and our school being Glendowie, there’s not a huge amount of music and so, to support a band and teach them how gigs work and how sound checks work and the kind of gear that you should be using, you have to figure that out for yourself and Rockquest does a big portion of that for you. You can reach out to them and say, hey, we need help, how do we do this because this isn’t something we’ve been taught and we don’t want to mess it up. So, Rockquest, can’t recommend it enough. We love you, Rockquest.
As we were talking about before, Thom is currently over in Glastonbury, do you think if you got to that level of being able to play at Glastonbury that you would want to take that opportunity?
Bella: 100%! I don’t know who would turn down Glastonbury.
Chris: We all have our little dreams that we want to accomplish. I think, Thom’s would be to play Glastonbury.
Bella: For all of us… I don’t have a specific goal, I just know that I want Coast Arcade to be big enough to play at Glastonbury, you know what I mean?
Chris: Back when we first started [my goal] would’ve been to open for Mako Road, or for Mako Road to open for us.
Bella: We would love to jump on some festivals this year. We were supposed to jump on a couple last year, but obviously covid, so they canned a lot of those, especially before the line-ups came out and so that was a little bit gutting because we were so excited to be like, hey! We’re on this, we’re on that. It is what it is.
L-R: Thom, Bella, Chris and Nate! Photo provided by Coast Arcade.
At least you’ll have more opportunities to do that in the future and they’ll be bigger and better. That’s a positive way of looking at it. Who would be on your dream line-up to play alongside, apart from Mako Road?
Nate: Didn’t we write a list? I’d want to play with Spacey Jane, Bella really likes them.
Bella: Stop, that would be my top. I think we wrote one [a list] recently. We’ve played with The Beths before and that was a dream come true, I don’t know how that happened or how we were able to get that. I’d love to play with The Beths again, Spacey Jane I think for all of us, Mako Road… Obviously the big ones like Arctic Monkeys, Thom I think, would like to play with the Foo’s even though they’re kind of not quite together anymore. Obviously they’re big goals, but for us, Spacey Jane, The Beths, Mako Road, those are all the dream.
Here’s hoping that you’re on the way to achieving that!
What has been a highlight for each of you being in Coast Arcade so far?
Nate: There’s definitely releasing a song and I don’t know, it’s awesome to just go into a recording studio, it’s just unbelievable to me that we’re already there.
Chris: Yeah, for me, I’d have to say having a song on Spotify, it’s so cool because it’s there forever. You can show your kids and your grandkids and be like, guess who released this song? I just find it really cool that it’s like, yours. I quite like listening to music on Spotify and all the time, I’m looking at all these artist profiles and looking at the top song. Then, seeing our one that we’ve worked towards, it’s so cool seeing that.
I can definitely understand that would be a huge highlight!
Bella: For me, obviously having something I wrote in my bedroom out in the world and I think coming 26th June, our music video is going to be on MTV Hits in New Zealand and Australia, which is going to be awesome, you know, little things like that and then, my biggest highlight would definitely be playing with The Beths just because a year or two before, I had made that my life goal. I’ll know I’ve made it when I played with The Beths, so the fact that happened a year later, that was kind of insane. I’m one of those people who always have new goals, I’m satisfied with where we are, but I’m like, let’s see how much further we can take this. For us, it’s just a matter of how far we can push it, really. We don’t have a limit on ourselves or on our mindset on where this is going to end. It could literally go as long as it goes.
Nate: We all see the potential as well, just putting in the work into it.
Bella: If we can keep up our work rate…
Nate: I’m willing to make my mark on the band seeing as I’m new.
Bella: The great thing about Coast Arcade is that all four of us are willing to push ourselves as far and hard as we can. It’s not just a band thing, it’s also an individual thing, if one person isn’t putting in the same amount of work, it does affect everyone and if we’ve got things coming up and if we did manage to jump on festivals, you can tell when there is one person who hasn’t practiced and none of us are like that, we’re all equally as invested, which is why I think it works so well.
You can tell that as well, from the way you work and what you’re achieving and how people are closely following you, I can tell that you work very, very hard.
Where did the name Coast Arcade come from?
Chris: I’m pretty sure we were just like…
Bella: …Spit balling?
Chris: We were just sitting in the car like, okay guys, we need to come up with a name…
Bella: For Rockquest. That was for our audition form.
Chris: We had to do it a week from then, so we had to decide. We just sent random ideas to the group chat.
Bella: I was previously in a band called Ragaire and every time someone would butcher the name or butcher the spelling, I was like, guys, we need something easy to say, easy to remember if we yelled it at a gig, people could easily find it online and I had always wanted my old band Ragaire to be something arcade. Something like, Blue Arcade, I don’t know. I was going through a phase and thought arcade was very cool and it was edgy, but not like, super edgy. At the beginning, we wanted Coast Arcade to be a very beachy band, real kind of surf-beach kind of vibes. The more we wrote, the more we kind of went into more of this pop-rock with a little bit of surf, a little bit of punk in there. So, coast, I think was Chris’ word, in fact.
Chris: Then we were just like, oh, Coast Arcade.
Bella: I said coastal and you said coast. It was like, spit balling. It’s not the greatest band name invention ever. It looks good on posters and hats… Oh, what? Did you say that?
Pre-orders for the Coast Arcade x Scruffy caps are available NOW through until 1st July 2022. Pre-order here.
Is that something that might be dropping soon?
Bella: Soon. Everyone has asked us, all of our mates are like, we want Coast Arcade merch. It’s been the one thing they want. They’re like, we don’t care about music, we just want to wear a hat with your name on it or a t-shirt. So, we kind of thought about it and it’s definitely in the works. Hats are definitely on the cards.
That’s exciting though, having merch out there.
This is one of my favourite questions, if Coast Arcade was a flavour, what flavour would it be?
Chris: Bubble tea flavour.
Bella: I don’t know, I feel like Coast Arcade is something sweet, a little bit like, zesty. A peach or a peachy-lemony… It’s definitely sweet, fun and summery and light, but then it’s also got a bit of a tang. A little bit of salt. Peachy-lemony-salt. We’d be a peach lemon tea sort of vibe.
What do you love most about New Zealand music? Or being in the New Zealand music industry?
Bella: I don’t know. There are just so many aspects of being in the New Zealand music industry, there are so many parts of it. Obviously being a young band gives you quite a different perspective to a more mature band or to a band that is more established. I really love the youth scene, Flaxxies, Park RD, that kind of vibe. We are all quite supportive of each other. We all play gigs together, it’s just a really fun kind of vibe, There’s not a huge amount of competitiveness for us, we’re not competitive with anyone as we don’t see it like that. If everyone is involved and loves music, that can only be a good thing. So, yeah. I think that part of New Zealand music is really cool and obviously, we’re starting to get into that kind of, older scene, more mature, a little bit of the R18, we’re starting to work with producers and that’s quite scary, I guess because it’s unknown and as I’ve said, you don’t kind of get taught how to do any of that… You don’t get taught about splits and royalties, all of that. It’s scary, but exciting for us to be entering that kind of phase and coming from a school and an area that music isn’t really a thing… We’re probably the only band from Glendowie… Ever. There’s a few musicians here and there, but it’s definitely not an area that music is hugely supported, I guess and you know, we would love to see more music coming through NCEA. I’d really like to see the NCEA curriculum with music taking a bit of a shift personally. But yeah, New Zealand music is great and we’re really enjoying the journey through New Zealand music.
Awesome! Well, you’re doing so well. I genuinely love Tattoo. I couldn’t sleep last night as it was stuck in my head.
Bella: That’s a good thing!
The best of friends who are creating a whole lot of epic around the country at the moment. Photo provided by Coast Arcade.
Have you got anything else to add?
Bella: Stream Tattoo. Watch our music video. Follow us!
Thanks guys!
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I’d like to extend a big thank you to Bella, Chris and Nate for their time and allowing me to have some bubble tea with them in the car for this exceptionally fun chat! Coast Arcade are tearing up the music scene, so make sure that you are following them closely to not miss a beat:
From Studying Software Engineering to Music, 20 Minutes With: Natassja Kelly
Natassja took the time to sit down and have a chat with me a few weeks ago about her new single and what’s next! Photo credit to her music Facebook page.
Recently, I got the opportunity to sit down with Hamilton local, Natassja Kelly, over Zoom to have a quick chat with her about her newly released song, Don’t Say Goodbye, potential collabs in the future with her friends and how she became viral on YouTube during the 2020 lockdown.
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Hey Natassja, how’s it going?
Natassja: Great thank you, how are you doing?
Yeah, not too bad, thank you! First of all, I just want to say congratulations on your new release ‘Don’t Say Goodbye’, such a wonderful song. How have you found things since it has been released?
Natassja: I think it’s less popular than the first one, but I think it’s because I was a little bit slack with the marketing for this one. It’s all good!
Give it time, it will pick up a little more. What would you say the creative process behind creating Don’t Say Goodbye was?
