INTERVIEW: Outsider
Outsider
The Photo Ladies Interview
Singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Seán Ó Corcoráin, who performs under the name Outsider, writes lyrics that reflect Eastern mysticism and Western philosophy, wrapped up in an upbeat and vibrant new wave sound. That is the backbone of his recently released debut album Karma Of Youth (via Ok! Good Records). Having used music as a way to cope with mental health issues in his teen years, he aims to pay that back with his music in the hopes that it will help others with their struggles. Inspired by The Cure, Bauhaus, The Smiths, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Depeche Mode and The Talking Heads (to name a few). The record is described as a metaphysical roadmap for a lost soul and documents the Spiritual Awakening, or Kundalini Awakening, that he experienced last year.
“ I thought I knew what my songs were about for a long time, but it is only recently that they all make complete sense and thus create a metaphysical roadmap. I was misdiagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), but it turned out this was not the case. In fact, it was just a rebranding of a psycho spiritual experience that modern psychology is still too Freudian to understand and only Karl Jung truly explored.”
Although the meaning behind his lyrics may not connect with everyone, his music has universal appeal with its fun and danceable nature. Ó Corcoráin had been in bands previously, but always in a backing capacity. After the ending of a long-term relationship and band, he found the confidence to put himself out there and started his solo project Outsider, transitioning for the first time into the role of a lead vocalist and sole instrumentalist. In January of 2017, he released his debut track "Late Night Radio", which went on to be featured in the Netflix Original Series 'Shadowhunters'. He signed with Warner Music UK's W Songs and released his breakthrough EP "Míol Mór Mara". The EP has received over 2 million streams and the title track was chosen to be featured in the football simulation electronic video game FIFA 18. It was the first time the Irish language had been used in mainstream gaming and garnered a lot of positive attention and fans for Outsider. A love for the Irish language led him to take the middle ground with his lyrics, infusing his songs with a mixture of English and the Irish language. With Karma Of Youth, he has debuted a strong follow up with widespread and mainstream appeal. You can follow Outsider and stay up-to-date with all upcoming news and music, as well as stream and purchase his music, via the following links.
Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify | iTunes/Apple Music | Google Play | YouTube | Ok! Good Records
You've said that in the past you only wanted to be a bass player and a backing vocalist, but you've since learned various instruments and have become a one man show. What led you to want to start your solo project Outsider and what was it like to transition into the role of a lead vocalist?
That's a long story, actually, so I'll try to tell you the short version. When I was 17, all I wanted to do was be in a band. I heard The Stone Roses and Joy Division and I loved the bass in those bands so I picked up the bass. That's all I wanted to do initially. I had joined a band of older guys and I wanted to sing, but they destroyed my confidence and they pretty much told me I couldn't sing so to not even try. That stayed with me until I was about 28, so a long time. During those years, I learned the guitar and started to explore other instruments. I started songwriting around the age of 25 or 26, but I wouldn't sing my own songs. I would sing them when writing them, but then I would get a lead singer to sing them because my confidence was just shattered. Eventually that lead singer quit the band I was in and I plucked up the courage to just try and sing my first song which was "Late Night Radio". The song ended up getting on really well. I think it's at 300,000 hits on Spotify now and got on a soundtrack, as well. But that was it for me. I was really, really nervous actually singing that song in the studio for the first time. It was a huge journey for me to get to the point where I would be Outsider performing on my own. The reason I perform on my own is because every band I've ever worked with, the other members seemed to want to be in a band but not do the work and not work as hard. The guitarist wouldn't write the guitar lines, so I learned the guitar and would write them for him. And the keyboard player wouldn't write anything for the songs, so I'd write it. That kind-of burned me out, but in the end the band broke up and I thought I had lost everything. But in the end I realized I had gained everything because I could do it all on my own now. So all of that hard work and slog paid off because it was developing the skills and the confidence in me. So I've had a long road to get where I am now.
You have also talked about how music has helped you to deal with your struggles with mental health and that finding bands you could connect with helped you to share that feeling of isolation. How have you gone about trying to pay that back in your own music?
