A decade on from their effervescent debut body of work, Shawcross, Australian duo Good Morning are a staple of alternative music. Liam Parsons and Stefan Blair’s music oozes personality; masters of tone, shepherds of sonics, and wizards of words, the cult two-piece have shown immense character and craft throughout their discography. Never veering from their distinctly DIY approach, they remain authentic and unique, perching at the forefront of global indie, established as one of Australia’s most cherished acts.
Prolific since their artistic inception, Good Morning have offered quality and quantity throughout their six bodies of work to date. Tomorrow (22nd March), they return with their seventh, longest, and most ambitious album – Good Morning Seven. The 17-pronged LP is written, produced and engineered in-house, with the pair – who live in different continents – setting up temporary studies in different parts of the world. The result is a cohesive yet explorative, cinematic yet subtle project. Lyrically, its breadth of themes weave into each other, tackling the intricacies of relationships, self-evolution, vices and freedom.
As they delve deeper into themselves as humans and musicians, we connect with Good Morning, dissecting their bond, the Australian scene, and the making and message of their seventh record.
Listen to the teaser singles so far…
Read the full interview…
How has the year been for you so far?
Ok! Can’t complain really.
Take us back to your roots – how did you first begin making music together and finding your sound?
We met in high school and bonded over a similar taste in music in the same way teenagers all over the world have done for decades. We just never really grew up and stopped doing it. I think/hope we’re still finding our sound.
How is the Australian music scene? Was building a fan base there easier or more difficult than in the US and Europe?
The Australian music scene has some really amazing stuff in it and some true garbage as well, but maybe we’re that garbage to other people. We’re lucky enough to have a healthy group of friends around us that also played music or did other creative things, and that fostered a nice community in Melbourne. I don’t know if it’s any easier or harder to build a fan base in Australia compared to anywhere else. We never really thought about it all that much, seems a bit futile.
What about your personal and musical connection allows you to create so well together?
We just like one another most of the time and we’ve been doing it for a minute now so it just gets easier and easier. If you can spend a lot of time doing stupid voices with one another or just talking shit, then it’s usually pretty easy to make music with that person.
You now live in different continents. How do you work around that when writing and creating?
We haven’t had to come up against it too much yet. So far we’ve just been meeting up in various places around the world and working together for big chunks of time. We really don’t go for the email/zoom/file sharing method of things.
Congratulations on your seventh album! How are you feeling about the release?
Thanks! Feeling good. It’s been done for a minute now so we’re pretty excited for it to come out to the wider world. The bit after it’s done and before it comes out is the best we’ll ever feel about a record so we’ve been living in that for a while.
Where does this album sit within your wider discography? What’s new, what’s familiar?
It feels like a natural progression, or refinement if you will, of some of the sounds we’ve been working on throughout the last records. This time we added more. Just more in general. More songs and strings and voices and synths and samples. Went for a kind of maximalist approach a lot of the time.
What was the creative process of the record?
We built ourselves a studio in Melbourne and spent all our time just writing and recording. In the past we’ve made most of our records in a few days, this one was a couple of years. Obviously most of the time we were ‘working’ we were really just hanging out with friends and doing other stuff around the studio, but just having the luxury of having our own long term space meant that we really zeroed in on production this time around.
What inspired the sonics of the new project?
We wanted to make something with a brighter feeling palette, almost our version of ‘pop music’. We referenced a lot of old dollar bin records as well to try and harness a kind of dustiness. But honestly it was really just whatever gear we had picked up over the period that kept us excited. This time it was lots of new synthesisers and samplers.
What are you conveying thematically across the album?
Not sure yet. Usually that takes a few more years to reveal itself.
What’s to come from you, this year and beyond? \
We’re going on tour in the USA with Waxahatchee and then playing some of our own shows in Australia. Probably some more afterwards too, I don’t know, we’re just getting our shit together. Then there’s always more music to be worked on.