STACK #164 June 2018

MUSIC FEATURE

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Brissie siblings George, Amy and Emma Sheppard – along with their bandmates Michael Butler, Jason Bovino and Dean Gordon – took the plunge into worldwide recognition with their 2014 mega-hit Geronimo . Eight ARIA Award noms and a win, multiple tours (including supporting Justin Bieber and MeghanTrainor), and a five-times platinum certified single later, George gives STACK the skinny on eagerly awaited second album WatchingThe Sky .

Words Zoë Radas

when we’re feeling down too. Actually, a lot of our ‘fun’ songs come from taking an optimistic look at a bad situation. Let Me Down Easy for example is a super upbeat, overly happy sounding song, but if you listen to the lyrics you notice the song is about this guy coming to the grim realisation that he’s about to be broken up with. We’ve always found it found it easier to deal with tragedy by laughing at it, so I guess that's an approach we sometimes take toward creating music. Live ForYou and Sorry are certainly both melancholy ballads (the former in particular). How does the approach to writing these ones differ from the most joyful tracks? Yeah, see, we do get sad! Haha. We’ll usually take a few sittings to write make sure what we’re writing/ singing about is coming from a real place. Whether it’s a slick pop song about keeping a fun night going, or whether it’s a stadium rock song about alcohol issues, it always comes from events and emotions happening in our own lives. The songs that are about heavier topics usually take a little longer to write because it’s can be hard to access/ the heavier songs. Obviously, we try to make every song as authentic as it can be. We always

them?Were all band members into the idea right away? Haha. Yeah, that song is a bit random... We had been in the studio writing songs for a few days straight and things were starting to sound a bit too same-same, so we decided to shake things up, and spent the afternoon listening to a bunch of old skool funk records. We ended up finding this groovy bassline which was calling out for a super deep voice. We managed to find this vocal processor, which lowered the voice, and then had an absolute blast talking into it the whole rest of the afternoon acting

Since 2012, your touring roster has just been mind-melting. Are you all experts at packing your stuff in under 10 minutes these days? You’d think so! But no. It still takes us the majority of the night before we leave to figure out what we need, then our bedrooms are always left looking like a bomb site, and we always leave something behind. The main pieces of advice we have for you: 1) Fold your clothes and organise them in stacks before you put them in the suitcase, so you can see what you’re bringing and what you might have missed. 2) Pack a laundry bag so your smelly clothes can be kept separate. Single Coming Home contains the lyric “Meet me in theValley” – are you referring to FortitudeValley? Does Brisbane make you feel as grounded/ excited as the track suggests? Can confirm! It’s referring to Fortitude Valley. Coming Home was kind of like our love letter to Brisbane. We’re pretty passionate about our home city. We’re convinced it’s the best city in the world. It’s big enough that you have all the advantages and services of a world class city, but small enough that you aren’t constantly fighting for personal space. We love spending as much time in Brisbane as we possibly can. There are some super funky spoken word bits in Edge Of The Night (they remind me of The Real McCoy).Who performed

like Barry White. The person performing the voice is Pete Thomas, one of the song’s co-writers. He had the American accent, which those lyrics absolutely needed to sound cool. “Milk and honey, sunny delight” sounded way too weird in an Aussie accent.

A lot of our 'fun' songs come from taking an optimistic look at a bad situation

You’ve said: “It’s fun for us to make this kind of music, so hopefully it’s fun to listen to.” It seems many artists operate in the opposite way – they only create when they’re feeling low, in times of pain.Why do you think it’s different for you guys? Is it an association thing? I know it seems that way, and we do make music for fun, but we create music

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JUNE 2018

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