That's a great question. I think that it's incredibly important to write music that is as raw and real as you can possibly do, without being a miserablist. You know with your more shadow-based emotions, your darker emotions. I try to make it uplifting too and balance it. For me, when I was younger...mental health is kind-of a new thing. When I was younger, there was no talk of that and that was the worst for me, when I was a teenager. What saved me was music and listening to bands. You know, there's bands on the radio and it's usually just vacant bubblegum pop, which I like too, but it didn't make me feel like anyone out there understood me. And then I heard bands like The Jesus and Mary Chain. They're a really good example. Or even Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen has some really, really deep stuff. Hearing that, the art form then turns into a life-saving kind of experience. And that's how powerful music is for me. I will never kind-of stand back on that. I don't think it can be overblown how powerful and how important music with real depth and honesty is. I tried to, with my first EP, express that it felt like my life was falling apart so many times. I'm in a great place now, but I tried to put that in the first EP and the response was...a lot of people contacted me. I made a promise, because i was so isolated and at one stage and alone, that if anyone ever talks to me, I will make 100% sure that I get back to them. That's something I have stuck to. It could be Instagram or whatever form of social media. Even in my YouTube comments, people have shared their stories with me. One guy told me how his engagement had broken off and he was just holding on. Another guy, a French guy, got in touch with me and told me this heartbreaking story about how his childhood sweetheart had left him and broke his heart and he was really depressed and his skin was covered in a rash and he just felt a connection with my music. That's just one or two stories. Obviously there's more. A fan wrote me a letter and at the time she was Lauren and I was the first person she told that she would be Matthew from now on. That was just mind-blowing for me. I've had lots of those experiences. It happens and came to fruition, all of this stuff that was going on in my mind when I was writing the EP. I didn't even have a manager or a band. I didn't really have anything. I say that in my mind, that if anyone contacts me, I will be the one to send the last message. It came to fruition for some reason. I'd like to expand that as much as I can going forward. That will be a huge thing for me, making a listener as important as the artist or the creator. I don't know how to develop it at the moment, but it's something that's incredibly important to me. I don't know how you can do it, I suppose, if your audience grows on a huge scale, but I'm pretty sure where there's a will there's a way with this kind-of stuff. That's what I'd love to see. I'd love to feel like the love that's pushed towards the artist at a live show reflected back at the audience as much as possible. I know that sounds idealistic, but that's something I really dream about. It's not about the ego projection for me anymore. That's just dead to me. There's something just bigger in all of this that I'm experiencing.
You started songwriting around the age of 25 and I read that with your EP, your songwriting style was more subconscious and you just wrote whatever came out. With a new album being released soon, have you found that your songwriting process for the album was the same or has it changed?
It's the same process, yeah. I keep that process as much as possible. I love that process and it works for me. It also means that I don't understand my songs until maybe months after I write them. I don't really know what I'm doing, but it always works out so much better. It might be a few months later and I'll realize "Jesus! Oh my god! This is what it means. This is what this song is actually about. This is what I was trying to express". The subconscious is so vast. There's something that processes a long time before your core brain or the analytical mind. I've used that process in this and I will forever. I've found that when I started doing that is when people started to connect with me on an intense level. One guy actually was in Dublin and had flown over from England and went out of his way to meet me at a hotel. He told me his whole life story about how his dad used to be a quite violent man and beat up his mom and we just sat and had coffee and talked for a long time together. I couldn't believe it, but he was just saying how my music connected to something in him, with that suffering and those memories and just had an amazing effect on him. When I get a reaction like that, maybe it's not music for the masses just now, but connections like that are really important to me. I hope it's not always about this suffering. I hope it's not always that dark. I hope I can balance it out with more light. I think I'm going in that direction. I think there is a positive message of overcoming in my music. That's just as important and I don't wanna talk about all doom and gloom. Even with this COVID-19 right now, we're going to experience things that damn near break us and that's when you go to art and that's the cure. It doesn't have to be music, but for me it was music. That's why I do the subconscious writing. It knows so much more than I ever could. That's where creativity comes from. What are we accessing, you know? What were the great poets accessing? It's supposed to be the language of the gods or expressing something of a higher love or a higher nature, something that we only momentarily access in our lives. This stuff gets me. I love it. But yeah, that's why I write that way and am so grateful that I discovered that way of writing. It ends up being...it's not too far out there. It's not like Frank Zappa or anything. I'm not like a psychonaut taking psychedelics and exploring the depths of the subconscious. I just let it breathe as much as possible and try to let my feelings flow into a song. I've noticed, as well, that sometimes having positive core and positive energy to your music and a positive message of overcoming is going to be important right now. I have a feeling about that, you know? I think that's really important with music, as well, that that's included. Sometimes it can be seen as uncool to be kind-of positive. I don't know where that came from, but I have felt that in the past decade, that that's not as edgy. I think you have to have both the dark and the light.
