Part 1

Name: Oh My Sun
Members: Carmody (vocals, backing vocals), Tal Janes (guitars, piano, synths, vocals, additional engineering, drum programming)
Nationality: British
Current release: Oh My Sun's album Apocalypse Baby is out March 7th 2025 via Bridge The Gap.
Recommendation for London:
Carmody: Tal recently took me to a falafel place called ‘Pockets’ in East London to celebrate our first release - ‘Five Pieces’. It was the best falafel I’ve ever tasted and I seek out falafel in every country I visit - so I’d highly recommend it!
Tal: I absolutely second going to ‘Pockets’. I love Persian food and a spot I went to recently which I really enjoyed was Cafe Persia in Golders Green.

If you enjoyed this Oh My Sun interview and would like to know more about the band and their music, visit them on Instagram, and bandcamp.
 


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?

Carmody: Many of our songs have their roots in ideas we are passionate about - like the environment or the power of dreams. We’re both interested in the meditative nature of cold water swimming and this inspired the track ‘Five Pieces’.

We also wanted the songs to work with just vocals and guitar so wrote most of them like this, initially without any production, the ‘will they work as songs round the campfire, totally stripped back, test’.

So we were inspired by 70s songwriters who really honed in on the writing of the song and focused in on melody and lyrics.
 
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'?

Tal: Whilst writing in my studio, I realised the ability to jump on different instruments can help perspective and creativity. For our song ‘After All’ I came up with a guitar part and then decided to loop it and played drums whilst we wrote. I think it gets you thinking in a different way, and this one ended up more about rhythm for sure. So in terms of prep, I think having some different toys to play with is fun.

My own personal preparation is more about getting excited and feeling inspired, so I might learn some songs which could then subconsciously inform the process. For ‘Dreams’ we wrote to a drum loop I made on a tr-8 drum machine and made a demo of it to document. I came up with the bassline on a fretless acoustic at the end too which sort of helped me at least picture how the song would build.

The same with ‘All I Can Do’ we made a demo with a drum part and bass as well as the guitar. The vocals can choose to bounce off the drums or bass so having that in the writing stage can be an option and create variety.



Most of the other songs were just voice notes, though, with guitar.

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?

Carmody: I think Tal and I both find cycling or walking in nature helpful, mainly for working through parts of the song that don’t feel quite right. I’m also a big poetry fan and love poets such as Mary Oliver, Ellen Bass and Rebecca Elson, they all have unique and beautiful perspectives on the world, and our existence, their words greatly influence my writing.

In coffee, we differ, I find it a fuel for my creativity but Tal isn’t into caffeine. So he miraculously powers through without any stimulants, although we both have a love of dark chocolate!

For your latest release, what did you start with? If there were conceptual considerations, what were they?

Tal: From my perspective, I had just done a load of creating remotely as we were coming out of lockdowns in 2022 and I had a strong sense that I wanted to make music in a room with no computers or production element, just focusing on the songs themselves.

Mine and Carmody’s collaboration was unplanned, really, and we just started writing and realised we had something. I think I was aware that she had just released an album and I felt like it could be a space for her to try something different outside of the world she’d built for her artist project.

For myself, I hadn’t really focused on a project where I could explore my songwriting, having been quite heavily into jazz for the preceding years, I was trying to find my way back into my earlier influences of Nick Drake, John Martyn, Joni Mitchell, Fleetwood Mac and more recently Alabama Shakes, Adrianne Lenker and an old but new obsession for The Beatles after seeing the Get Back documentary - this definitely rekindled some creativity and joy in me for making music.



Tell me a bit about the way the new material developed and gradually took its final form, please.

Tal: So over the course of about 8 months we met up either at mine or Carmody’s studio whenever we could to write. We hadn’t really set out to start a project and it was ambiguous whether the songs would be for Carmody’s own project or not but after writing 3 songs together we felt like the songs had their own world and narrative and we were going to keep going till we had an album.

It's interesting creating without anything being predetermined and we didn’t have any sort of pre-existing relationship, we just met and started writing together. So you’re sort of going straight into talking about deep subjects and feelings when writing songs together and then you’re also figuring out how the different parts of your musical worlds come together into something cohesive.

But we had a lot of crossover lyrically, we both have really strong feelings about the environment/nature and as we say semi jokingly say the ‘apocalypse’, astrology, family and nostalgia.

I had been feeling pretty withdrawn from the guitar during the lockdown periods and because it's always been such a big part of my life, I wanted to re-establish my relationship with it. So around the time we met I had been putting my focus and care into my connection with it. So a lot of our songs started with an idea I had come up with on guitar and then rest unfolded together in our sessions. I didn’t want to come with too much prepared but just enough to spark something.

And in that vein, I had the vision of going and recording the songs live with a band, as opposed to tracking. I was obsessed with ‘Sound & Color’ by the Alabama Shakes (loads of references of music I love in theirs) and the process they went through seemed exciting to me.



Also, I had always recorded live with a band growing up, but the idea of getting the sonic footprint whilst in the studio and production was very exciting to me. I was really tapped into leaving space for peoples energies and spontaneity. So we just sort of wrote songs in a bare bones way, typically just guitar and vocals.

We booked 3 days in a studio in rural Wales with my friend and long time collaborator Alex Killpartrick who engineered and mixed the record, Jake Reynolds who assisted, and Lester Salmins (bass) and Fabio De Oliveira (drums) who I’ve known since I was in school. We did 7 tracks as a band in two days with one rehearsal prior and it was definitely intense but I wanted to capture ideas fresh as they came and to get something raw and real.

Carmody also hadn't recorded live with a band before and all the lead vocals we used were done live with the band, she absolutely smashed it. This was the basis for the recording and then the tracks were produced at my studio, adding extra layers and finding those extra details to build out the sonic world.
 
What makes lyrics good in your opinion? What are your own ambitions and challenges in this regard?

Carmody: I think lyrics that you can’t predict are the best kind. Where the rhyme is slightly skewed, or not there at all.

I like to think that being candid and exposed in your lyrics can really speak to people, and be cathartic for the person writing them. I love lyrics that take you out of yourself and the songwriters who find the words for things you can’t - that’s such a special quality in a writer.

For our record we realised that Tal brought the ‘absurdism’ to the lyrical quality and I brought the ‘nostalgia.’ This gave the songs a dreamlike air that felt different to our individual writing. Tal would always take the lyrics to somewhere wonderfully unexpected and unique and then I’d add some sprinkling of nostalgia.

I think it felt quite refreshing and different to our individual writing. But we also had a lot of shared interests so the ideas would flow quite freely.
 
What are areas/themes/topics that you keep returning to in your lyrics?

Carmody: I think in my solo project I’ve always written about different relationships and dynamics that play out with the people in my life. With ‘Oh My Sun’ it felt like a totally new and invigorating approach as we both wanted to write about things in our environment that were affecting us at the time, and still are!

I think one theme I always personally come back to is dreams, as I learn a lot from my dreams and try to bring them into my everyday life as much as I can. I think the impending fear surrounding environmental collapse and our general estranged relationship to nature living in London is something that Tal and I seem to return to, as it feels important to us.

We also have a rather niche love for our grandparents and the time in which they lived, which inspired ‘Can’t go back.’ I feel like that’s something we could potentially return to again and again.