Natassja: I recorded Don’t Say Goodbye at Porch Recording Studios in Hamilton with Regan. I won this competition here in the Waikato where I got to record two songs for free in a studio, which is really cool. Writing the song, I started it at Uni and I saw a piano and I was like, “ooh, I have an idea” and I recorded something on my phone and then I went home and I had these lyrics down already and I was like, “maybe I’ll put a tune to these” and I wrote it thinking of Disney, that kind of vibe. That nostalgia kind of thing. I wanted something that felt like a hug to people. When we were recording, we recorded the song live, just me and the piano and then Regan added a bunch of strings and all that. I was like, “ah, this is it!”
Wow, that’s awesome and you said you got to record two songs at the studio? Was your first single also recorded at the studio?
Natassja: Yep.
You’d be pretty excited to have two songs out there are the moment.
Natassja: For sure, yeah. It’s surreal, honestly. Just having music out there for people to hear, just anyone.
I bet it’s pretty crazy imagining it in your head and then it being a reality. So, you mentioned you’re from Hamilton, how do you find the music scene up there?
Natassja: Well, during High School, a bunch of my friends always did gigs and all that because they were all in bands, but since I had friends up in Auckland and down in Christchurch, I feel like the music scene isn’t as big as it is in those cities just because it’s smaller. It’s just more local, which isn’t too bad, it’s nice to build a smaller community with your music. It’s definitely different to the bigger cities.
If you can build a base in your hometown, even if it’s small, you can move on to the bigger cities, that’s a really cool thing to say you have done.
Natassja: Yeah, for sure. There’s heaps of artists that started out, especially in Hamilton, like Stan Walker is from Hamilton.
What led you down the creative path, especially music?
Natassja: I always grew up around music, just everyone in my family is able to sing or play an instrument… I kind of just grew up having that be all I knew. Then, in High School, I was thinking of doing going into more of a stem career, I started doing software engineering last year, but I was like… “I don’t think this is for me!” and I switched this year to music, which is so good. I feel like having that creative part just always felt like home to me. I always went right to it, no matter what I did. I want to do this for the rest of my life.
Good on you, that’s amazing. So, I’ve seen a few posts with yourself and our local musician down here, Harry Burt! You’re pretty good friends?
Natassja: Yeah, we met at a barbershop competition a few years ago and that is quite different to what we actually produce in music. It’s just really cool to have people in other cities that make the same music as you. It’s nice to have someone there as well, going down the career path that you are. It’s really cool.
Is there going to be a Harry collab any time soon?
Natassja: Ah, hopefully! I was down there a few weeks ago and we did a few writing sessions, so hopefully sometime soon.
Both your voices gel very well together, so that would be really cool to hear that.
Bit of a random one! What are five things that people wouldn’t be able to find about you on the internet?
Natassja: One would be that I have quite the collection of pop vinyl figures. I’ve always collected them. Probably the software thing. Doing software engineering first and then switching to music. That’s something a lot of people don’t really know unless they know me personally. I’m a big Marvel fan. I went to watch the movies with my family and [I watch] the new Disney+ shows, I’m obsessed with those. I like to take polaroid’s and have taken them since I was 12. Three years ago, I won the national barbershop quartet competition with my quartet back in High School. Same as Harry, as well. We won the same year, which is really cool. That’s five things people probably wouldn’t know about me.
Amazing. Going back to the Marvel thing: do you have a favourite superhero?
Natassja: At the moment, just because it’s new, I think Moon Knight is my favourite. Out of the movies, probably Spiderman has always been my thing.
I love Spiderman as well!
How do you feel that the New Zealand music industry could be improved?
Natassja: Probably have more opportunities for local artists, I think in High School there were a lot of competitions like Rockquest and Play it Strange, but there’s not much once you leave High School. I think something for people that aren’t in school anymore, but who still make music would be really cool, even if it was something like a small competition, just more of those would be really nice.
That would be really beneficial.
Have you got any other songs in the pipeline?
Natassja: Nothing confirmed. Hopefully an EP sometime soon because I’ve got a friend in Auckland, Noah Page, he’s so cool, he’s a producer up there that works in a sound studio. I’m hoping to record an EP with him. I’ve done a few collabs with him on my YouTube channel, which is really cool. Nothing confirmed-confirmed that I’m working towards. Hopefully just building a fanbase off the stuff that I have out right now.
I read that you gained a little bit of a following from your YouTube channel during the early pandemic? What kind of covers did you post?
Natassja: I used to post really often back in High School. I used to post a lot of covers, that was my thing. I wasn’t really comfortable with sharing my original songs because they were really personal back then. During lockdown, I noticed that one of my old covers of As the World Caves In by Matt Maltese blew up. It has 44k views now! I’m like, oh my gosh. I got like, thousands of views every day and so many people were commenting and I was like, “wow, what is this?” and I realised that the song was trending on TikTok. Heaps of people must have searched it up on YouTube and that was only one of the covers and it was like “oh, let’s check out this person…” so grateful for that! It really shines a light on how powerful apps like TikTok can be in the music industry. It’s insane.
That’s massive that you became viral because of that!
Going back to your two songs that you’ve got out, Easier and Don’t Say Goodbye, what are each of them about?
Natassja: Easier was written probably two years ago now, I was going through a break-up and it was just like, the awkward stage right after a break-up where you don’t really know what to do and it’s the kind of break-up where you stay friends. So, you still hear about them and it doesn’t really get any easier. It’s really cool hearing other peoples’ interpretation of the songs. Don’t Say Goodbye was a love song. It’s kind of just past the honeymoon stage where you’re kind of like, settling in with your person and you don’t ever want to leave them, you always want to be around them no matter what, that kind of perspective on love. Nothing else to it, I just wanted a Disney vibe to it really. Like, a princess singing it to their love interest in a movie, yeah. It’s interesting because a lot of people were like, “wow, Easier is supposed to be a sad song, but it’s so upbeat” and then, Don’t Say Goodbye is slow and sad, but it’s actually a happy song, which I really love doing, juxtaposition is really fun.
Now, I know that this is a commonly asked question to musicians, however, who inspires you to create music?
Natassja: At the moment, I listen to a lot of independent artists. So, people like Bruno Major and Lizzy McAlpine. It’s so cool seeing them start out with a really small fanbase and then they blow up on things like TikTok, I feel like it’s just so inspiring to see someone who makes the same music as I do gain that kind of following and have so many people like their music as well. That really inspired me and really motivated me to be making music. Of course, all my friends as well, Harry especially and Noah, they constantly inspire me with their music. I get a lot of demos from Harry and we exchange demos of original songs and we’re always hyping each other up, like “you should release this! This is so cool!” and it’s so nice, so lovely to have that support system as well.
Thank you so much for talking to me and for your awesome music! I think you are super talented and an inspiration for other up-and-comers as well.
Natassja: Thank you!
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Meet Fool’s Lagoon: An Interview with Joe and Josh on Their New EP, Gigs and Perfecting their Craft
The five Indie-rock legends who make up Fool’s Lagoon! From L-R: Mark, Josh, Matt, Joe and Connor. Get around These Fools, out now! ALL photos featured on this interview were provided by Connor from Fool’s Lagoon.
Recently, I had the chance to interview Joe and Josh (just missing are Mark, Matt and Connor) who are members from upcoming Auckland-based band, Fool’s Lagoon, to talk about their new EP, These Fools, how they established their epic band name, their debut EP, working with CJ from Mako Road and their upcoming gig at Cassette 9. You’re going to want to get to know the names of these five lovely lads, because things are about to get smokin’ with their new music. Super stoked to have been able to interview them for their first interview ever, also.
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Hey team, how are you?
Josh: We’re good, super pumped after the release. It’s been such a buzzy time.
Is it good being Auckland based?
Joe: I’m from Napier, I grew up there until I was 18 and then came here for Uni, there’s always something going on in Auckland for whatever you’re into as well. Napier isn’t so busy. You know, it’s a good thing and a bad thing. There’s always stuff to do, people to meet and different things to try.
I guess, Auckland is the big hub of things and like you said, there is never not anything going on.
Joe: Lockdowns.
Josh: We’ve come to expect that. I guess the fun thing about being in the band is that we had so much time in lockdowns to think up music on our own, which I think is a little against the way we usually do it. We usually need to be in person. Once we got back together, it was f*cking mean.
I guess for a band, it’s not bad to have different ways of doing things. It’s pretty cool you had that experience.
Josh: We’re hoping that it’s all in the past.
Joe: You forget how good live music is as well.
Josh: We had a gig in December and there was a four month gap in our gigs. We were just recording at the time and yeah. You forget what it’s like to be up on stage. It’s so different to creating and being in that mindset.
How did you cope with the gap during that time?
Joe: As Josh was saying, we had recording on the mind. It sort of worked out well. We focused on that, got our songs together, got them prepared. We were sort of like, “once we get that out of the way, hopefully things will open up a bit more” and we did have a little bit of time to get our songs and the live performance up to scratch as well, which was good. I guess, maintaining little steps along the way so you don’t get lost in something unattainable, or the opposite, just no direction at all.
That’s great. So, you’ve just released your new EP [These Fools], which is brilliant by the way, congratulations!