What can you tell me about your new album Karma of Youth? What has it been like to release an album during lockdown, since normally a band would be planning to tour, which isn't happening right now? What has that whole process been like?
It's hard to say. You have to roll with it. I've never found anything I've done to be straightforward when it comes to music, so I don't know. I just roll with it. I'm really thankful that it's not worse and I still get to release my album. Ok, maybe everything is in disarray and I don't get to do a tour, but I don't really know what to say about it. It's just going to flow the way it flows. Whatever happens, happens. I'm not going to complain about it. It's just strange. It's odd. It's hard to know how to confront it or what to say. I hope people who hear it will connect with it and it can serve in some way during this time. I think it could be a great album to listen to, especially at this time, because it's a hell of an adverse situation. You're gonna have to face yourself. A lot of people are going to have to face things they haven't faced in a long time. You're going to spend a lot of time alone. This is a time when you can be driven towards the arts. As far as not being able to do the normal things surrounding an album release, I'm not a fan of the normal things anyways! I think I was talking to my publicist about this. You can probably tell by now that I'm quite spiritual, but it's all in the flow for me. That's what it is. I just go back to that. It's just in the flow and you can get really anxious or worried or down about these things, but that doesn't happen to me anymore. I'm just accepting that whatever happens, happens. I could see it being a positive thing for my style of music, to enter the kind-of collective consciousness to serve people in that way. It has that feeling of overcoming in a really dark time. I think it balances the dark and the light quite well and I think it has that feeling of overcoming suffering or of acknowledging and facing suffering. So yeah, that's how I'm feeling about it right now. It's all in the flow.
You have said that you weren't always spiritual and never really wanted to be but it just kind-of arrived at your door. You experienced a bit of a spiritual awakening last year, so what can you tell me about your journey into spirituality and why it's important for you to let the spirit, mind and body connect and how it all ties into your music?
We could talk for another hour on this! That's a great question. I suppose I was just a normal guy or whatever. I wasn't spiritual at all last year. To say not at all, I still had practices that were spiritual. A lot of Eastern practices now have been rebranded in Western terminology to make them more, you know, palatable or acceptable or easy to digest for Westerners. They'll be reframed in scientific terminology, like mindfulness or visualization, and it will turn out that it stemmed from Hinduism or Taoism or something ancient from the East. That's what I'm starting to see a pattern of. I was training in Muy Thai, so I had spiritual practices but didn't see them as spiritual practices. This whole thing really blew up for me when I experienced a spiritual awakening in July of last year. Most people say not to tell anyone about this, but I don't care anymore. If you're familiar with Kundalini or Kundalini yoga. It's not the same thing but they call it a Kundalini Awakening in Hinduism and Spirit of The Valley in Taoism...there's a number of different names for it. Basically it's like blockages to your chi energy. I didn't know what chi energy was. Or blockages to your chakras. Electromagnetic energy runs to your spine. It sounds out there. I wouldn't have believed it if you were telling me this, if it hadn't happened to me, but it happened to me and it's real. Anyone who knows me knows I would have been pretty straight laced and, I don't know, erred on the side of conservative science maybe. Well, conservative with science maybe, but I wasn't conservative otherwise. I was definitely a little conservative about spirituality until this