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Hi guys, welcome to VENTS! How have you been?
Yeah good thanks, we’re both in Oslo at the moment recording some new Sunship and Wombats stuff. It’s the first time I’ve been in an actual room with another musician for a while so it’s nice.
Can you talk to us more about your latest single “Hashtag World”?
It’s kind of a garage rock song about how subjective happiness is and learning to accept and embrace the fact that life is shit sometimes. About how we perceive what ‘normal life’ is when we’re surrounded by media showing us images of the insanely rich and beautiful with all these exciting lives being lead which can leave people seeing this day in day day feeling like they should always be doing more to reach these unattainable and obviously unrealistic goals.
Did any event in particular inspire you to write this song?
The idea was bubbling in my head for a while but it all came together while I was reading ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*^k’ by Mark Manson. I’d be feeling pretty down and a bit irritable and a friend recommended I give it a read. It was so good and there’s a super hero in it called Disappointment Panda (who i reference in the song) who’s super power is to tell people the harsh truth about themselves in the hope that they can confront the problem and deal with it.
How was the filming process and experience behind the videos?
Yeah great. We had the idea to do a trilogy of videos across one long narrative and so we reached out to Marta Brodacka, who had done the stop motion video for Up On The Moon, and explained the concept behind the album and after a few emails back and forth, Mushroom Bob’s adventure was born.
The single comes off your new album Everywhen – what’s the story behind the title?
I actually read it in a book called ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ by David Wallace-Wells (which is a must read about climate change) and found the concept intriguing and started reading up on it. It’s an aboriginal concept, translated roughly as ‘The Dreaming’ or ‘Everywhen’, and relates to our ancestors and nature. It encompasses our past, present and future all at once, in the same moment. It felt so relative to the album we were making. How both we, and the songs we create and choices we make, are all made up not only of our own past but also the past of the country and culture we happened to be born in, all the songs we’ve ever heard, the present day stories we tell ourselves and the future ones we imagine.
How was the recording and writing process?
It was genuinely one of the fastest album’s we’ve ever made, the writing process just flowed. We started off with the idea to make an EP but before we knew it we had 14 songs! The album was written between London and Oslo mainly, we sent ideas back and forth and tweaked them till we were happy. Random pointless memory, I wrote most of the lyrics/melody for Interstellar Ride jet lagged in New York looking out of a hotel window and A4 Life by a pool in Menorca. We recorded and produced the album ourselves in Oslo then sent all the files over to LA to be mixed by John Congleton, who really elevated and helped bring out the best in each song.
Would you call this a complete departure from your previous work or is in some ways a continuation?
I would say somewhere in between. I have done a couple of solo albums where I sing and write lyrics and Tord has done a couple of more electronic based albums so coupled together with what we’ve done in The Wombats it doesn’t feel like too much of a departure, I think to call it a complete departure we would’ve had to have made a techno-black-metal album or something, haha!
You’ve mentioned how you guys wanted for this to feel like a sci-fi soundtrack – so did you approach this almost as a score?
Interstellar Ride was one of the first songs we made for the album and so it felt like maybe the album could be a journey through ‘space as the mind’, going past various planets made of swirling thoughts. Once we had nearly finished the bulk of the album I asked Tord to send over some of his instrumental electronics tracks I knew he’d worked on over the years to see if any of them could be used as interludes to help it feel more like a sci fi journey. We both love film soundtracks and creating atmospheres in music that provoke imagery.
What aspect of time and nature did you get to explore on this record?
I guess every time you make a song you cement a song in a specific moment in your life, like a sonic photograph, which is one of the aspects I love most about music, it’s ability (like smells) to create and help store a memory. Also, all the experiences we’ve ever had, all the songs and conversations we’ve ever heard over time get stored in our minds and sometimes they pop up in songs and you’re like, oh where did that thought come from, didn’t even know I was thinking about that! Humanity’s relationship with nature was lurking in my mind throughout the writing I suppose, especially climate change. The word ‘nature’ is only present on the song, Hashtag World, where I realise that despite all this technology and media surrounding us and living life in a modern city we can become pretty detached from nature but we should never forget that we still are very much a part of it. There’s nothing quite like switching off all your devices and going for a long walk along a beach or up a mountain to calm you down.
Where else did you find the inspiration for the songs and lyrics?
Apart from our subconscious where most of this stuff comes from I’d read a few books, 2 of which I mentioned already and the 3rd was Sapiens:A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, such a good book. Check out Homo Deus too, fascinating! Riding with Elephants was actually a mad dream I had that I wanted to remember. Sometimes a sound can inspire a song, for example, A Beach In The Middle of Space started off as just a phone recording Tord had made of the Vienna orchestra tuning up then he messed around with the pitch of it.
What else is happening next in Sunship Balloon’s world?
Well unfortunately it doesn’t look like there are any gigs in the immediate future so we will just keep recording new music for our 2nd album. Also we didn’t get to meet Mushroom Bob whilst he was filming our videos so we’ve organised a night out with him, gonna get smashed on dead leaves and other decaying matter.