Joe: We’re pretty stoked to have it out. We’ve been playing together for a bit more than a year now and we had some of those songs from the early days, so it’s good to capture that and put it together like, here’s a snapshot in time.
Josh: I think it’s pretty special to release it because as we come together more and we play different music, our influences and style of music that we’re playing has completely been shifting and kind of like evolving. So, getting those initial mish-mashy things together in an EP and being able to release it out… I think we will look back on it really fondly.
That’s awesome and you guys worked with CJ from Mako Road, which would have been super epic to have done that.
Joe: He’s a legend. A down-to-earth kind of bloke. We didn’t really know what to expect, but we had so much fun.
Josh: Such a wholesome person. He’s so talented. He really produced us. People will say that he does recording and production, but you don’t really think about his involvement in the way that our songs came together structurally and all the great hints that he would give. He would just give great advice.
Joe: Yeah, we’ve got some recordings where we set up a little mixer in the backyard and played our songs and sort of demos. Looking back on how they started to how they finished up, he sort of took it to the next level. He took all the parts we had and took them up a bit. A lot.
Josh: Like we’re fresh meat.
Fresh meat. Great way to describe it! That’s really cool. How did you get to work with CJ?
Joe: Funny story talking about Mako Road because our drummer, Mark, he used to be in Mako Road. That was in 2017, I believe. So, he was playing with them when they were still a covers band and then, I think, somewhere in 2017, Rhian started their songwriting and then Mark played a bunch of gigs around Christchurch in the Uni scene, they recorded Sun Comes Up and Daquiri, so Mark is on those songs. Then he moved to Auckland to start his career and that’s when Robbie took over on the drums. So, the link there is that Mark is also good friends with them and since CJ is living in Auckland as well, he is doing the whole production thing, so if we’re doing an EP, we should go to CJ and it went from there.
Oh, how funny! I had no idea Mark used to be the drummer of Mako.
Josh: Every drummer is extremely busy, like they’re all working, you know? There’s no shortage of bands that need drummers. Not enough drummers either.
To put it bluntly, there are not enough Kiwi musicians!
Joe: A lot of them are hiding, I feel like. I played guitar for ages before I was like “maybe I should go and ask”, I think there’s a lot of people like that out there as well. I think getting people inspired is a big thing. Just get out there and give it a shot.
I guess, in our country, it’s a little bit hard to do that sometimes, isn’t it? Have you guys found that, that it’s been a little bit challenging?
Joe: We’ve sort of been lucky that we’ve known a couple bands around town and have a few contacts that could help start getting gigs going. I think New Zealand has got a lot of that small sort of gig thing going on as well. There’s not like a huge, mega American music industry here. In the New Zealand band scene, there’s this own sort of niche as well. You can get in contact with them and make friends that way, I think that’s sort of how we’ve looked at it and I think it’s quite good like that and sort of in a more genuine kind of way.
Josh: There’s so many amazing solo artists coming out, but I feel like bands and musicians just want to play their instruments and that’s less common, you know? It’s almost less desirable. We’re super happy to play music.
Having the EP out is obviously going to bring you guys to a whole new level.
Joe: We’ve got some awesome feedback, we’re so stoked every time. We’ve put a lot of work and a lot of creative juice into it.
Josh: Some of our songs come from joking about the people in our lives and that’s what Mates Rates is about, right? Your mate is just not paying his rent…
Like, realistic stuff.
Josh: You’ve got to bring different sausages to the BBQ than just like, Hellers.
That is a great expression! Please always use that.
Josh: That’s exactly what it’s about, we were just joking about it and then it became a song about that mate. It’s good fun.
So, off These Fools, the EP, what words would you use to describe each song, or which one word would you use to describe each of them?
Joe: Golden Boy I’d like to say is stomping, you know? That’s kind of rockier in a way.
Josh: It’s got a bit of like, sass.
Joe: I came up with the riff and we went for Cage the Elephant kind of avenue, Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked kind of thing going on. Mates Rates, one word, it’s kind of the hook.
Josh: It was our first time kind of playing around with like the “oohs” rather than a full lyrical thing, it’s just “ooh”
Joe: Try, you’re going to have to explain that one.
Josh: I think it’s very different to the other ones. Mainly because I wrote it. I kind of came up with the chords and they were kind of cheesy. Compared to what we normally make, it’s very…
Joe: It’s a ballad. Young love. He’s so smitten so he had to write a song about it.
Oh, that’s so sweet.
Josh: I felt like that song was so sentimental. Nostalgic, maybe.
Joe: We’re giving way more than one word now, aren’t we?
It’s fine, go off, I don’t even mind.
Joe: Then Run, sauce.
Josh: Sauce.
Joe: It kind of goes a lot of places that song, you know. That’s why we put it at the end because if you’ve got that far through the EP and then you get your ears around Run, it’s sort of like an experience.
As I said, I love the EP. I don’t think anyone wouldn’t listen until the end, you’ve got that going for you!
Where did your name, Fool’s Lagoon, come from? Was it random, or did you find inspiration from somewhere?
Joe: To get our name took months. It took so long.
Josh: So many text threads about it, google docs, polls. Like, we did a vote… We had come up with so many ideas and we would write them all down as we came up with them, by the end of it, we had over like 40 names.
Joe: It was ridiculous. I was real hesitant to tell people I was in a band before we had a name and we were together for months without a name. Then, one day our bass player was just like, Fool’s Lagoon. It was like, that’s cool. What does it mean? I don’t know. Then we put it on the doc and we had this gauntlet of names just like a college basketball playoff bracket. For three days, we were called +64, like the New Zealand code. That didn’t really feel right. That won our first gauntlet, then we came back and our guitarist, Matt, he was unhappy, so we reassessed, we were set on Fool’s Lagoon and we were like, right, make the socials so we can’t go back. That chapter is sealed and we moved forward.
Josh: We actually added Fool’s Lagoon right after we did the first gauntlet. When we started voting, we were like, let’s add in Fool’s Lagoon and then it just won. It came out of nowhere.
I think it’s got a fun vibe about it, the name, as well. I saw that you guys did a kind of introductory Instagram post a couple months ago and it was really fun, showcasing who you are as people and it kind of goes with that.
Joe: That was mainly from recording sessions with CJ. Connor, our bass player, he’s an editor for his day job, so he’s got that sort of creative side to him as well. I’m not a super visual or graphical kind of person when it comes to that, whereas Josh and Connor have got that sort of side to it. So, we’ve got a few skills to leverage altogether, the five of us.
You played your first show in December last year, right? How was that? Did you notice the audience getting hyped up?
Joe: They got as hype as they could while sitting.
Oh, of course. Covid red light.
Josh: It was actually really fun. As much as it felt like a church service with everyone kind of in their pews, it was really fun because people could clap and it was good fun. To finally play together to a bunch of friends, my God, we’d been waiting for so long to even go on stage.
Joe: Yeah, it was satisfying just being able to finally be like, boom, here we are.
That was with Little Sunday, wasn’t it?
Joe: Yup. We’ve played two gigs with them now. They’re a real cool bunch. Mark our drummer, has filled in for them when their drummer broke his foot. Mark is everywhere. They’re really cool and it was good to sort of be apart of that and learn the ropes as well. That gig was my first proper like gig-gig. I’d done stuff at High School, like school shows and stuff, but I was very nervous, but we did alright I think.
Josh: It was great. It was just super awesome. It had been a long time since any of us had played live at that point.
Joe: Coming out of the lockdowns, as we say, was good to be back. We’ve got some gigs in the pipeline in Auckland, we’re still trying to get a little awareness to our music before we start drumming up making different connections in other cities. We were due to play in Wellington a week and a half ago [three and a half weeks at time of publishing], but then half the band got covid. That was quite gutting. I love Wellington. It’s a great sort of vibe there.
Josh: Right now we’re taking time to properly make our show… A show. It’s easy to play your own music live because you do it at every rehearsal, but to actually craft a really good live show, I think is different. Trying to integrate changes to the song just to make it a better experience. I think once we have a really good set, we’d like to gig lots and lots more.
Completely understand that. You’ve got to work on getting your names out there.
Joe: Yeah and that’s why we decided to release our EP and not drag out a single release. With our EP and our first single [Bizarre] from December, we were of the mind of like, here’s our music, here’s us and go out that way instead of trying to draw people into something that we don’t have like just a body of work people can get an understanding of what our music is and who we are, that kind of thing.
Josh: The EP was obviously the first step to do that. To properly get it out there, I think it’s working. I think people like it.
Hell yeah, people like it!
Josh: It’s been really rewarding. It’s a lot of hard work in the release process and getting all the masters back and you’re just waiting around. Sometimes there’s that feeling of like, God, should we release this now? Should we wait a bit?
Joe: It’s a whole business side of it as well, you’ve got to go through the creative and the business.
What helps you to know when something is ready to release?
Joe: With the whole like, getting a song recorded, mixed and mastered etc, once those things are done, then it’s ready. On the other side of it, if you have it done, what sort of marketing tactics do you have or release strategies do you have. Trying to line it up with gigs so that people get to see you and hear you when they go home, it makes sense.