happened. That was my experience, and it was so overwhelming and influenced my life. I looked back at my songs and even when "Miol Mor Mara" came out, on my first EP, my friend who made the video was like "I just love all of the Hindu references in it" and I was like "What are you talking about with Hindu references? I don't know anything about Hinduism". There was a spiritual energy to my music before I had any interest or awakening, so it was going in that direction. Even the song "Saviour" I think was a premonition of this awakening that was coming. A lot of Kundalini yoga practitioners would know what I'm talking about. Or Hindu. This is bread and butter for Hindus. I have a friend who is a journalist in Dehli and when I told her about this, she didn't bat an eyelid. She was like "Ok. You should do this, this and this" and it was so normal. If you tell someone in Ireland or the West, they'll tell you that you need to go see a doctor or a therapist. I have years of therapy done and am as happy as I've ever been in my life. Unbelievably happy. It's hard to explain, but that's the bones of it. There's lots about it online and as with any subject, there's loads of lies and misinformation about it online. It's like, if you're into it, cool and if you think it's a load of rubbish, cool. It doesn't really matter. I feel like being honest about it. I don't feel like living my life anymore where I'm keeping some secret. I'm an artist. Salvador Dali was as weird as it gets. David Bowie was out there. I look at them and feel it only takes a matter of time before people just accept you're a weirdo. Well, not a weirdo but that you're out there. I don't mean to label anybody. People are just going to have to accept that about me and hopefully they see it as a good thing. I'm not selling anything, you know, apart from my music. I'm not selling any...I'm kind-of into the anti-guru. I don't like gurus. I'm not trying to convince anyone of any one faith. I like Hinduism and Taoism. I like them all and any spirituality. I love science. I love atheism. I love listening to atheists. I'm not attached to anything and I'm not trying to attach anything to anyone else. This is just all happening to me and I'm experiencing it, and if it serves others and my music, great. I feel like it's raising my consciousness and making me happier. If I can do that through my art, which great artists have done forever and I see it in art everywhere, then great. That's the direction I want to go. I'm still working. I still have a day job as most musicians now have, who aren't mainstream. It's just a tough time at the moment. This isn't something I talk about at random, but it is important to my art and to my music and I think it's important to humanity. And it doesn't have to be called anything. You can frame it any way you want. I don't have to talk about any particular religion or spirituality. I just want to express myself and say how I feel. You definitely have to pay homage to...if you have a spiritual awakening in the West, and you tell people about it, if it's in India they're like "Awesome. I'm really proud of you", and if it's in the East, they're like "Jesus. That's great". But in the West, they tell you that you need to take medication and that happens a lot. They just don't understand it. Western psychology is absolutely fantastic, though, in processing trauma for people. It's wonderful. I'm a huge fan of Western psychology. I think Eastern mysticism or spirituality and Western psychology needs to be reconciled as much as possible. Everyone needs to open up to that a little bit. That's something I'd like to bring to the table if possible. That sounds incredibly ambitious but that's the power of art, isn't it?
You have a deep love of the Irish language which developed when your grandfather spoke it around you as a child. You have said that there are those who are staunch about speaking the language and those who have no interest. Why do you feel you connected so strongly to the language and ultimately get your degree to teach the language? Why is the Irish language so special to you?
