Ever since we first laid ears on Good Brother’s new single Peace To My Brother earlier this month, we’ve been hooked. The track flaunts infectious electronic production with deft lyricism, crafting a slice of music that rewards multiple listens.
So, before he launches the single this Saturday at Boney, we caught up with the artist himself to chat about the song, genre, and what the future holds.
Ahead of his Peace To My Brother single launch show this Saturday, we caught up with Melbourne-based artist Good Brother for a chat.
HAPPY: Hey, how’s it going? What are you up to at the moment?
GOOD BROTHER: Yeah, good thanks. Mainly just gearing up for the single launch coming up this Saturday. Other than that, just the usual; writing, recording, mixing, wondering why it’s been so long since I’ve had a Le-Snak.
HAPPY: We’re loving Peace To My Brother! Could you tell us a bit about the track?
GOOD BROTHER: Peace to My Brother is the first release from an upcoming album I’m releasing titled Bananatown, which I wrote and recorded over around a month last winter. I wrote the song after another young musician had passed away and I was feeling quite gross about being a listener on the other end of the kind of trivialisation/reduction of real people’s problems that takes place in the music industry. At the time the awareness of that disconnection was pretty consuming. The song took quite a few more attempts than usual to get the approach right, both lyrically and musically, but I’m really happy with the way it turned out.
HAPPY: You’ve already got a full album under your belt… how did you approach the writing of this new single differently to past material?
GOOD BROTHER: Up until a couple of years ago, I had no desire to be a producer or songwriter of any sort. The first album, Congratulations, You’re Tall, was really just intended as a kind of symbolic ‘letting go’ of a selection of the mountains of stuff that I had created over the years while learning to make music.
In the lead up to writing for this second album, I had some personal things go down that put me in a super confused mental state, and so I started writing as a means to make sense of things. As a result, I was leaning a lot more into parts of my personality I wouldn’t if I were just making music for creation’s sake. An example being the line ‘You’re not practising honesty/you’re just too self-absorbed to read the room’, which really captures me at my cynical worst.
Musically, I was listening to a lot of songwriter music at the time, and I really liked the idea of if, say someone like Leonard Cohen listened to a lot of house music. Not that it sounds anything like that, but I really wanted to fuse these two different types of music that I loved; a singer/songwriter sentiment with dance production.
HAPPY: One thing that really struck us from the new single was the way you flip between genres. When you’re writing a song, do you approach it through the lens of one particular genre and infuse other genres into it? Or do you approach the songs without any real sense of genre in mind?
GOOD BROTHER: I’ve always listened to a bunch of different genres, whatever speaks to me really. So when I’m making a song like Peace to My Brother, I’m focusing on how to best convey the song’s meaning. There’s no deliberate intent to fuse genre. In the instance of the beat change in this song, it was intended as a literal illustration of the song’s lyrics about the commercialisation of genuine pain/emotion. While the message of the song is otherwise gloomy, smack bang in the middle of it is an 80s inspired, nostalgia-drenched, love song chorus to distract you.
HAPPY: You also mix electronic production with real instrumentation, right? What’s the importance of incorporating real instrumentation in your music?
GOOD BROTHER: There’s a lot of music I just can’t listen to because it sounds ‘too-perfect’, or you can’t feel the human on the other side. For me, music has always been about that feeling of connection as a listener. Coming from a background of playing guitar, I think using real instrumentation is just the most direct way for me to inject myself into a song. On the other hand, I find the idea of exploring different realms and fidelities within the context of electronic music exciting. For example, I like recording guitar parts or vocals on my phone and setting them against synth plug-ins and drum machines. I think that real instrumentation will always pop up in my music as I try to keep things as genuine as I can.
HAPPY: We’re interested in your live show… could you walk us through what your live setup looks like?
GOOD BROTHER: So the current live setup includes a drummer performing with me, which brings a whole different energy to the tracks that I’m super pumped about. Then on my end, it’s a combination of vocals, loops and samples on a sample pad and playing some keys and guitar live. I want the shows to be this space where you can dance along and at the same time indulge my brooding existentialism.
HAPPY: Are there any particular artists you’re digging at the moment?
GOOD BROTHER: I’m really obsessed with the new Weyes Blood album Titanic Rising at the moment; it feels like the soundtrack to a really high-class drug overdose. I think Julia Jacklin is amazing and love her new album. I find Earl Sweatshirt’s latest stuff really inspiring. The A to B directness of his lyricism and song structures feels really honest and vulnerable. I’m always listening to a lot of Car Seat Headrest, The National, Father John Misty, LCD Soundsystem and Frank Ocean.
HAPPY: What’s next for Good Brother? Any other exciting plans in the works?
GOOD BROTHER: After this launch, hopefully just playing a lot more shows and releasing the new album Bananatown. Got some stuff on there that I’m really proud of that I’m looking forward to sharing. There’s also a couple of film school students who have decided to follow me around over the next bit and make a documentary, so that should be interesting.
HAPPY: Cheers for the chat!
GOOD BROTHER: Thank you, hopefully I’ll catch you at a show sometime.
Catch Good Brother live at Boney in Melbourne on Saturday, April 27th. More info here.