Josh: I think we know when something is ready to be released when we’re done with nit-picking. We’re very, very particular about what is playing at what time, the timing of everything, so we will tweak it, tweak it, tweak it until we’re not complaining anymore. Like, we’re done. This is good.
Joe: There’s a point where you’re like, I’m only nit-picking it because it’s me. You know?
Josh: Exactly. No one is listening to this like the way I am right now. You always know you can do better.
Joe: You get real close to it, that’s what we say. You get real close and we’re like, what about this, what about that… That’s why it’s good to have someone who is producing you to be that other sort of ears because even when you’re writing a song, you can go down a certain path or add this thing in you think is cool and then something else changes.
Josh: It’s the whole process, I thought it was so cool when we had CJ come in and listen to our music because he immediately had notes. We’d been playing it one way for so long and you’re just like, this is the song now. You know? It almost leaves your brain that you can edit it and change it because you’ve been doing it one way for a while and when CJ came in, he gave us immediate notes which were very clear, very constructive notes about how we could change the song and make it more dynamic. It was just so great. I think when we released it, we knew that it was ready.
Joe: We definitely think it went above of what we thought when we had the songs and gigged them a few times, we got from where it was then, to where it is now. So much better than we ever thought it would be.
Josh: It’s hard nowadays to just say f*ck it and release it. I was just hanging out with someone today who was talking about their EP and how they never released it and it’s like, come on man. At that point, you just have to put it out. How else are people going to hear the work that you’ve done? It’s hard.
You never know how people are going to perceive it either, unless you put it out.
Josh: At some point, it just doesn’t f*cking matter. Good to bad, it’s all being put out. If you don’t put it out, there is no way to distinguish, there’s no answer.
Joe: What do they say? You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
Such a true statement. What are some things that the readers of Welcome to the Gig should know about Fool’s Lagoon?
Joe: I think things they should know about us, we’re five guys from different parts of the country…
Josh: Who f*ck around. That’s about it.
Joe: We love music, but we aren’t the type to pretend to be like, serious. We like to be tongue-in-cheek as well. This is fun for us. We like to joke around, perform on stage and just have music that people can move to and maybe feel some kind of feeling, I guess.
What Fool’s Lagoon song do you relate to the most and why?
Josh: I think Run(Escape). The lyrics aren’t really about anything, it’s kind of just about running away and like youth.
Running away and youth, that sounds like it gels well!
Josh: I think I relate to how it sounds almost. It just moves. I can’t get enough of it, it’s my favourite.
Joe: We like to say we’re making music for movers and shakers. So, whatever gets you moving, you know. Our first single, Bizarre, when we did that, I did the lyrics for that one.
Josh: So, you can relate to that one?
Joe: Yeah, probably.
This is a bit of a random one, if you could go forward to the future and see what is in store for Fool’s Lagoon, would you do it? If you would, what would you hope that you would see?
Josh: No, I would not.
Joe: I don’t know if I’d want to. If I did, I’d have liked to said we gave it, you know, all our creative juice and all of our hard work. We put ourselves out there and wherever that had taken us, then we could be happy with it. Everything that we’re doing, recording music and playing gigs and stuff it blows me away. It’s so much fun. The more fun, the more experiences we can have together.
Josh: Yeah, I think if I were to go to the future, I’d hope to see similar to that. To say we’d taken the chances and really put our effort into it. I don’t want to ever be complacent in what we do. It’s really the only way we have of creatively expressing ourselves. If I can see that happening in the future, continuing, I’d be happy.
Well, thank you guys so much for your time!
Joe & Josh: Thank you so much!
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I would like to extend a huge thank you to Josh and Joe of Fool’s Lagoon for taking the time out of their Saturday night to have a chat and let me be the first person to interview them! It was an absolute pleasure and I’m really looking forward to seeing the guys live eventually and being there on this journey to see where their music careers take them. Fool’s Lagoon are also playing an upcoming gig on the 16th June at Cassette 9 in Auckland for Breaking Sound NZ. You can check out the Facebook page for the event here, would highly recommend wrapping your ears around their music and heading along to this gig. It is going to absolutely blow the roof off the place.
Make sure that you check out all the social media links for Fool’s Lagoon below:
Talking #tagyourfolks and Next Musical Steps with Isla Norman
The lovely Isla doing her thing! Credit to Isla’s music Facebook for this photo.
Super lovely, super talented and super thoughtful, Auckland based artist, Isla Norman AKA Isla, took some time out of her day to have a mini interview with Welcome to the Gig!
Isla’s yearly initiative, #tagyourfolks is about to kick off for the third year in a row and it is well worth checking out for an extraordinary couple of weeks of Kiwi music.
Read on below to find out more about Isla, #tagyourfolks and what she is up to next!
Hey Isla, thanks for taking the time to be interviewed for Welcome to the Gig! I’ve recently learned about #tagyourfolks which is an incredible initiative for NZ Music Month every day during the month of May. What is #tagyourfolks for the readers who haven’t heard of the project yet?
Isla: So I recently heard #tagyourfolks described as a "secret Santa for musicians", which made me smile. It's basically a chain of covers designed to uplift our local artists - it starts on the second of May with Mackensie Grace covering Colette Rivers, and then continues from there with Colette Rivers covering Steve Tofa. You can tune in every week day in May, and hear a Kiwi musician put their own spin on another local's track.
How did the idea behind #tagyourfolks come about?
Isla: It started in March of 2020 during that time. You know, that specific period of time. We were feeling devastated for musicians whose gigs were getting cancelled left right and centre, and wanted to come up with a way to keep building a community safely.
Correct me if I’m wrong, is this the third year of #tagyourfolks? Are the artists each year the same, or do they change up?
Isla: You're not wrong! This is the third year. We have a few that have been with us from the beginning (Odds & Ends, Hazza Making Noise, Echo Children, Shana Grace) and it's only grown each year. This year we have a few submissions from overseas "honorary kiwis" South for Winter and Good Habits. It's just a good time!
How did you choose the artists to partake in #tagyourfolks?
Isla: It's open submission! Lots of them are friends I've made in this beautiful lil music scene of ours, but it's also been a joy to have people I've never met jump on board. It should just keep on growing each year we make it happen.
One of the coolest initiatives to come out of the past two years! Each of these artists cover the next artist along for nearly three weeks during New Zealand Music Month! “If you take one of those old school internet chains, bin the tacky obligation and add a tupperware of talent, then you’ll get #tagyourfolks.” Excellent! Keep your eyes on the social media from the 2nd May to celebrate this wonderful project.
What hardships have you personally faced being a musician in the New Zealand music industry?
Isla: Oh MY has it been a tricky few years. I'm so so lucky to have a reliable day job, and my heart goes out to people whose incomes have been affected by these turbulent times. Personally I haven't played a live gig since last August, and I've had some of the biggest shows I've been asked to play cancelled. It's defeating, but there's still a lot of energy out there.
On the flipside, what has been the highlight so far about being a musician in New Zealand?
Isla: It all comes back to the people, I reckon. I've been playing in a band with my best friends for years, and we just get so much joy out of prepping for our goofy little local gigs. I plant the seed of an idea, and they water it until it's full blown weeping willow. It's fun getting BK chook after a gig, too.
Which New Zealanders do you look up to the most? (In or out of the industry).
Isla: I had the privilege of working for "To The Front" recently as a mentor for wahine and gender diverse youth. Honestly, I look up to the people trail blazing with these incredible programmes that I would have loved to have as a teenager. It never even occurred to me to start a band as a kid, because I didn't [see] myself reflected in others standing on stage. I won't mention any particular names because I'll absolutely miss someone, but check out To The Front - they're angels.
Do you feel as though in the future you would like to collaborate with an international artist? Is there anyone that you’d love to work on a project with?
Isla: Wouldn't that be a dream! Do you know someone? Haha. I'm such a fan of Dodie and Orla Gartland. If I even just got to see them play live I think that'd keep me levitating for the rest of eternity.
What’s next for you? Any other big projects/ideas upcoming?
Isla: Yes actually! I'm working on my second EP at the moment with Morgan Allen. It's a kind of wintery collection of songs, and a completely different soundscape to anything I've done before. I generally strive for positivity in my work, but it's been therapeutic to just embrace something darker for a bit.
Thanks so much for your time, Isla! I am certainly looking forward to #tagyourfolks throughout May.
Isla: Thank YOU. We love everything that you're up to.
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Make sure to check out the #tagyourfolks initiative at the links below and follow Isla on all of her social media platforms!
#tagyourfolks:
Instagram
Facebook
YouTube
Isla:
Spotify
Instagram
Facebook
YouTube
Sun, Salt, Surf and Sand: An Interview with Nick and Eric from Flaxxies
Photo provided by the Flaxxies boys. Full credit to them!
A couple of Tuesdays ago, I sat down and had a great chat with two of the five members of Flaxxies, Nick and Eric, we chatted about everything from their rehearsal space, what animals each of them would be and what life is looking like post-red light restrictions.
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Eric: Good evening!
Nick: Hey!
Hello! How are you guys?