You're bringing back so much for me. This is such a deep question. My grandfather would speak Irish when I was a kid. He wasn't a fluent Irish speaker. He would just speak some phrases so that kind of, I feel, ignited a sentimentality about the language for me. In my day job I'm a teacher. You have to teach it here in Ireland, so that kind-of went hand in hand, as well. I developed just a love for it because it is a beautiful language. It's so old and ancient and mystical. I especially loved with "Miol Mor Mara", that means 'giant beast of the sea', literally. It means whales in English, but that's not what it means in Irish. The language is really ancient and almost like reading Tolkien or something. It has beautiful poetry to it. Basically, after colonization by the English, although we now have 20,000 people speaking the language, we weren't allowed to speak our language. That was punishable. I'm pretty sure the famine...it wasn't a famine, it was a genocide...but we won't get into the politics of it. The Irish people were crushed. Their identity was crushed, but we rebelled and got most of our country back. The language was nearly crushed, so I feel like there are people who are really staunch and want to speak Irish all of the time. And then there are people who...it's a really difficult language to speak, so they are scared to try. I'm going to sound like Buddha now, but I like the middle way. I like the idea of the middle way. I love Pixies and the way they'd have some Spanish phrases in their songs. That's what I wanted to do, and you'll find Irish words peppered in my songs. Sometimes they won't be and sometimes they will be. It just depends. I have a really good song that I'm really looking forward to. I'm just finishing it up in the studio. It has a lot of Irish references. It actually references Che Gueverra and the Irish Rebellion and taking back of the free state. The song for some reason is about all of that. It runs deep in our blood. That's what I grew up with. We're only free really 100 years from colonization. I think this generation has kind-of forgotten it, but for me it wasn't forgotten at all. When I was growing up, the troubles in Northern Ireland were still happening. There were still bombs going off and people still killing each other. There was still a war between Catholics and Protestants. It was never about religion. It was about land and power and basically why the hell are you stealing our country, you know? I don't really want to get into the politics of it all because, I don't know. It's not the way forward. Love is the way forward, as cheesy as it sounds. Even my manager, who's from London, born and bred, he didn't know what the language was in my songs. He loved my music and was like "What's this language? I love it". He thought it was maybe Latin. He didn't know the Irish had a language and he's from London. That said a lot to me. English people aren't taught in school about their history of colonization. My manager Rich is one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life and I love him. He's great. It's like, how do we move forward from all of this? I'm going down a road I don't want to go down now, but it is something where I would hate to see Irish completely lost. The best way to reclaim it is through middle ground and true art. Definitely true art. We have traditional Irish music and an Irish speaking tv channel here and stuff, but it's not working. Whatever they're doing, it's not working. They need to, as Buddha would say, find the middle way here. That's what I'm trying to do with that. I'm just going to do whatever I want. I spent my life kind-of caring too much what people think. You know, you kind-of try to fit in. I just don't fit in, so I may as well accept it. I just don't care anymore. I'm going to do whatever the hell I want. The subconscious writing, it all connects. I work from how I feel and I don't care if it makes sense or not. I don't care if it suits an agenda or not. I don't care. I've never been happier since I've started to work that way and that's a message that I'd love to spread. I really hope that energy is in my music.
You also had a teacher in secondary school who you said encouraged you to develop an understanding of lyrics and poetry and you've talked about your love of lyrics. What do you love about the process of writing lyrics for your songs and what role does poetry play in your songwriting?
You're gonna make me emotional! Yeah, there was a teacher. With "Brotherhood", I think I talked about that briefly, about masculinity and this idea that, and even see it with some females, that crying is a weakness or something. For me, it's the exact same as laughter. It's the same release. For me, there's no difference anymore. You laugh, you cry-whatever. Yeah, when I was growing up I didn't feel like I was getting much encouragement or praise for anything, anywhere, that I would do. I definitely didn't believe I was good at anything. There was one teacher, Jim Minogue was his name...I don't know what I did. I think he got us to write a poem. He was kind-of a free spirit and was really out there. We liked him and you weren't supposed to like teachers. I didn't like a lot of teachers. I was in a Christian Brothers school and I didn't like it at all, actually. When I was 13, one of my friends who was 15 got stabbed in that school. There was just a bad vibe in that school. That was my memory of it anyway. Anyways, he encouraged me and just kept saying I was a poet and could write great lyrics. He just kept encouraging