In 2008 Horrorshow dropped their debut LP The Grey Space to widespread acclaim. 18 months later, and with much having transpired, the talented duo are set to release Inside Story; a somewhat more outward-looking LP that still maintains that power of introspect Solo has come to be known for. The 13-tracks exude a constantly-developing lyrical and musical perspective. It isn’t hard to see why they’ve played Big Day Out and Groovin The Moo festivals and toured nationally with Muph & Plutonic and Hermitude. Solo recently took some time out for a chat.
How does it feel to be gaining favour in a culture that only five years ago, you admired from anonymity?
Umm I don’t know if I really think about it like that to be honest. It’s cool though, I enjoy being able to throw down and kinda do what we do, especially in a live context. Lately I’ve been enjoying getting back in front of people and having that moment. Live, you really get to see people react to the music and you get to see them smiling and enjoying themselves so that sorta thing is pretty cool, to go from standing in the front row of a crowd, rocking out, to being the one that’s making everybody else rock out and watching the different roles in that relationship, that’s a pretty cool feeling. Particularly moments like when we played the Big Day Out, I’ve seen a lot of acts that I really love and admire in those kinds of situations so I guess it’s cool to be on the flipside of the whole process now. I dunno, it’s all happened so quickly, we’re just still rolling with it and not really sure where it’s going to end up but it’s great.
Explain the philosophy behind the album title, Inside Story.
I remember the moment I thought of it, I was walking up a stairwell in a hostel in London. Basically I had just been tripping out since I arrived in Europe. There’s a line on the first album: “…having revelations about my place on the food chain…” What I was talking about there was this feeling of being this little dot on the map and being removed my normal world and placed in this other environment that was totally unfamiliar to me. Travelling through that environment-different places, different people-and engaging with it. The only constant was what was going on inside my head and that’s the philosophy behind the album. A lot of the thoughts, lines and ideas for the tracks were all things that were going through my head during that three month period. I had a bunch of notebooks with me and I’d scribble down ideas or words and carry them all around with me. I didn’t get too stuck into the writing until I came back and opened up these notebooks. Also, there was another layer of meaning to it, I wanted to be a bit more cryptic this time around with what I was talking about and maybe wrap certain things up a bit more. So the album works on one level but within it, there’s all kinds of things that I’ve hidden in there personally-certain lines that relate to particular moments on my trip. That’s the other level of meaning to the title, there’s this whole other story for me inside the music.
You have spoken of the significance of travel in the music you have produced. How much importance does your city and locality have as well?
Well we deal with that on Found which is basically the real story of me coming home from the journey and just tripping out over being back in my familiar environment and just seeing it for how amazing it is because of the time spent in separation. The second verse of the track is about rocking out with the Spit Syndicate guys a year later at Good Vibrations and partying our whole crew there, friends of ours from the neighbourhood. I think that feeling of belonging is really important to us as musicians, in terms of knowing that we have a really strong supoort base back home. I think the first album was really centred on Sydney and the things that go on here, the vibe of the place. Whereas I feel the vibe of the new album is more epic or worldly.
There’s a line on the new album alluding to giving The Grey Space a paintjob. What has changed in the last 18 months personally? What has spurred on the desire for vibrancy?
That was just the sort of period that we were at when we did the first album, we maybe wanted to do something that was a bit darker and grittier. This time around, there’s been a whole lot of external influences and experiences that made us want to build on what we were doing. We’re proud of the first album and what we did with it but what has changed is just our learning curve. We learnt so much from making that first record, we were just kind of making it up as we went along and now we’re in a better position, particularly sonically-everything that Adit has learnt about his production, the whole engineering and mixing process-all those sorts of things in creating that vibrancy you’re talking about. I think this record has a lot more texture to it, it’s just more rich whereas I feel with the first one we were in a bleaker place and also our know-how sent us in the direction of that stripped-back, bare sense lyrically and musically. Whereas now, we know a bit more about what we’re doing and we’ve got a few more skills up our sleeve to pull off some other things, to pull of some tracks to move a crowd.
