HARRIS gives us an insight into the Melbourne music community right now.

Tell us a bit about where you find yourself right now and how have the last two months of isolation treated you? 

I’m currently sitting next to a heater in my kitchen sipping on some freshly made filter coffee. My last two months have probably been as bizarre as everyone else’s. That being said, a lot of my friends have told me that they feel their life or routine hasn’t changed that dramatically during isolation. I feel like almost every aspect of mine has. The most obvious one being that I haven’t been able to play or attend any live shows. That been the biggest thing. Also there was a lot of change in my non-music life as well. I was working at a pub North Fitzroy, so my nights have really freed up a lot there too. Oh, I moved house. So I’m just living with my dog, Keiko, now. That’s been cute.

I’ve had a lot more free time to write and work on music, which has been productive…at times. Honestly, sometimes isolation hasn’t put me in the best headspace to create, cause its just weird place to be, existentially. A lot of great things have come out of it too. I have a theory that I write best when I’m meant to be doing something else. Replying to dumb emails, cleaning the bathroom, writing a song for someone else, trimming my bonsai tree. So I’m not sure if unlimited free time is my ‘perfect’ writing environment. But I’m also a believer in just making yourself sit down with a guitar or at the piano, or with whatever, and putting down whatever comes out.

Congratulations on the release of your new single, it’s certainly a change of pace from Fan Girl. What’s that like moving between two projects of completely different ilk?

Hey, thanks! I feel like I consume a lot of different music, so I guess it makes sense that I want to make different types of styles of it. That being said, I feel that both Fan Girl and HARRIS sit somewhere in the general indie rock sphere. But, yeah, obviously very different vibes or ends of it.  

It’s a very different writing process for both projects, both in terms of what headspace and angle I’m going for, but also the literal way it’s written. In Fan Girl, Vince and Jack write/wrote all the music and after that’s done I write the melodies and lyrics. In HARRIS, I’m writing everything. The music might come first or it might be a lyric.

It’s a bit hard to describe the different headspaces and angles I have for both projects, but on a really superficial level, with Fan Girl, especially with the newer stuff, it’s a bit grand and vague in a pop-reliability way. With HARRIS stuff it’s a bit more naturally confessional and as a result it can feel a bit more like an unfiltered warped version of my personality, maybe sometimes a bit full on or gloomy, but also a bit silly.

Thematically, I guess the lines between my writing for both projects sometimes get blurred because I almost always am writing about what I know or about myself. So that’ll happen.

I get to play guitar live in HARRIS, that’s fun!

“Sheena Is A Bush Doofer” is a heart-wrenching story about the trials and tribulations of relationships. Can you talk about that moment in your life and where that story came from?

Ah damn, I was trying to make it funny and not heart-wrenching! I wrote it when I was in a not particularly fun time in my life. But it’s about a relationship between two people who are really different, and things aren’t connecting like you hope they would.

We understand the song was written pre-iso but certain aspects appear to be quite timely and appropriate. Was your DIY video clip a way of linking the moments from the past with the present, or was it less considered than that?

I don’t think it was as academic as that. It was more like, how the fuck do I make a music video when I can’t leave my house? There’s this big white wall in the house I’m living in and that made me think of the Alex Turner video for Cornerstone, and so it was very inspired by that.

There’s a lot of feedback noises and eerie soundscape stuff that float around on the track, so I also thought that filming it on an old handheld camera would lend to that gritty DIY vibe. Then, Harry Anderson, who edited the video, used his studio magic to accentuate that VHS-home-video vibe further.

We have been told to expect more music from you in the coming months, is that have you’ve kept busy lately?

Who told you that…

Yeah, I have been working on quite a bit of new music. Not sure what the exact plan is at this moment. There’s lots of demos floating around of varying level of qualities and coherence. But yeah, there will be more HARRIS songs out in the near future.

We’ve have been living in some dark and strange times, can you give us an insight into the Melbourne music community right now, how do you think everyone will rise out of this?

I think it’s been really difficult, weird and hard to navigate for everyone. And the future seems a bit scary sometimes. But I think some good things will come out the other side. I can’t speak for the whole Melbourne music scene, but I feel like most of the people in our community are taking this opportunity to write a lot, and mix things they may have recorded years ago, and collaborate with new people (safely of course) and explore other ways of creating. It’s definitely a thing I’ve only felt more recently, but I have lot of moments of optimism, and I’m really excited to see what comes out of all this, once things get a little more normal.

Sheena Is A Bush Doofer - Out Now

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