me to do it. He told me I should write poetry, that I could do it, that I was really poetic. Actually, it was my understanding when he would go through John Keats or Shakespere or something like that, I was just lit up. I'd never felt like that before. I was on fire. It was amazing! John Keats...I haven't read him in years. He hit me so hard. It was fucking unbelievable! It was like music had just helped me to survive or something. Ireland can be a hyper-macho society. Like Conor McGregor would be typical of an Irish kind-of guy...generally. Not all guys, but typical of where I grew up. Poetry, etc wouldn't exactly have been looked upon as a cool pastime anyways, but I stuck with it and he lit that fire in me. Just that encouragement was important, because I could have encountered it but not have had anybody encourage it and it would have just fell by the wayside. I wouldn't have believed it had any worth. I would have been ashamed of it or something, you know? He really had a good, positive energy from it. It's absolutely huge to have that. I don't think he even realized the effect he's had on my life. I remember I was listening to "Black Dog" by Led Zeppelin when I was 14 and I decided to write my own lyrics to the song. I used the melody from "Black Dog" and wrote the lyrics. I remember showing my brother and he was like "No way! You didn't write that!" and was like "Yes I wrote that man!" and he was like "That's the best fucking thing I've ever read! I didn't know you could do that". When you're 14, writing lyrics can blow someone's mind. I continued to do that and then started to write songs, but then after a long time I realized the melody should come first. If you are using a lot of poetic lyrics and consonants, it chokes your melody, unless you're going to use a lot of baritone. Now I kind of hum it and add the lyrics later. Yeah, they're always important to me, but I've become less flowery over time and more raw. I do have an affinity for trying to have a poetic turn of phrase or colorful words or language, but if it's simple and gets the message across, that works for me too. Is it enjoyable? Over time it's become a labor of love. I've learned not to be so hard on myself with lyrics. Sometimes I can really judge my own lyrics harshly. So, I do enjoy it when I feel like I've done something good, but the process can be difficult because I won't allow a lyric if it doesn't feel right to me. That can end up taking months and then they'll haunt me. There are lyrics in songs that I feel like I just put in. Like one or two. It's very minute. That would haunt me if I feel like something isn't 100%. It's something I've worked hard to let go on. The thing you love can become that thing that overwhelms you, whereas if you are just playful and let go, you'll create the best energy. I feel like you'll create the most emotionally charged and honest music. You know, I just admire some lyricists so much. Like Echo and The Bunnymen and Ian McCulloch's lyrics. I love Frank Black's lyrics. I think he was so far ahead of his time. I think he is so spiritually tuned in and doesn't know it. The stuff he was writing about back then is so important now, like climate change, like "Monkey Gone To Heaven", which has beautiful lyrics. He used numerology and was way out there with spiritual concepts. The more I read about him, the more I just admire him. I saw in a documentary that he has some mental health issues. I often wonder if he had a spiritual practice if he could be a much happier person. That song "Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons" from Trompe le Monde...the lyrics in that are as good as anybody out there. I don't care what anyone says. The concept that he has this dream and thinks he's a bird and flies over the Olympus Mons, the volcano on Mars. I don't know if you are familiar with the song, but you should listen to it. The whole concept is so melancholic and so beautiful and so astral, as well. I could talk about it forever. There's just some things that Frank Black does. He's so underrated if you really look into his lyrics. I find him astounding. I know there's Leonard Cohen and there are lyricists like Nick Cave that everyone considers the serious guys that write the real poetry. I don't always think that's true, by the way. I think there are some lyricists that go under the radar and Frank Black is definitely one of them. I think, and it took me a while to understand how much Kurt Cobain's lyrics went under the radar...I think he used to slate them himself. I'd leave it until the last minuet, you know? He probably got these subconscious flows of lyrics. When I look at them now, I can find so much meaning in them. And they seem sometimes almost a little bit throw away, but if you give them a chance, and there's some songs where if you just give them a moment and look a little bit deeper into them, there's just something so powerful about them. I think that really poetic and technical lyrics can be a little bit...at first glance you can think they are so beautiful. There's other lyricists where if you give them a little bit of time, they can potentially be much more powerful.
You have said that upon reflecting on 2019, that it's only this year that you are discovering your true self. You have also said that artists can choose certain paths, that they can idolize success as a figure of accolades or use it as a way to find their purpose. What do you feel has set you on the path to finding your purpose and what do you feel that you have learned about your true self?
