Hey, super nice to have the chance to chat with you. What have you been up to over the past year in this big old mess?
At the end of last year, I started a period of recording sessions with Tom Campbell, a brilliant producer I recently met in Bristol. It’s been a while since I released any music so after sifting through hard drives of lots of demos, we picked out the ones we felt were strongest and got to work! The result is a handful of recordings which are by far the best I’ve ever made! So it’s exciting to now start sharing them with the world.
I’m very interested in how you started your adventure with music, and did you know from the beginning that this is what you wanted to do?
I felt an intense connection to music from an early age which has never really left me and it was always songs that I was particularly drawn to. I taught myself to play piano by trying to learn Beatles and Elton John songs and really it was all in a bid to try and start writing my own songs. I was thirteen then and song-writing is something I have just always done since. I formed a band at drama school which was a great outlet for my writing and have written a lot of songs and music for theatre over the years too.
Congrats on your new release, ‘Richard Feynman’. Can you give us some insight into it?
Thanks! I wanted to write a song about the artists predicament; that until you have an audience, you can never really know if what you are making is any good and sometimes even the value of it is only appreciated after you die. Which is kind of bizarre when you think about. It made me think of how Nick Drake’s music only truly found a mass audience after an early 2000’s car advert and then how a very quotable figure like Richard Feynman has found a second life through rehashed and churned out endless internet memes of his quotes. And I just found the concept funny – the idea of a writer saying “Oh what’s the point? Nothing I write will ever be as clever as what Richard Feynman said anyway!”
Lyrically, it definitely feels it marks a progression in my writing. I’m particularly pleased with the balance struck between a certain earnestness and a Neil Hannon-style irreverence. The listener can decide for themselves which side it leans most towards…
What are you doing to ensure you continue to grow and develop as an artist?
Currently the usual – trying to do the difficult thing of balancing life/work so that I can give dedicated time to writing. I love how Nick Cave says he treats his writing like a 9-5 job, showing up at the office and putting the hours in every day. I haven’t quite got that luxury yet, but it is amazing how you find that if you do put that time aside, more often than not something half decent comes out.
What should we expect from your next releases in terms of style and sound? How different are they going to be compared to your previous works?
Undoubtedly, I will probably feel I have made some huge progression but then my friends will say ‘oh yeah it sounds like Rufus Wainwright’ or ‘that bit sounds just like that bit in that Radiohead song’.
What is exciting me most at the moment though (and those same friends have said similar things) is that for the first time I feel all those influences have mixed together into something really original sounding and hopefully something that is now sounding like only ‘me’.
Where are you based? Can you tell us how the music scene there has inspired your sound at all?
I live in Bristol, a great city in the south-west of England. For its smallish size the city has a pretty amazing arts and music scene going on. I actually moved here from London as I felt it would be a better place to try and build an audience locally as there’s a great gig scene here.
If you could perform at any venue in the world, where would it be and why?
Union Chapel in London. It’s beautiful. I like playing in any church spaces. A space like that can feel incredibly intimate on quiet songs but also has the right atmosphere for bigger songs too. Also, my songs often have thoughts on religion going on in there somewhere, so that setting kind of suits for those reasons too.
Can we expect a new EP or an album from you in the near future?
Yes! The current plan is to release a few more singles with a view to releasing an album later in the year!
Finally, have you got anything to share regarding upcoming gigs, and what have you got planned for 2023?
No major gigs booked in at the moment but hopefully some support slots in the pipeline this summer. My main focus will be recording and releasing the new album. I also released an album of minimalist piano music last year called ‘Free Fall’ (@davidhewsoncomposer) so I’d like to follow that up with a new album this year too!