Nick: Yeah, good! We’ve been away in the Coro for the weekend, so we’re always pretty happy to get away. A bit of salt, a bit of sun.
So, thank you guys for chatting with me! I’ve been wanting to do an interview with you guys for ages.
Nick: Sorry we’re not all here, we can probably fill in what the other boys would say. It should be an accurate representation, hopefully. We will be as unbiased as possible.
Eric: We’re a bit split up at the moment. Don’t know where our bassist is.
Nick: Chris, our bassist, just disappears sometimes.
Eric: He’s all good, it’s just radio silence sometimes.
Well, at least you know he’s okay! So, I have a list of questions for you both.
What are your goals as a band for 2022, apart from being able to gig again?
Eric: You really caught us off guard.
Nick: As gigs are off the table, it’s going to be a lot of behind the scenes stuff.
Eric: Parachute music was going to be the biggest one.
Nick: We’re spending a bit of time with those guys over the year. A lot of behind the scenes recording. Getting our set ready for next summer, if we can use it then. Use the year to get ready for the summer, whatever that will be. Make songs, get recordings done… The whole nine yards.
Eric: I think it’s been a pretty common theme for us, as soon as summer dies down, how do we ramp back into [next] summer and festivals because we always like building up towards those two things.
Nick: To reiterate, it’s the end of summer now and the end of the holidays, so gig season is pretty much finished up and everyone gets a couple weeks off to do their own thing and then we all come back together and make a plan. The whole year we will be working on stuff behind the scenes, real calm and getting it ready for next summer, which is what we are always planning for. Everything is like a lead up. We’re pretty much working around that at the moment.
Eric: Gigs, we sort of want to be doing about one a month to keep in practise and to have something to look forward to. We’re a big fan of having little goals sprinkled throughout the year and tick off as we go. Then, once we get to the end of the year, it’s like “oh my goodness, we’ve done so much and made a load of progress!”
Nick: This year will be a lot less gigging than we have before, a bit more quiet sort of work. Obviously with Parachute, it’s a little more behind the scenes what we’re doing with them.
At least you’ve still got goals even under the current circumstances. That will see you through!
Do you get to practise much together? How do you do it when you’re in different locations?
Nick: We’re all down in Auckland and Benji is currently living up in the Coromandel for the month. He will normally come back for a couple days every couple of weeks. Throughout the year, we’re all normally based here. Because we are practising so regularly, 3 or 4 times a week, building up over the years, we can afford to kind of all disappear for a month or so and then come back.
What do you do outside of Flaxxies? Obviously, music is a huge part of what you do, but, what else do you do?
Eric: I’ve just started my sparky apprenticeship, so I’m doing that, working full-time now. It’s really good for music though, it’s logical thinking and it’s nice to be able to be an efficient engineer in our studio. So, if we want to record something, I’m always the guy that gets up first and is like “I’ll run the cable here.”
Nick: It pays to have someone who knows how to do things like that. So, Benji, he’s studying a property degree at Uni, I’m doing the same as him this coming year. Jayden, our drummer, he works for a panel store, like doing sales and stuff. Bit of this, bit of that. Chris is at Uni doing liberal arts, like philosophy and economics and stuff like that. There’s a bit of a spread, whatever makes everyone tick.
Eric: Really into my skateboarding, been doing that since I was really young. Just picked up some decks, like DJ controller decks, so I’ve been going hard on that.
That’s so cool! I didn’t realise that you guys did so many different things.
Eric: I’m a big fan of when it comes to music, you can put more into it if you’re exploring heaps of different avenues of it. Sort of like, dipping your toes into everything. Throwing yourself into something you haven’t done before.
Nick: It’s like giving a keyboard to a set of guitarists, you know what you want to do… But don’t known how to do it yet.
This is a random one and it’s going to be a pun, so I apologise in advance because I love puns. What would you dream day - or dream days - to be really technical?
Eric: That’s an awesome question!
Nick: Probably a day that involves not having to do a hell of a lot.
Eric: I would say that dream days would be like festivals, back-to-back. That would be mean. We always have moments where we’re on our way to gigs and back, where we’re always discussing how much we love what we do and how much we’d love to keep doing that. I’d say the vibes are always up in those moments, so when we have back-to-back, we always look forward to those.
Nick: True. When we go away from home for music, for like two weeks or something. That’s what it’s all about, life on the road.
Eric: Being around your mates, having a bit of fun… Doing your job at the same time.
Do you feel different or a lot more independent when you’re away from home?
Eric: I certainly don’t feel as independent as I know I’m eating really badly.
Nick: In terms of the domestic affairs like washing and laundry, not very good. In the context that we’re on our way and finding our life just from a couple guitars is pretty cool.
Eric: It’s very satisfying when you get little perks like when you play at a restaurant and then you get to have a feed and you’re actually hungry and then you realise, “oh, I just did what I love doing and now I’m not hungry anymore.” We have a lot of moments of self reflection which is really good because we always take time to appreciate what we are doing and where we are. We take the time to be around each other and be like “ah, we’ve come so far, man!”
It’s good to have that though, you go from point A to point B and so on and then it’s like, “holy sh*t, I achieved that” and in such a short time sometimes as well.
Eric: It keeps the fire burning as well. Once you can see that you have improved and can see you’re improving, it sort of sees itself out.
Nick: That’s the motivating factor, right?
So, I’ve got some random questions that aren’t about music… Which animal would you say represents each of you and why?
Nick: I reckon Benji’s a little puppy dog, eh.
Eric: Nah, I think there’s something better. What’s something that trots around and does whatever it wants?
A cat!
Nick: Benji would be happy to be a cat. He loves cats. He’s got his cat at home, she’s like 17 years old and loves her to bits. Benji’s a cat. What about the others? Hmm… I reckon Chris would be like a little puppy, a little dog. Like a poodle cross something eh, because he’s got real curly hair and is a happy little dude.
Eric: Yeah, he’s happy being himself.
Nick: I always think of Jayden as a shark or something, eh. He brings in the pain when he needs to.
Eric: Yeah, I’d say that Jayden is definitely the most honest in terms of criticism and we value it.
Nick: I reckon Eric is a lizard, just because.
Eric: I was about to call us lizards because when we’re charged up, we will just do everything, but we definitely need that time to sit in the sun and do nothing.
It’s funny to hear how different you’d be if you were animals.
If you guys had to relocate as a band, where would you go and why?
Eric: Ah, the UK. We’ve been thinking about that for quite a while now, just because life is very similar to here. The roads, the culture…I think there’s a couple “isms” that would transfer over going over there, so you wouldn’t be like a complete alien.
Nick: Yeah, true. Also, there’s a lot more people there. A lot more people to come to shows. Australia would be the other option. That would sort of be us, but bigger again.
Eric: I’ve definitely romanticised living in Europe and meeting all these foreign people.
Nick: There’s a lot of big names over there, compared to here.
Recently, you released your latest track, King of the Reef, what was the inspiration behind that song?
Nick: Benji has a little bit of a story behind that. The title, King of the Reef, that’s a title that one of our friends in the Coromandel has just from being the best surfer at the reef, so he’s the King of the Reef. It’s written about some of the stuff that those people get up to, what you do when you’re living down there.
Eric: Sort of like the beach bum lifestyle.
Nick: Bit of an ode to the beach bum, eh.
Eric: Where Benji is working is Luke’s Kitchen (apparently a pretty amazing place! Hit it up if you go to the Coromandel) and they take in a lot of beachy dudes and dudettes. That was sort of like the culture and the aura of the people around him and it encapsulated into a very surf-y and rock-y song. I think it paired very well with the riff.
Nick: We made the riff and we were like, “damn, this is a surf-rock song.”
When I heard that the first time, I was like “yeah, this is definitely a surf-rock, Flaxxies song.” In the review, I wrote that it seemed so you guys, it fits so well.
Have you got any merch coming out at all?
Nick: I think the step in our next couple of things to move onto is we’re going to sort out a bit of that to go around throughout the year, just when we’re playing shows and stuff.
Eric: We’re just milling around with designs mostly. It’s a bit hard, you know.
Nick: Settling on a couple of things, trying to encapsulate what everyone wants. We’re in very early stages, but I reckon that’s something that is coming pretty soon.
Eric: Yeah, deciding on something you’re happy to see other people wear and if you saw it on the street, you’d be like “that’s my band and that’s what my band represents” that kind of thing. We don’t want to just slap our name on a t-shirt and sell them for $40 a piece, we want to put in a bit more effort and I think we’re really into wearing our hearts on our sleeves and just sort of putting pride into our work in the ways we can.
Nick: If you’re going to do it, do it properly.
Would you go back and revamp the EP in any way, if you could?
Eric: Definitely, just because there tracks on there that are not cohesive.
Nick: Yeah, exactly. They didn’t really come out as that.
Eric: That’s not to say they shouldn’t have been released, it’s just to say that it wasn’t their time. Albums and EPs should be cohesive to a sound or a feeling.
Nick: Absolutely, yeah. It’s a bit of a jarring thing. It was pretty much what we had coming out of High School. We were like, “we need to put something out online.”
