STACK #197 Mar 2021

MUSIC FEATURE

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Sheppard L-R: Emma, George, and Amy Sheppard Insert: Still from the Somebody Like You duet clip with Taiwanese artist Sammy

gratitude. It’s about being grateful that up until this point, you’ve lived an interesting life filled with love and adventure. You can appreciate each day as though it might be your last, because even if you were to die tomorrow (or lose your voice), you could be happy and content with the life you lived, the magical experiences you had and the wonderful things you accomplished. 3: Don’t Believe

in Love Don’t Believe in Love is somewhat of an ‘anti-love song’. When it’s right, love makes the world an amazing place to be, but love can also hurt us in a way nothing else can. We’ve all been to that dark place where we feel like true love was never meant for us, so this is a song of defiance that you can scream when it hasn’t worked out. This song is about those times where it just feels easier to build up the walls and pretend not to care – those times where being 'too cool' for love is easier than letting your guard down and risk getting hurt again. 4: Somebody Like You Somebody Like You was actually the very first song we wrote for this album. It was written in Brisbane by Jay, Amy and myself about a time in my early '20s when I lost the girl I believed was the love of my life. I don’t think I’ve been that heartbroken before or since. She was the best thing that had ever happened to me at the time. Over the course of the next few years I slowly began to realise that I wasn’t actually moving on, even though I had started seeing other people. It was clear to me that although I wanted to find someone new, every time I did it was just because that person reminded me of her. We released a duet version of this song with a Taiwanese artist named Sammy, which was cool! We got to make a video clip from different parts of the planet! I was on a beach in Australia and Sammy was on a beach in Taiwan. Worlds away, but singing to each other across the sea – it suits the song perfectly!

TRACK-BY-TRACK

SHEPPARD Navigating dicey vocal surgery, rage at love's pain, appreciation for extraordinary experiences, and a duet filmed over oceans, George Sheppard (with contributions fromAmy and Emma) gives us a compelling insight into the first four tracks of the sibling act's new album of pop pearls, Kaleidoscope Eyes . Read the full run-down at stack.com.au.

1: Kaleidoscope Eyes Before we’d written anything for his album, we knew that we wanted it to be a bit more experimental than your average pop offering, and we wanted it to be a cohesive listening experience from start to finish. Even though we released 12 singles last year, we always intended for people to treat this as an album to be listened to from beginning to end. Having long had an infatuation with cinema and epic orchestral movie scores, Jason and I got together one evening and created this lovely orchestral intro that brings the listener into the world of Kaleidoscope Eyes , and leads nicely into the opening track, Die Young .

2: Die Young At the very start of 2019, during the very first writing trip we did for this album, I was diagnosed with a vocal injury. I had to undergo surgery, then I had to be completely silent for two weeks (that was an interesting experience), and then it was going to be six months until I was ‘hopefully' back to full vocal range. Right at the start of this album I was forced to confront the terrifying reality that my voice was incredibly fragile, and that there was a possibility I could lose my passion and my livelihood. So, the headspace when we wrote Die Young was as though it was a ‘final’ Sheppard song – but it wasn’t sad. It’s really a song of fearlessness and

Kaleiodoscope Eyes by Sheppard is out now via MGM.

Read the full track-by-track online at stack.com.au

72 MARCH 2021

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