Wollongong legends The Huneez sat down to unpack their music, songwriting, and their stunning debut single.
If you haven’t wrapped your ears around Morning Blue, the stellar debut single from Wollongong’s The Huneez, then you’re seriously missing out. A fresh and bright new track for your summer playlist, the trio have well and truly knocked it out of the park with this one.
Fresh off the release, the trio sat down to reflect on their creative process, their development as artists, their formation as a band, and their approach to Morning Blue: the music and the video.
Paul: I wanted to start a band, a simple band. Just keys, vocals, and drums. I wanted a pop band, so I put an ad out on Facebook, like most bands do these days…
Chad: And I responded!
Paul: Yep.
Chad: And Paul heard me and thought, “that is simple!”
Paul: “He’ll do nicely!”
Chad: Paul was, and still is, a drum teacher, and there was a vocal teacher working at the same place. So, Paul asked her to come in and that ended up being Kaitlin.
Kaitlin: It was me. Yeah, I was on the train, got the message. Didn’t realise at the time that I needed this band in my life, but I was like, “hey, I’ll give this a go.”
Chad: We knew she needed us.
Kaitlin: So, I came in and we did a few practices, and we all kind of just got along really well. We ended up being able to just make music really easily together.
Chad: We ended up in our first few sessions, that solid couple of months where the band starts and we’re trying to build a setlist, we ended up writing about a song each session I think.
Paul: We had a full set within three months.
Chad: It was pretty cool. And after that, obviously, we changed a couple of things around and tightened some things up, but I think that’s when we knew we had something. We just worked so well together. I’m a songwriter as well but I’m not so good on the lyrical front. Kaitlin just has it all there.
Kaitlin: We kind of all brought something different to the table that each one of us didn’t have. I’d bring lyrics, Chad would bring some melodies and fancy chords to the table.
Chad & Kaitlin: Paul’s got the rhythm!
Chad: And also structure, Paul’s really good at structuring songs and knowing where things aren’t working. He’s good at reeling things in when I go too far out. So, that’s our writing approach. I think it was a similar story with Morning Blue. Kaitlin had a rough outline of the lyrics and the melody, and I ended up messing around with the blues scale. I came up with the riff and just based the whole song on that. And then Paul joined in and by the end of the session, we had what became Morning Blue.
Kaitlin: Yeah I feel like we fleshed it out really quickly.
Paul: We had the meat and potatoes of it in the first two and a half hours!
Chad: Yeah, crazy! And then eventually it came to recording it, we ended up in the studio and just smashed it out in a day. Adam Jordan, the sound engineer, was really good. He suggested tweaks to bits and pieces and before long we had a master! And then we slept on it for a while because I had to get my act together and make a music video.
Paul & Kaitlin: (Laughs)
Chad: I was trying to come up with an idea that fit the track, I knew I wanted to direct it. Probably should’ve asked these two if it was okay but it all worked out in the end!
Paul & Kaitlin: (Laughs)
Chad: I pitched a few ideas to the band and eventually came up with the idea of having the greenscreen shirts. And the whole idea of the video… if you’ve seen it, that bit at the end that dollies through all of us, moving into the next shot and it appears as one seamless shot, and that’s where it all sort of started. And then from there, I developed the idea of changing the colour of the shirts on the hits, on the notes of the riff. We filmed it all over two days, one in the studio, one on the beach. Got up at sunrise. Poor Kaitlin, I made her walk along the freezing cold beach in the middle of winter with just the T-shirt on.
Paul: She still hates you.
Chad: She’s still in the band, so it’s all okay.
Kaitlin: Haven’t left yet!
Chad: But yeah, the video came together, lots of work in post-production obviously, but just chipping away at it between work and band practice and everything. So, that’s how it all happened!
Paul: About the band name…
Chad: Oh yeah, people keep asking us that! How’d we come up with The Huneez?
Paul: Do you remember?
Kaitlin: We chucked a bunch of words on the whiteboard, one of the words was honey.
Paul: I just remember we were talking about toast and someone mentioned jam.
Kaitlin: And you [Paul] always wanted “The” in the name.
Chad: Yeah, you had to have that. And then I think I pitched “The Honey Toasts”, didn’t I?
Paul: Then we went with The Honey, that didn’t work, so we thought, “we’ll plural it.”
Chad: Whack a Z on there to make it look cool.
Paul & Kaitlin: And change the spelling!
Paul: Now it looks like it belongs on a festival poster!
Chad: Festival organisers take note!
You can check out Morning Blue on all streaming services, and watch the music video and behind-the-scenes on The Huneez’s channel on Youtube!
Grab your tickets to see The Huneez at La La La’s (November 11) here.
