What’s the story behind your latest song/album?
“Last Quarter” first came into being as a demo song in 2017. However, it was not included in our first album “Forgotten Notebooks”, which we released on CD and digitally during the same period. It was forgotten somewhere in the recordings we made afterwards. The difficult journeys we made in the summer of 2024 and the retrospective questions we made led us to pull the song out of its hidden corner again. We included it in our latest album “Live In Studio: 19.10.2024” and recorded it in a single recording with minor interventions, preserving its acoustic sound. The theme of the song is the expression of exhaustion in the face of recurring negativities that are hoped to change but never change. The recurring guitar arpeggio and the lyrics express a tension in this direction.
How has your creative process evolved over the years?
The music we make is basically in the country/folk sound. However, since we come from different backgrounds, a spectrum like rock, blues, indie and grunge inevitably seeps into our songs. We have a variety of sources of inspiration that we have always admired and followed closely, from Willie Nelson to Nick Drake, Neil Young to Townes Van Zandt, Uncle Tupelo to the Louvin Brothers. Blues masters like Robert Cray, Junior Kimbrough, Tony Joe White have also joined this background over time and have had certain influences on our compositions.
What’s one misconception people have about being a musician?
I think that in ancient Greece, music, which had the power to affect all nature including the dead through the mythology of Orpheus, has created two different traditions over time, as an imitation practice with the epistemologies of Plato and Aristotle, and as a lower level of knowledge, such as poetry. Nietzsche addresses this issue with the distinction between Dionysus and Apollo. Musicianship is still either evaluated as a great divine power and a mystical activity of special people, or as a bohemian entertainment that is not very respectable for people trying to escape from responsible rational life. We believe that neither of these approaches are correct. Musicianship is not something that is done by saying “I am a musician”. It is a process of self-awareness, intuition and being able to create an alternative plane for life through one’s own emotional world. Of course, with the power of symbols that carry meaning, such as notes and words.
Who or what has been inspiring your music lately?
The late Justin Townes Earle, Will Johnson, who have been prominent names in modern folk/indie music lately, and the magnificent project Ocean Carolina, who have been quiet for a while, are the artists that have caught our attention. Of course, the tension-filled composition style of Tony Joe White, who we recently lost, and the near-flawless vocal techniques of Jim Reeves, one of the architects of the classic Nashville sound in the 60s, are quite admirable. Finally, the pioneer of Russian rock music Stas Namin and his band Tsvety are among the artists that have caught our attention and that we have been following live in the last year.
What’s next for you—any exciting projects or goals on the horizon?
We have more than 10 new compositions that we have written in the last two years. We will be preparing a thematic album from these pieces. Again, we do not want to spoil the acoustic sound, but there may be some electric guitar interventions in the arrangement. We will return to our studio routine in this direction in the summer. Thank you and the Hella Fuzz Music Magazine team for your interest in our song “Last Quarter” and for having this nice conversation with us. We hope our answers were clear and we expressed ourselves clearly. Stay tuned, best wishes.