The artwork for Inside Story is outwardly symbolic with the warm colours used and the collage of accumulated experience on the cover. Do you think this was important to convey following The Grey Space?
I just think what we tried to do with the artwork this time around was to really tailor it to the music. We had an overall idea of the vibe of the record from the get-go, once we had that established with the music, we really wanted the artwork to channel that same vibe so we could create an overall package. That was really important to me this time around. We hooked up with this graff writer from Brisbane called Gimik. One thing we talked about was the importance of having colour and different textures. One thing I’m stoked about with the album is the artwork-I do feel like it adds something to the album when you’re listening to it and looking through the booklet, there’s little hints in there.
How did you approach Inside Story differently on account of ‘the fear of an impending deadline?’
Well it was a very different process. We did the first album over four or five years and just went along with it, we’d have months off here and there. Whereas this time around, it was always a long-term plan when we got involved with Elefant Traks, even before The Grey Space, that we would follow up that album with another one inside a year. So we were always aware of that deadline but we’re talking about a much more compressed time-frame. One thing about being on a label like Elefant Traks is that you have to fit in with everything else going on for everything to function right. So this whole tour with Urthboy has all been locked away since way before we finished our album so if something had gone horribly wrong and we didn’t finish it, the tour would still have had to go ahead. It’s just industry once you get a bit involved in the ‘industry’ side of things, there’s many more concerns to doing a record than just when you feel like it, there’s lots more at stake and you have to rise to it I guess.
Is Thoughtcrime an affirmation of your particular brand of lyricism?
I wrote the track as a kind of call for substance in music. I feel like we get an opportunity as artists to say something to get people thinking. A lot of music out there doesn’t do that, it just caters to the lowest common denominator. It’s a little frustrating sometimes as an MC or as a fan of Hip Hop which I think, as an overall culture, definitely has some principles within it about putting effort into what you do and really treating it as an art. So I just wrote the track as a bit of a call to people to use their brain and really put time, effort and thought into their music. Some of what I was saying in the track is that we’ll probably never write that mega-hit, that super-catchy track everyone loves but I feel like our music does identify with people who like to think about things. I guess it’s a general call to everyone saying lets have some substance in what we’re doing but we can still enjoy ourselves doing it.
Was Always Coming Back Home To You by Atmosphere an inspiring force behind the opening track, In?
No, not really-only in the sense that it’s an awesome example of a beat driven by an acoustic guitar. Adit made the beat a while back originally as a remix of Lupe’s Kick Push…and I loved the way raps sounded on it. Acoustic guitar to me creates a sense of intimacy-like the listener is right there where the sound is being created-and was the perfect instrument for sucking people in and also for establishing the slightly darker, organic sound we wanted to get for the intro track.
“…I feel like we get an opportunity as artists to say something to get people thinking. A lot of music out there doesn’t do that, it just caters to the lowest common denominator..”
Getting samples was a really interesting process, although we can’t take much of the credit for this-we had a lot of help from Sulo at Elefant Traks who handled the process. There were two major instances of sample clearance, Walk You Home which we discussed earlier and In My Haze with Jane Tyrrell. The former samples a track which came out via a smaller, independent music publishing company so it wasn’t too difficult to get in touch with them and come to some arrangement. I also wrote a letter to the artist saying something about our track and what it meant to me to try and use the sample in question, trying to explain that part of the reason we were using the sample was to pay homage to that style of music. Who knows if they read it-but we managed to work something out fairly easily. The sample for the track with Jane Tyrrell is actually a Midnight Oil song from one of their albums. We knew we HAD to get this cleared as we played the track to a few people and they picked it instantly, from being so familiar with the band’s work. We reached out to Sony(the publishers) but didn’t hear anything back for a while. We were starting to really stress about what we would do with the track as we really liked it with the original sample, and we liked the idea of paying a bit of homage to some classic Australian music. So we actually mixed the track and bounced it as separate parts in case we had to get things replayed…still hadn’t heard anything. Then one weekend The Herd went to Brisbane to do a Kev Carmody tribute show with a bunch of notable Australian musicians, and one of the dudes in the band at this show was Jim Moginie, the guitar player from Midnight Oil! So Urthy took him aside and played him the track and explained our situation. Luckily he dug what we’d done with it so he got in touch with Sony and got the ball rolling…we were absolutely stoked, for them to come across someone from the band right at that exact time when we needed their help-it was one of those weird moments where you feel like fate must have had something to do with it.