I found out about you through your song, Take Me Home, I’d really like to know what that song is about if there’s a meaning behind that one, also.
Nick: That’s Benji’s little love song. He was in a bit of a soft spot when he wrote that song.
Eric: About a Sheila that he was very keen on and she was not reciprocating. That was his journey of acceptance. That would be the best way to say it.
Poor Benji, I feel bad for him now!
Nick: Get him to do a full three page write-up for you on it. I’m sure he will!
I know that it’s off the cards at this stage, however, will you come and play in Christchurch at any point, or would you like to?
Eric: We’re keen to get down.
Nick: We’re making plans for Dunedin and stuff at the moment, so obviously once we can do that, we’re pretty keen at looking to play Christchurch as well, logistics-wise.
Eric: Yeah, so keen to see the South Island.
Nick: I’ve got family in Christchurch, so we can head down there pretty easily.
Well, I’ve got a couple more questions… Have you got any dream places you’d like to play? Obviously, you mentioned about Europe, are there any venues or festivals you haven’t played that you’d like to play?
Eric: We’ve had this thing that we’ve talked about a lot, have you seen Coldplay play live in São Paulo, Brazil?
No, but I’ve heard how good it is.
Eric: It’s like this big YouTube video and Chris Martin is sort of lying down and it’s Fix You and there’s all of this confetti, then he runs up this huge stage that sticks out in the middle and he runs all the way up and we were thinking about that, if you were playing in São Paulo on this sold out football stadium [we’d love that]. We were just saying that if we sold out there and Madison Square Garden, that’s definitely another one. If you’ve played at Madison Square, you’ve made it.
Nick: Yeah, that São Paulo one is definitely a dream. It’s just the biggest one, heaps of people. It would be crazy. That’s an end goal.
That would be crazy! Imagine if you made it to that point and you look back on this interview in years to come and it actually happened.
What’s a random fact about each of you that your fans should know about you?
Eric: There is no ‘the’ at the start of Flaxxies. We’re not THE Flaxxies. We are just Flaxxies. That is a very important piece of knowledge to us.
Nick: This is Eric’s pet peeve and mine a little bit.
Eric: We sort of scrunch our noses when people call us The Flaxxies. Don’t like that.
It doesn’t sound right!
Nick: Being used to it being one way and then hearing it the other way is very jarring.
What are some funny facts that we can share? Benji hasn’t washed his hair in six months.
Eric: I’d say that would be over a year.
Nick: He goes in the sea everyday.
Eric: He washes it with water and salt, he doesn’t just leave it.
Nick: Chris and Benji are pretty hearty op-shoppers. They’re probably some of the biggest veterans.
Eric: We love our op-shops.
Nick: We also have this thing where we say someone’s name and then when we get their attention and shout “sucks!”, so I’ll go “Eric” and he’ll look at me and I’ll go “sucks!”
Eric: If we have people around us that don’t know us, we like, call out to each other and so, Nick will be like “Eric” and I’ll go “nah…”
Nick: You can’t fall for the sucks. So, when people don’t know us and they overhear us, they’re like “these guys hate each other.”
Eric: Benji will yell out from above where we are and shout “Nick!” and you’ll just hear this “F*CK YOU!”
Nick: Nobody responds to their name anymore. That’s probably the biggest quirk of our weird little relationship. It’s a lot of weird sh*t like that. Another thing you should know about our band is that we always pay our taxes. Always.
I will make sure I include that.
Eric: Flaxxies will not be done for tax fraud. You can put this right at the top.
Welcome to the Gig x Flaxxies: Flaxxies are not Fraudsters.
Eric: That’s the fine print at the start. Another thing is, we have a lot of love for each other. Definitely love and enjoy spending time together. I think most of our band is just us being mates and just enjoying doing things together.
Nick: I feel like that’s a lot of what it is. It really comes across, as well.
Eric: That would be our only advice to young bands. Spend time with your bandmates and make sure they’re actually your friends. The closer you are with someone, the better you can come together and discuss things creatively. When you’re doing something creative based, you need to have that comfort with each other.
Nick: You’ve got to understand each other and it’s hard to do stuff with strangers.
I think even though you guys are younger, you have a lot more wisdom and knowledge than people I actually know that are older than you guys.
Have you got anything else you want to add before I leave you to your night?
Eric: Shoutout to all of the musicians that are going through this whole red light system. I know it’s really hard. Keep on going, there are a lot of people who are going through it with you, you’re not alone.
Nick: When you’re going through hell, just keep going. That’s a King Krule quote there for you. Keep trucking on. Now is the worst time to give up. Don’t give up. Now is the time they want you to give up.
Eric: Don’t do it.
Nick: I guess that’s our summative wisdom, keep going don’t give up.
Love it, that’s the best advice that you could give I reckon. Awesome.
Thank you so much for letting me interview you guys!
Nick: Thank you for wanting to talk to us!
Hopefully see you down South sometime soon.
Nick: It’s just a case of when.
Eric: Thanks for having us! See ya later!
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You can follow along with Flaxxies at the below links - make sure that you do go and check out what they are up to. They are exceptionally talented and working hard to make their mark on the world! Very grateful for their kindness and words of wisdom.
Flaxxies -
Spotify
Instagram
Facebook
YouTube
Flaxxies Feature Friday
King of the Reef Review
Welcome to the Gig Presents… A More-ish, Funky Interview with SOJØURN!
Oosh - producing awesome music, fun vibes and serving up great fashion fits, what more could you ask for?! All photos provided by SOJØURN.
The band consists of Tony Baker (bass), Elias Giles (keys), James Finlay (lead guitar, backing vocals), Isaac Hunter (lead vocals, guitar), Jim Bokma (drums) and Jacob O’Brien (saxophone, backing vocals) - AKA, the funniest people I’ve interviewed thus far. My face wouldn’t stop hurting from smiling afterwards.
With their new single More on the horizon, due for release at midnight this Friday, 29th October, I sat down with 5/6 of the guys from SOJØURN (Elias, James, Isaac, Tony and Jacob) for a chat and let me tell you, it was the most hilarious interview and the most fun I’ve had in a long time. Not only do these guys create insane music, they keep you laughing the entire time you’re chatting with them and their newest song is super dreamy and really chilled to listen to with the promise of More great things on the way.
As I was unable to screen record this interview and have still getting familiar with each voice, this write-up will be a little different, so you will still see all the answers from the band, however, as there were quite a few of us, you will see their answers just listed as SØ instead of their names typed beside each answer. Apologies for this.
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Hello!
SØ:
-collective hellos-
How’s everyone been?
SØ:
- Alright, alright!
- Bit over the level three, to be honest. I was kind of hoping we were going to go into level two.
- There’s a virus going around or something, what — what’s going on?
So, this is just a casual chat, whatever springs to mind, just say it!
SØ:
- Unreal.
I do have a few questions for you all, though. Your latest song, Saturday Sipping was released in February this year, wasn’t it?
SØ:
- Yup, correct. There were four Saturdays that month.
- That’s what that was about.
- How do you know that?
How was that received by the audience when it was released?
SØ:
- I think everyone that we know liked it. I don’t know what the plays are on it, but I think it did pretty well! It’s always gone off live and so, we just tried to capture what we do live and stick it down on tape.
- Sometimes, it’s also hard to know what the audience thinks because they’re not just going to say, “oh, it wasn’t that good” like, for someone to say that to you, after they hear your song, it’s super rare.
- Yeah, if they don’t like it, they’re probably not going to be honest.
You’ve also got the people who are honest and who do love it and mean it when they tell you that. So, that’s a good thing. You said that goes off really well live, have you noticed any other top songs that go off, too?
SØ:
- Yeah, some of the songs that we are releasing in this EP, some of the big, sort of, bangers that our audience has been waiting for. More is one of those, which is one of our singles. [Insert unreleased song title here] is another single that I think we’re going to release?
- Yeah, we will.
- We played that one on the main stage at Bay Dreams, that’s how it made it into our cut down set. All the stuff on our EP, we’ve played live, except for one song.
- At the moment, I think that our most successful songs are the two that we released together on Summer Tape, so that’s Take a Drive and… Mind has gone blank. What’s the other one?
- Still a Mess.
- When we played them at our last gig which was in Mangawhai, which was a sold out show, which is our hometown also, for me, that was one of the biggest moments in our music career. Everyone knew the lyrics and to have that many people singing all the lyrics was a major deal for us as a band as well. Those are definitely our most successful songs.
They’re such great songs, as well. I can see how they would go off live at gigs. I’ve heard from so many bands that it is so surprising when people know the lyrics to their songs! Unbelievable.
SØ:
- I only know the lyrics to my all-time favourite songs. I don’t even know all the lyrics to all the songs that we do and I hear them all so often!
- You get that with your favourite songs, you start singing along to them before you learn the lyrics and then you just sing your own made up lyrics forever.
- Pretty much eh. Making up words as you go.
Then you realise two years down the line, hold up, I’ve been singing the wrong lyrics this whole entire time!
SØ:
- It’s all about what a song means to you.
So, you were going to play at the YOT Club in Raglan and that got rescheduled, didn’t it?
