Leon Stevens of Southscope
Firstly congratulations on the new EP Hindsight and single Selfless. What subject matter do you address in your EP and is the writing a collaborative process between the band?
The content behind the 4 tracks on the EP are drawn directly from observations and experiences from my life over the years. It touches on themes of love, regret, the trials of life and the way different minds perceive and deal with these subjects.
These songs were pretty much complete before I took them to the band. However we always keep it open for change as Tyrone writes the drums and as we all decide on final arrangements and harmonies for each song.
With some obviously strong family ties within SouthScope, does this provide a more innate musical understanding when jamming and fleshing out new material?
Oh absolutely! It's almost my favourite part about the whole thing haha! No but the chemistry between us all still blows my mind and it never takes more than a few words or even a look before we're all on the same page and understanding of the direction of a song or an idea. It's great!
Having cut your teeth playing in various outfits in Sweden before returning to Australia to lay down some new material, what experiences did you take from your time in Europe that found their way into your Australian musical project?
Living, writing and performing over there definitely helped me to be more comfortable on a stage. Performing to a foreign audience was pretty intimidating at first! I also feel that my writing process evolved with my years spent there.
In a live context, have you found performing in Sweden greatly different to that of Australia?
The Swedes absolutely love music and really appreciate a live show so they were such a fun crowd to play to! The only real difference I suppose was being treated as a foreign artist and the novelty that comes with that.
The Hindsight EP was produced, engineered and mixed by Zachary Miller of Target Hearts Studios and mastered by Simon Struthers at Forensic Audio. What did Zachary and Simon each bring to the table that really shines through on this EP?
Well Zach's an old friend of mine so straight away we felt very comfortable working with him. He definitely helped me to open my mind through the whole process and brought new fun and exciting ideas to the table that we used throughout the EP.
Simon really felt the vibe we were going for and really developed the mixes even further through the mastering! We're stoked on the result.
What did you find to be challenging in putting this EP together and conversely what were some of the enjoyable surprises in working on Hindsight?
Initially we were faced with the challenge and pressure of recording the whole EP in only a two and a half days of studio time without any real pre-production. On the second day however, we decided to book another session a few weeks later which then enabled us to put even more thought into the production and come up with some exciting touches to the songs that had never crossed my mind previously, even rewriting one of the song structures during drum tracking.
What is on the horizon for SouthScope for the remainder of 2017?
It's an exciting year with the release of our debut ep, so our main focus is to get that out there and support it with a bunch of shows over the next couple of months. Without saying too much we are always writing and already have a handful of new songs so may even hit the studio for our next single late in the year.
