STACK #151 May 2017

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STACK

MUSIC

We caught up with Amy Shark ahead of the release of her brand new EP, Night Thinker .

Words Alesha Kolbe

How did you go about perfecting your sound? AMY SHARK: It’s definitely taken the longest for me to work out, just ‘cause I was really lazy for a long time. I probably didn’t put the effort into the production. Production is such a big thing, and I know that now, whereas for so long I was just like ‘I just write things and acoustic songs and I don’t need to worry about it or pour that much money into it.’ I was just also trying to find my place and my sound, what I wanted to do, what would complement my voice and my writing. To be honest, putting acoustically-written songs with these big like hip-hop beats behind them just doesn’t really work, you know, or make sense. No-one’s gonna buy into that. It randomly happened with one of my first songs, I had a guy that was really great with percussion, and I was just like ‘this is working.’ We did it again

with another song which had a lot more electronic drops in it. I just felt really good about it - I thought it had a really cool sound. I was working with the lyrics and eventually I got there. Is it true that it only took you 10 minutes to put the finishing touches on Adore and Weekends ? It is actually. I don’t even mean to sound like a dick when I say that, but it’s pretty accurate because I’m either on or I’m not. If I ever have to push anything, I’ll generally just not - I won’t push it. If it doesn’t come out easily and fluidly - usually when I get the melody on point everything connects and it just becomes executed really well. That’s kind of what I’m addicted to.

Well I didn’t wanna use a family name, and my favourite movie of all time is Jaws . I used to have really heavy nightmares about sharks when I was younger, and my parents banned me from watching Jaws . I was pretty young. Then I moved onto like Jaws 2 , Jaws 3 , Jaws Revenge ; anything with a shark in it I was just addicted to. Basically that’s where it sorta comes from - being addicted to watching docos, reading about them. (And before you ask, she’s seen ‘about 30 seconds’ of Sharknado .) What kind of stuff did you listen to growing up? So much music. I listened to a lot of punk growing up, I sort of moved into listening to a lot of, you know, your Bjorks and your Jezabels, and your Tegan and Sara, really lyric-heavy stuff, Bright Eyes. Even that took me a while - I was for

Where did the Shark in Amy Shark come from? (ps – her full name is Amy Billings).

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