SØ:
- Super gutted about that. YOT Club in Raglan, we’ve been trying to get in there for a couple years now, we finally got the go ahead and we had it sorted and yeah.
- We’ve rescheduled that for [a date over summer which is unreleased at this stage]. That’s what it says on my calendar.
Gives you something to look forward to, as long as everyone is out of lockdown, eh? What are you guys doing with your time now that you can’t do gigs and properly record with CJ at the moment?
SØ:
- We were pretty lucky to get all that recorded in that time, really. Now, at the moment, all that we would have been doing would be just tightening our practises up and just smashing some gigs out. We’re really stoked to have that already recorded [the EP] and ready to send out.
- Although now, with level three, we can’t practise anymore, which sucks. Yeah, too risky.
- Don’t want to be known as the super spreader.
You mentioned about a new EP! Is that coming out next year, is it? When are you thinking that is going to drop?
SØ:
- Ooh, can we say?
- Yeah, we’ve got rough dates!
- [Release date estimate]
- We have a single coming out at the end of this month that’s from the EP and then another single coming out in [unreleased date] next year, which is also from the EP. Then, the EP will come out not long after that.
- It gives us some good time to build some content around the EP and get some videos done and more artwork, I guess.
- Building a whole image on the EP really, eh.
- Merch as well. We’re thinking about doing some more merch! Another merch drop with the EP.
- Ashlea, I’ve got a question for you. If you were to buy merch, what would you buy? Would you buy a t-shirt? A hat? What do you think is a good merch idea?
Ah, God. As someone who has a lot of merch, most of it is t-shirts. I’m wearing a Mild Orange t-shirt right now.
SØ:
- That’s what they call me, by the way. Mild Orange! [Elias]
- Why do they call you that, bro?
- Because I’m cool, man.
That’s brilliant! If you do like a Mako Road thing, do the bucket hats. They’ll go off really well. What would you guys like to release as merch? Anything out of the ordinary?
SØ:
- Hoodies. Hoodies are always my favourite, hoodies are always a go.
- I’m going to say a craft beer.
- We’re thinking about doing lighters. Lighters with the SOJØURN logo on it.
- Beer cosies.
- Stickers. Stickers are mean. Everyone likes stickers.
- We were going to do Hawaiians. Like, the shirt.
- That would be loose.
You’ve got some pretty rad ideas.
SØ:
- Yeah, we just need shows to sell them at.
You could also open up a webstore and that would get a lot of customers, too.
SØ:
- Yeah, not like the gigs, but yeah. Maybe if we do make our own craft beer line, we can start pumping it out.
- We should do a vape juice!
- What’s the taste of SOJØURN?
[At this point, there were so many random tastes being thrown around, I couldn’t keep up]
Would you ever do a collab with the Dolphin Friendly boys?
SØ:
- That would be unreal.
- Being at different ends of the country, that makes it really hard to tee up times where we’d all be able to do it. A lot of people to tie down. It’s hard enough trying to get our own band in one spot, let alone two. That would be sick. I’d love to do something like that.
- When we were recording the new EP, the guy who recorded it with us is CJ from Mako Road, he’s recorded Dolphin Friendly, as well, so we may be able to get in through that.
That would be pretty sick. You guys with Dolph would be awesome, or even a Mako Road collab, that would be epic as well.
SØ:
- Even the idea of split EPs, split albums is quite cool. Not even collabing on tracks, just as a joint release, that’s another option that would work
- A side and B side.
You guys have got great ideas! I need to get you on Welcome to the Gig more.
SØ:
- Our brainstorming has just come to life.
- We’ve been locked up too long, that’s why!
The epic artwork for More, out 12am on Friday, 29th October! Do you feel like you’re being watched?
What are you most looking forward to when you come out of lockdown? Apart from obviously playing gigs. Anything in particular you’re looking forward to?
SØ:
- Going to the festivals.
- I’ve just recently started writing again and found some creative energy starting to be built up again. I’m looking forward to bringing those to the band and hacking them out. Building an album, maybe. That would be cool eh.
That was actually going to be one of my questions, if you guys were going to release an album eventually, that kind of covers that off.
SØ:
- This EP is six tracks, so it’s heading towards an album.
- When we do anything again, we will definitely work with CJ. We’ve had an amazing time working with him and all our best studio experience has been with CJ and the fact that we also recorded in our own band room… We didn’t have to go far. We could stay overnight there and work as late as we possibly wanted. It was really comfortable for us. The whole process was a lot nicer, so we’ll definitely be doing that again for the album. CJ soundproofed our band room and turned it into a studio. He set up his desk and computer and away we went.
- We had a gazebo sitting in a garage.
- The garage is kind of like our band room, it’s been turned into a bedroom, which has been turned into a band room. It’s big and it’s sort of like - since it’s isolated, we can just hang out there and we play late into the night. The neighbours don’t mind too much.
- We haven’t had a complaint.
- That we know of.
- The last songs that we recorded in the [shared] studio, we always felt like there was a pressure behind us to get it done by a certain day, it needs to be done by this time… You know? [Also] the long drive, you know, for Elias’ stuff, we were recording in Auckland and it would take two hours to drive there and back, finding accommodation and it creates this pressure.
You have got to have the classic Europcar van photo!
Regarding the new EP, has the title been released yet, or do we have to wait until next year?
SØ:
-collective I don’t knows-
- We’re allowed to, I think. The EP will be called [insert EP name here], which is the title of one of the tracks on the EP.
That is super cool, I love it!
SØ:
- The EP name does summarize what the EP is about, it’s getting pretty out there in a good way.
- I would say, based off the song, it’s experimental. We kind of experimented with different things and we wanted it to be kind of like, we want to take you on a trip with our different sounds and that’s pretty much what [EP name] is.
- The SOJØURN trip.
- There are no drugs involved.
- Yeah, sober.
- Even though it’s an experiment and we are pushing our boundaries, we are still staying true to SOJØURN’s sound.
- I think it’s a body of work that does really reflect the sound we have the most fun playing and if we’re just jamming off the cuff, it’s the kind of sound we would be jamming with, playing around with. Psychedelic and groovy, they’d be all that.
- We’re all really proud of it. I can’t speak for everyone, but it’s probably our best release.
- 100%.
- Although Jacob, they do say pride cometh before the fall.
- Nah, we’re proud as f*ck.
You’ve got to be proud of what you put out there, eh. It’s really good to hear you’re proud of it.
SØ:
- Yeah, we’re 100% confident around the release and around the fact that people are going to love it. There have been projects in the past where they’ve been so rough you’re not confident it’s your best work.
- That’s the worst feeling.
- You never want to release something and then have second thoughts after it’s already done, because then… What can you do? It’s just like that forever. That’s what I was thinking when I was doing my tracks. I know that I won’t be able to change it, so I better get it right.
Nah, that is awesome! I’m so excited to hear this new EP of yours, it’s going to be epic. Hopefully once the covid situation calms down, you guys can go on tour and I may be able to fly up to where you will be and see you!
SØ:
- No, we’re going to fly down!
- We’ll come down to Christchurch.
Oh mean! Was it last year, you guys came down here and played with The Hootz?
SØ:
- Yeah, we did.
- At Wunderbar.
- About this time last year for Spring Send.
- Yeah, that was last year and that was also in level two. That was a crazy experience as well because people had to be seated at the gig.
- I’m super confident we could have easily sold out our Christchurch gig with the amount of people that were at the bar but couldn’t get into the venue next door. It was guttering to see. It was a blast also, I loved that South Island trip.
- Everyone started standing up and we nearly got kicked off stage by the bar managers because everyone was standing up.
- Unfortunately, we have a song called Stand Up, where we tell everyone to stand up.
- The management didn’t like that! It was a coincidence, we wrote it before the plague, we didn’t know that it was going to be trouble.
The plague! That’s pretty much what it feels like. So, you guys almost got kicked out of your own gig because of that!
SØ:
- We finished the song and they cut our sound completely and the manager came up and talked to us and was like “if that happens again…”
- We need level one back.
Did you have any Summer festivals coming up? I saw that Bay Dreams has been moved to 2023.
SØ:
- Yeah, we’ve had Bay of Islands Wine and Food Festival canceled on us, YOT Club, Raglan… Auckland.
- We had to cancel a whole tour.
- We’re still going ahead in Taranaki in late December.
- Oh yes! The Festival of Lights.
- I don’t think we had many festivals lined up for this Summer. I think there was a possibility of Bay Dreams on the second release.
- It won’t happen any more.
- Our main goal for the end of this year and the start of next year was the whole EP release and doing our own shows. We wanted to hit all the little venues.
The boys playing at Soundsplash, Raglan in January 2021.
Next year, eh. That would be really good, hopefully. You did Bay Dreams and Soundsplash this year.
SØ:
- Yeah, main stage at Bay Dreams and that was an unreal experience. Biggest stage we’ve played on! Then, Soundsplash - can’t remember what that stage was called, that was fun too.
- Top stage.
- Top stage! That’s what it was.
- We also played at Wingman on Great Barrier Island, as well.
- That was a cool one.
