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Part 2

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?

I like to follow the roads that intrigue me for as long as they intrigue me. As soon as they stop seeming interesting, or feeling true, or like they’re starting to disintegrate, I’ll walk back up them and try a different route. No harm in trying everything and exploring.

But I think it takes a good writer to know when to turn back on a road that’s going nowhere.

There are many descriptions of the creative state. How would you describe it for you personally? Is there an element of spirituality to what you do?

As a Christian, I believe we’re created beings living in a created world. One that has a narrative and purpose interwoven with our own free will at play. As far as I can tell, I can only create because I was first created, and made in the image of that creator. The intentionality and meaning I see in simple interactions, in the creativity and choices of others, in the beauty of the natural world, in the bipolarity of the human heart, in the chaos rebelling against order …This all informs the way I see and experience and know the world around me and myself.

So it’s in no way hyperbolic to say that my spirituality speaks directly into my creative state, but also no more or less than it speaks into every element of my life really and how I live it.  

Especially in the digital age, the writing and production process tends towards the infinite. What marks the end of the process? How do you finish a work?

I don’t think that’s a new challenge specific to the digital age for artists. Poets on typewriters and painters on canvas and sculptures with clay have always struggled to know when the work is ‘finished’.

I guess I’ve given up trying to say ‘this work is now finished’ because the truth is, it never is. But just go with a gut feeling of whether I love it enough to share it, whether there’s any element that makes me cringe (in which case, I keep working at it until that feeling goes away), and whether I feel it’s saying (through lyrics, sounds, musicality) what I want it to say.

Being in the band and working collaboratively with Ed and Josh really helps with that too, because you’ve got another two people looking at the work and making the call on when it feels finished. So far that’s worked out for us in a truly democratic way, it rarely ends in a big creative argument. It’s nice to share that intuition together.

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?

We sort of do a bit of both - it all depends on the song. With Tranquilize we literally wrote that in one day and apart from some better quality recorded instruments and vocals, it really hasn’t veered much from that original demo at all.

With a song like “Blue Valentine”, we sat on the groove and verse melody for ages without any lyrics, and with a pretty average chorus that didn’t make the final cut.



I think it was called ‘Hip Hop Cowboy’ in the demos folder for a fair while (not a very cool title I know, but if you’ve taken a look at anyone’s demos folder I’m sure you’ll see much worse) - there was just something about the hip hop nature of the original groove smooshed together with those ‘cowboy’-soundtrack-like guitars that we all really loved.

But it was probably a few weeks (and a couple of attempts) later that we landed on the chorus you hear today. Another week or two until we’d finished cycling through different lyric ideas and finally landed on ‘Blue Valentine’ as the anchor for the rest of the lyrical narrative.

So yeah, sometimes it takes a day. Sometimes it takes a couple of months. I think you just have to go with the process that the song needs.

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?

Both Edward and Joshua are producer / songwriters so they understand a little more of the technical side of mixing and mastering. Actually, not sure anyone understands mastering really. But at least on the mixing front there’s quite a lot of detail and feedback that goes into it. I can get quite picky about particular production sounds or elements that felt really special and distinctive in the demo phase, and making sure we don’t lose them once we’ve built and fleshed the songs out and all gotten so used to hearing all the parts.

I was a little cheeky with “Bones” in that after several rounds of mixing, and even after it was mastered, I listened back to an earlier demo and realised that we’d lost a decent amount of the presence of the pizzicato strings that come in in the pre-chorus. It would sounds pretty silly to some people that we’d go back into mixing and get it re-mastered again for a couple db more, but honestly, some of that stuff sonically is just so special and unique to a song, I reckon a lot of those little elements really give a song it’s character.

Even though lyrics and melody and a hook and all that are obviously crucial. There’s something about those special moments that can really set the tone and mood of a song that are worth being really detailed about.   

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 actually haven’t experienced that yet. I guess it’s early days. But in my experience there’s a fullness and an ‘expansion’ that kind of occurs.

So it’s the opposite. It’s really cool for the song to go out of your hands and no longer just belong in your little studio with your little band mates, but belong to anyone and everyone who listens and connects to it. That inspires me to keep creating for sure! You remember it’s not just about you and your self-expression.  

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Inherently different, yes. But not neccessarily more or less valuable to the human experience.

I reckon more than most people, I’ll attribute or call out artistry in what others would consider ‘mundane’ tasks. The art of conversation, the art of relaxing well, the art of making people in a room feel comfortable and part of the same room, the art of enjoying the smallest things in life, the art of making, as you say, a great cup of coffee … or throwing a meal together from the ingredients in the fridge. I think there are so many more forms of self-expression and creativity than we give credit to that are as equally valuable and meaningful to the human experience.

I mean, of course, music is a particularly multi-faceted one though and pretty universal - whereas other more ‘mundane’ forms can be a little more niche or more private experience I guess. Like I was literally staring at a tree the other morning and I cried because I thought the bark and the leaves and the birds and the pollen drifting like little snowflakes, was just so beautiful and so perfect. I know that’s not an entirely common experience. And a tricky one to share or invite people into if they’re not in the exact same state as you. But a lot of people will cry over a song that captures the heartbreak they’ve felt, and multiple times and across multiple time periods. That’s pretty special.

I think personally I tend to express a lot of things through music that I’m perhaps slightly ashamed of or nervous or sensitive to talk about broadly or confidently.

“Comedian” is a very personal one for me that captures a lot of what I wanted to say and be and do for people around me who were really hurting at the time, but without knowing how to do that justice.



Music helps me do justice to the things I’m feeling when a simple word or singular catch up with someone mightn’t do it justice.


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