That's a hell of a question! That's something you can get easily embroiled in and I've seen it everywhere in the music "industry", where you start out loving art and all of a sudden it becomes this business and ladder of success and you're counting up your achievements by your number of followers you get and all of a sudden that becomes more important than the art along the way. You may have had this purpose at the very beginning. If I really was to be honest with myself right now, this purpose I've found is definitely aligned with my awakening. It's like you're finding yourself again and that feeling of the reason you fell in love with music or a certain song or art. That feeling that just made you feel not just stimulated, but you are feeling something on a huge energy level. You are feeling something spiritual. You don't have to call it that. It doesn't matter what you call it. Take spirituality out of the equation if you'd like. But everybody knows you're feeling something that you just can't describe and it's probably changing your life. In lots of instances, it's definitely saving people's lives. For me, that's the top of the mountain. That's the ladder, to create something that affects someone like that. When I say finding myself, I suppose I spent...relating back to the story where I was told I couldn't sing, I found it very hard to find my identity because I didn't feel...I didn't grow up in an environment where you're praised or comfortable with being yourself. Maybe that's why it's a huge thing for me now. I don't care what anyone thinks and am just going to do whatever I want. I didn't feel like I was allowed to be myself. You would be heavily criticized for being in any way different. It makes it very hard to step into your own identity. It took me a long time to do that. So yeah, I didn't grow up in an environment where I could freely express myself. I just didn't. I wouldn't say I'm envious, but I can see it in other artists. Maybe it's a class thing. I grew up working class. Maybe you grow up middle class or upper class. You'd be in a more educated and understanding environment. Definitely a more secure environment. Maybe I'm wrong. I could be corrected. There would be more of a chance of you growing up and supporting your artistic endeavors. Working class environment is typically more about the bottom line. You have other concerns and priorities. You can't prioritize art. I've found that making guitar music is a very middle class endeavor. It really can be you know. For me, with my first EP, I put all of my money into that. If that didn't go well for me or there wasn't any return, that was it for me. I couldn't afford to do that again. That was it for me. I didn't have a wealthy family to fall back on. It's taken me a long time to become who I am. So yeah, I am only stepping into it this year. I'm 36 now. Sometimes I feel like...Kurt Cobain was dead at 27 and I hadn't even sung yet! But that's it. I just have to accept myself. This is who I am. Once you can accept that, then you can move forward and hopefully create something great. It's been a long road for me. It's been a really long road for me. Music is an ego projection. I did get embroiled in that like everyone else, where you want to be the most successful. I mean, of course I want to be successful. I'm not saying that I don't, but there's an ego trap in it. There's a trap in becoming attached to this person that you think you are. You also, I see it a lot where you become this star. It's an incredibly bullshit word, because everyone in that room where you are playing that music is just as important as you, in my mind. I can't really figure it out yet, but I will figure out how to level the playing field a bit. I just feel there's an energy. You can tell the artists who are worshipping their audience in return. You can always feel that, you know? They're the best gigs I've ever been to. The energy in the room is great. You know when an artist is just so thankful for every person in that room. Everybody can feel that energy and it just charges up the whole room. I've seen The National do that and I saw Joe Strummer do that before he died. I've seen The Pixies do that actually. You can feel that energy and that's something that's important to me. I don't have these huge answers yet, but I don't think I need them. You just need the intention to do things differently. That's what I see in my future. We'll see where it all goes.
What's next for you? You'll be releasing your album soon, but what are your plans going forward?
We're in lockdown! There's a lockdown coming up! They say gigs aren't going to back until 2021. I mean, they aren't going to let schools back until September it looks like. I can't imagine 80,000 people in a stadium being a good idea. So yeah, I'm going to write and hopefully get back into the studio soon, but for the foreseeable future, I'm on a 2 kilometer lockdown, so I don't really know. I think everybody is in that zone of uncertainty right now. It's just business as usual for me and whatever comes up comes up. I'll take every day as it comes. I haven't a clue what's going to go on, but I do know that I'm going to continue to write songs and write music. Hopefully the lockdown doesn't affect things too adversely. If it does, it does and that's the way it's going to go. I have nothing to plug, apart from my album, which I'm happy to be able to do! There was a suggestion on holding off on the release. I suggested that, wondering if we should hold off, but the label said they didn't see why we should, and I love that attitude. I feel like my music is really soundtrack-y and I think there may be some soundtracks coming up, so that's something. We'll see what happens with gigs. A tour of America would be awesome.