Name: Kind Hearted Thieves
Interviewee: Jay Ra
Nationality: British
Recent release: Kind Hearted Thieves team up with drummer Dave Abbruzzese (Pearl Jam, Peter Cornell) and Jeff Nolan (Scott Weiland, Ginger Baker) for their new songle “Dark Petal.” Their full debut album Love & Other Curses is out via Ramsden.

[Read our Dave Abruzzese interview]

If you enjoyed this Kind Hearted Thieves interview and would like to find out more about their work and current projects, visit the band's official website. They are also on Instagram, and Facebook.



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?  

To be perfectly honest I have no idea. I have just always been driven to create things. I never really found the correct outlet until I started writing songs.

I tend to read a lot so I think my inspiration comes from a variety of places but I tend to not specifically try to force anything when I am writing stuff. I think it just seeps out from things I learn about and read.

For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

It is almost 100% chance based for me.

I keep a notes folder on my phone so when a cool line appears I sketch them down. Sometimes I allow myself to expand on the line, depending on where I am when it appears. When I come to write a song I usually find something interesting when playing guitar which I try to expand into almost a full structure. Once I have that then I play with lyric ideas and sometimes dip into my notes folder if I feel like I am getting stuck.

I very rarely have a finished product in my mind when I get started. I like to have paint on the page before I start seeing any end result.

Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?

I like to allow things to just evolve naturally. So I play guitar a lot which tends to lead to finding something that I think could work as a song. Once I have that then I am motivated to get it finished.

I have tried setting specific times to sit and write but I tend to feel stuck really quickly in those situations. I am a big advocate for avoiding getting stuck. I try to not stop once I get going. So if I hit a part that I am struggling with I will just write anything down for now with the intention of going back and tidying it up afterwards.

Which quite often I just forget to do haha.

Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

It’s all about motivation for me. If I am not in the mood then I just don’t do it. I have to be conscious of this though. Now I need to be writing and playing as we need new music.

If I notice I haven’t really been interested for a while then I will watch some things that fire me up. Documentaries like Bob Dylan No Direction Home, PJ20 (Pearl Jam) and HYPE!. They tend to fire me up.

What do you start with? How difficult is that first line of text, the first note?

Almost always with the music. I find the music naturally tells me a melody for the vocal. Once I have the structure I like to just make noise till I find the melody.

Lyrics are almost always last. As I am playing around certain lines will fall out and I write them down then I piece them together. It’s like stream of consciousness writing but with music.

But the bucket of thoughts needs to be pretty full for decent stuff to fall out I think. So I spend a lot of time reading and learning new stuff.

What makes lyrics good in your opinion? What are your own ambitions and challenges in this regard?

I think it’s all about balance. In my mind there are a few types of lyric and you need to have a reasonable amount of each in a song for it to be interesting. I could talk about this for days as I am a complete nerd, so I have sub classes of categories haha. But just a few would be cliche lines, metaphorical lines and descriptive lines. You need a bit of all of these to make something work.

It’s interesting though because you are always working from your own barometer of what is good, but then someone hears the music and says different things anyway. For example, I felt like “Dark Petal” from our album needed another pass because it had too many cliche lines in. But then people heard it in it’s earlier stages and said it was their favourite. So I left it as it was, but I would definitely have kept working on it if it was just my own opinion.



One thing I do like to do with lines is to try and come up with a different way to say the same thing. So with a cliche line like “On your high horse” I changed it to “Your horse may be high, but it’s tainted and lame,” from our song “Nevermoor.”



Playing around with cliches rather than being blatant with them. Whenever I have been asked to help someone with songwriting that is almost always my first suggestion. Try saying the same thing but differently.

To quote a question by the great Bruce Duffie: When you come up with a musical idea, have you created the idea or have you discovered the idea?

Both. I think you have to have an baseline ability first. So I have had loads of “ideas” that I am just incapable of creating.

For example, I am learning to draw at the moment and I have had so many cool ideas for pictures but I am nowhere near the ability level to create them.

For me though, because I like to play rather than work I think they write themselves. Whether that’s a higher consciousness writing though me or just happenstance I don’t know, but I definitely don’t feel like I own the songs I write.

From your experience, are there things you're doing differently than most or many other artists when it comes to writing music?

I really don’t know. I don’t know many songwriters so I don’t get chance to ask people really.

I am really interested in the process though so I watch a lot of youtube about it. Not many oft hem suggest just wingin it as an option but I imagine that wouldn’t make a great clickable video haha

Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?

It’s all about flow for sure. I try to let the songs go where they want to go and keep any emotional attachment out of it. It’s easier said than done though and sometimes if I really like something that doesn’t fit I will save it for something later.

It’s easier as I write on my own. I think having emotional attachment to your ideas would be a lot harder to fight if you were writing in a group as you would be dealing with Ego too.

Once a piece is finished, how important is it for you to let it lie and evaluate it later on? How much improvement and refinement do you personally allow until you're satisfied with a piece? What does this process look like in practise?

My thoughts are I will never be content. Both in life and with a song haha. So I think I have a gauge for when something is finished enough. You never truly finish something.

Because we are completely independent I have a lot of different sides to my job. This means we are limited by time so I don’t have the luxury of sitting on something for years. I think that helps though. Although, if something really isn’t good enough I just drop it and move on.

What's your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally? How involved do you get in this?

I think a song has to hold up on it’s own first. No amount of production will fix a crap song. I think I read that Mumford and Sons do the campfire test. So playing the song around the campfire with just a guitar. If it still works then it’s a winner.

For the finished song though I would say, certainly production, is majorly important. I am very involved in the orchestration and composition bit. The song is still evolving in the studio so I like to be there to guide it along. Once it get’s into the actual mixing and scientific stuff I am out of there like a robbers dog haha.

After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Can you relate to this – and how do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?

I am currently being assessed for ADHD so moving on to the next shiny thing is ideal for me. It’s finishing a job I struggle with.

So with this album for example I was already writing and thinking about the next one when we were half way through recording.

I am effectively the manager, PR agent, booking agent and all inbetween for KHT so I don’t think I have time to experience creative emptiness.