Liam Parsons of Good Morning
Hi and thanks for taking the time out to speak with us at Musicology.
You are set to perform on the Big Sound line-up for 2017 which is not only a nod from the industry but given the occasion, do you feel like this is going to be a precipitous moment in the band’s career and the opportunities that will abound from showcasing to such a wide audience?
I can understand why people would think of Big Sound that way but I think it would drive us crazy to treat it like that. For us it seems like more of an opportunity to hang out away from home and play some music. The meeting of music and business has always made us pretty uncomfortable, although we can recognise it as a necessary evil sometimes. I think we’ll just be trying to enjoy ourselves and see some good music.
Your amazing lo-fi sound falls somewhere between Guided By Voices and Ty Segall. Primarily it is just the two of you but do you look to make music through the eyes of a 3, 4 or 5 piece act or embrace the boundaries of a duo and allow it to define your sound?
I think it really depends on what the song calls for at the time of recording. Sometimes it’s fun to push ourselves and try and make something that sounds like it could have been made by a real band, or the inverse and keep it smaller and contained. At the end of the day we can only do what our brains and bodies let us do, so regardless of our intentions we’ll always been confined to the boundaries of the people in the room. I think we’re gonna do a record with a band sometime in the future so it will be interesting to see what the differences are.
It has been stated that your songs “songs are lullabies with a twist” what do you make of that assessment?
Yeah that’s a fair assessment! It’s music to put you to sleep and give you bad dreams.
You recently melded your EP’s into Glorcross, an all-encompassing 12 inch of your work to date. In fusing the two together did you feel that there was a real continuity between where Shawcross ends and Glory starts?
To me they feel like looking at the same things in two different ways. Shawcross is kind of the glass half full and Glory is the glass half empty. It would be a lie to say that they were intended to be placed next to each other, but now that they are it does make a kind of sense. There’s a definite through line.
The piano sections throughout your LP are wonderfully subtle in their downbeat accompaniment. In particular your track To Be Won has a real loved in feel with the deliberate addition of a creaking chair and as seemingly insignificant as that sound maybe it transports the listener into your room as if to emphasise the reality of day to day living which begs the question, what everyday snapshots make their way into your work and for what reasons?
It’s never intentional to record it, but it usually doesn’t bother us enough to take it out. Like for instance, the creaking chair was just in the recording of the piano and once we’d listened to it a few times it just felt more natural to have that take than to do it again. Most of Glory was recorded next to a building site so you can hear power tools and things like that. Lots of reflections off glass windows, people talking, phones going off, beer bottles, doors opening, a TV in another room. There are so many everyday things that I think only Stefan and I would be able to tell are in there.
When an outfit releases a debut album, it is often a case of extracting year’s worth of life experiences and pouring oneself through a sieve and consolidating those experiences into one defining LP. Over what span of your lives have you drawn from in producing Glorcross and the subject matter it canvases?
Pretty much the awkward growing pains of being in early adulthood. Like the ages of 20 to 22 or so, when everything either feels hilarious or terrifying.
Returning back to Big Sound. Are there some other artists on the line up you are particularly keen to check out?
Yeah! Mostly just stuff I’ve seen before but love anyway, like RVG, Two Steps On The Water, Ara Koufax, Big White and Amyl & The Sniffers. I hear good things about this band Boat Show so I wanna check that out.
What else is on the cards for Good Morning in 2017?
Going to Europe after Big Sound for a quick spin which should be nice. Then I guess we come home and figure out what we’re doing with our lives. Probably gotta find a job. Write some more music and have a sleep.