This is tricky to answer as a lot of what we’ve learnt isn’t necessarily tangible or easy to put a finger on-we just have been through a lot musically in the past 18 months. We went through the process of recording and mixing an album for the first time, got to see first hand what sort of sounds work well with that process, how to record and layer vocals to get different effects, all that sort of thing. We’ve also learnt about shows, we’d never really played them before the last record so there’s been a real learning curve there, seeing what works in a live context and then trying to channel some of that in the next record. We’re constantly learning lessons about how to handle ourselves in this music thing, and no doubt we’ll learn some valuable ones from this release as well.
The title track is characterised by a strong lament for the prominent role of technology in our lives. How do you strike a healthy balance when promoting your music in this digital age?
What I was trying to say there goes beyond music-these new technologies are totally affecting every aspect of our lives, how we interact with each other, how we shop, how we get our information, how we plan our travels, how we bank-everything! And I guess sometimes I just trip about that, about what our world is like now and how so much of it is digital or intangible-how far away we’ve gotten from the basic, primitive place we started in and how unnecessary so much of what we’ve constructed for ourselves is if you really think about it. A lot of the inspiration for this track came from a job I was working for a large media agency, seeing how huge multinational companies hire people to sell things to consumers and how media agencies strategise about reaching people in their homes, on their phones, etc. I sort of feel like all of these things, and particularly the way they’re developing with smartphones and high speed internet, etc-are in some ways taking us further and further away from our basic human relationships with each other. Even things as small as catching up with your friends on the phone or in person-now we all just sit back and stalk each other, getting gradual updates on every detail of each others’ lives without having anywhere near as much of a quality interaction. The second verse of the track is sort of looking at the recession amongst other things, the amazing economic system we’ve created and how much strain we’ve put on it with our own greed, buying and consuming things that when it comes down to it are totally unnecessary. As far as promoting our music, we definitely try to engage with our listeners online as that’s where people have migrated to-now as bands that’s where we have to try and reach them. We use myspace and facebook a lot to interact with people and also twitter to keep them updated, and while we try and embrace all these things so we can keep our message relevant, sometimes I get really frustrated. Essentially I just get sick of sitting on my laptop all day, and sometimes I wonder what life would have been like 20 years ago when people still largely interacted with each other without the need for a computer screen. Or 500 years ago, when there wasn’t even electricity! With that said, I understand the trade off, these sorts of technologies make so many things possible for people like us-such as the very fact that people are able to visit your blog and read this interview without the need for any financial backing from a media outlet.
Something I’ve noticed about both of your albums now is an ability to compose a really poignant track to finish with. Is this something you’re aware of or just the way it happens?
Well I think you’ve got to have a sick track as your last track. For a lot of people the strongest track doesn’t necessarily go at the end, a lot of people want to get their strongest tracks towards the beginning and that’s fair enough because we’re all struggling for peoples’ attention spans these days. I like to go out on a lasting note so that when the CD ends, you feel like going back and listening to it again. Walk You Home was one of the first tracks we did, we were in a position where we had both the intro and last track done and I knew that we wanted to put that at the end so then we just sorted the order in the middle. When we wrote the track I didn’t think it could be placed anywhere else besides last. I’m interested to see how people react to that song because it’s obviously really personal for me, it meant a lot to me to write it and I’m proud of it but it’s very much not your typical Hip Hop song. I’m not sure if everyone is going to like that track.
We’re on tour for the next 2 months with my man Urthboy in celebration of both of our new records, so make sure you come and see us on the road when we’re in your town! After that we’ll see what happens over the summer…Adit’s turning his attention to working on some new tracks with Spit Syndicate which I’m really excited about, and we still have a few tracks on the boil. I don’t think anyone could be mad at us if we had a break though–2 albums in 14 months is a pretty good effort I reckon.