How do you guys manage as there are six of you in the band! How does that work when you’re on stage? You can be thrown on this tiny stage and then there are six of you!
SØ:
- Sometimes James gets close to knocking my keyboard over. One time he knocked it and it was almost at the edge of the stand and it’d have been a disaster if he knocked it completely over. I would probably think it was funny, but it would ruin the gig.
- Lots of bass heads in the face, just getting deafened by the cymbals, it’s what being on a small stage is like.
- Tripping all over cables and knocking them out…
- Being careful where you stand, really.
- You can pull it off though eh, jamming out and looking like you’re dancing all over the place, but your feet are in the same spot the whole time. We don’t even think about it now.
- I think at a few of our shows, there were three of us on the stage and three of us on the ground, we’ve done that before.
Bit of a balancing act there by the sounds of it! So, if you had to claim an album as your own that already exists, what album would you claim and why?
SØ:
- As a band? If SOJØURN had to recreate an album? Okay.
- As in we literally own it, or released it as our own?
Owned it/released it.
SØ:
- Faaaar, it’s not like we bought The Beatles back catalogue.
- My album would be Astroworld by Travis Scott and my reason being is because it has my favourite musical engineer behind it, Mike Dean, who I really look up to when producing music, yeah some of my favourite tracks are of [his producing], so I look to those as reference points. Yeah, that’s one of the top ones for me. I would also like to say that for our SOJØURN EP, I used Stadium Arcadian by Red Hot Chilli Peppers for the drums and that’s probably way up there as well, so that was a great reference point for how I came to CJ, how I wanted the drums to particularly sound.
- I was going to say… Bob Marley and The Whalers. I don’t know exactly which album but I find them pretty cool. I like The Specials first album.
- What about the Pixies album?!
- Yeah, yeah. That’s pretty high up on the list! Bob Marley, Pixies, you know… Bob Marley is tried and tested. He was so big in New Zealand, such a legend. It resonates more with the Kiwi soul.
- Uncle Bob.
- That’s a really good question.
- There’s this band called The Frightnrs who are a New York band who are a part of Daptone Records. They do analogue recordings and they get this old, authentic-sound. Nothing More to Say is the only album by The Frightnrs and they released it while their singer had leukaemia and he passed away just after they recorded it and it’s real beautiful and he’s got this super high voice when he sings. That’s what I sort of like to cry happy tears to.
That sounds amazing.
SØ:
- Did I buy you time, Isaac?!
- Uh. Yeah… I would like… Bays by Fat Freddy’s [Drop]. Freddy’s is f*cking ultimate. Or, Continuum by John Mayer. Two different genres, two different sounds. This EP, I drew a lot of inspiration for writing from the up and coming Kiwi talent, eh. Bands like Mako Road, Masaya, Muroki - some of his grooves are crazy! Dolphin Friendly, very similar inspiration from their older releases and yeah. Any of those guys.
- They’re such good people.
This might be a difficult one to answer, but it might not be at the same time… What’s the toughest struggle that you’ve had as a band?
SØ:
- Covid.
- Nothing really eh, we’re pretty cruisy. Maybe personality clashes, but we just sort it out. We’ve got some big personalities and some big differences in ideas, but we always massage them out.
- I agree with that.
- Being at the top of the country, like, that makes it harder on touring. You’d want to be in Wellington or Taupo, somewhere like that.
- We were talking about that, actually.
- Apart from Auckland. Closer to the main hub.
- Apart from that, we’re just killing it!
- I’d also say like, different lifestyles and different commitments that we have in our lives. I think that would be with any band, but I think with having six people and us doing different musical things or us playing sports or us with our different types of jobs, it’s hard to bring us together. We really have to make time to commit to the band, which is what we want to do.
- Everyone steps up, everyone does it. If the only time we can do it is a certain time or a certain week, we make it work.
There are some positives that come out of the toughness that you face from time-to-time.
SØ:
- Yeah, always.
To go along with that question, what is the proudest moment that you’ve had within the band?
SØ:
- Bay Dreams.
- Mine would probably be everyone singing the lyrics at our show. People that know your songs and put time and effort into listening and learning the lyrics. It kind of shows truth that they enjoy the song, but it’s real difficult to learn the lyrics of a song that you don’t like, you know what I mean? That for me has a real deep meaning, that was definitely the greatest feeling I’ve had with the band so far.
- This upcoming EP for me as well, it just sounds so slick, real proud of that.
You’ll be eagerly anticipating the EP drop!
SØ:
- If I could drop it tomorrow, I would.
Can you please? Please just do it?
This is a random one, if you guys could go forward to the future or go back to a previous year in your life, what would you choose to do?
SØ:
- Do we get old in the future, or can we be young? Do we get to go back?
You can Benjamin Button if you want to! Like, age backwards… There’s no rules in this game.
SØ:
- We can go back and we can go forward again? As a band, we could all travel back and see Bob Marley or something and come back!
- That would be a mean weekend.
- He played Western Springs in 1970-something.
- I’d just see mean gigs and just go on excursions if I had that power.
- I’d go forward 500 years to see if the world still exists and then come back.
- Oh, but what if it doesn’t exist and you obliterate into nothing?
- Oh, bugger.
- -Screaming- MY INSIDES!
- I wish I traveled Europe before covid. That was definitely my regret, yeah I don’t know. I don’t think I’d like to go to the future, I’d always like to go back in the past.
Reggae, soul, rock, surf - what more could we possibly ask for?
Yeah, I think the past would be a lot more fun. You could almost rectify any mistakes you’ve made, as well, if you went back to the past.
SØ:
- I was going to say, I would go back and be my younger self. Music for me through High School was always something really fun, never something I tried to hone in on, it was more like d*cking around and not doing much, so I would have told myself to work at it a bit more. Learn more when I was younger.
- I have changed my mind, I’d go back in time and give myself a hiding. That is the official answer, lock it in.
- Sort your sh*t out.
God, you guys are entertaining. Have you guys got anything else you’d like to add, serious or not serious?
SØ:
- We’re all like, back bench comedians, we can’t really hold a conversation, but we will just come in with the one liners. If you run out of questions, we might just squirm.
- The More single is out on Friday, 29th October.
- Save the date!
- There will be a pre-save link for all streaming platforms for Spotify, Apple Music for it. [Links at the end of the interview]
- Keep supporting the SOJØURN.
Your friend, Tony has just joined the chat!
SØ:
- He’s not our friend! We’ll be here another hour.
This has just been such a classic interview.
SØ:
- Thank you for your interest in our music, Ashlea.
No worries! Thank you guys for being so creative and putting out such amazing music. It’s really cool to see your passions.
SØ:
- We covered a lot of ground.
- I was just talking to someone about the uncertainty of trying to plan shows and I’ve kind of just pulled together maybe 6 or 8 dates over summer, we’re obviously just going to sit and wait, see what happens with all this covid sh*t. In the mean time, we’ve got a couple real banging releases to throw out there into the universe, that’s pretty exciting, you know?
I’ve heard all about them! Can’t wait. Will definitely have to do some reviews once they drop!
SØ:
- You’ll have to get up here for one of those North Island shows.
- We told her we’d go down to her.
- Yeah, we love Christchurch! We’re pretty keen to get back down there. Maybe in Autumn - March/April we’ll try and get down there and throw some bangers out there.
100%. You guys are ALWAYS welcome in Christchurch and hopefully there will be some normality throughout the country very soon.
SØ:
- [With the new music] Kit from Melbourne is keeping us in line. We’ve done it all on our own up until this point, now we’re working with Meow and working with a bit of agency and it’s quite exciting and Kit has done a lot of stuff with Mako and I think he may have done There’s a Tuesday and The Butlers before, as well. I think his biggest client was the Pixies, that’s not too bad as a starting point.
Amazing! Please keep up the amazing work! Thank you for your time - I appreciate it, even though you’re in lockdown, I’m sure you have other things to do.
SØ:
- I can only speak for myself, but I don’t.
- I’ll probably just sit here long after the interview is finished.
- If you exit the zoom Ashlea, we’re probably just going to stay on here!
Have a good night guys and again, thank you!
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An incredibly big thank you to Isaac, Jim, Tony, Elias and Jacob for your time during the most entertaining interview - my face hurt so much from laughing and smiling, even for about an hour after it had ended. Make sure to keep your ears to the sky for SOJØURN’s new EP, dropping sometime early next year and go on and pre-save More which comes out THIS Friday. I’ve heard the track and it is definitely my favourite song of theirs thus far. A fantastic taste of what is to come.
A little bit of background on the track according to Isaac: “This song is about the closing stage of a relationship when you can feel someone slipping away. It’s the perspective of feeling invisible to the other person and blaming yourself for the relationship ending.”
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Pre-Save More here and find SOJØURN at the below links -
Spotify
Instagram
Facebook
YouTube
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At the moment, I do have availability to do interviews, reviews, features etc. for New Zealand musicians - check out the blog for what I have done in the past. You can send me a message on Facebook, Instagram or send an email. Right now, I don’t have the capacity to do international features - please keep an eye on the social pages as this could change very shortly.