Soda Blonde: 'The dream needs to be reimagined'
An interview with Soda Blonde's Faye O'Rourke and Adam O'Regan about their second album Dream Big, as they get set to head out on tour
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This week is an interview with Soda Blonde (Faye O'Rourke, Adam O'Regan, Dylan Lynch, and Donagh Seaver O'Leary) who released their second album Dream Big on September 8 and kick off their tour in London on Wednesday, November 22. I interviewed them around the Indian summer start of September for the podcast, TPOE 278. You can read the interview below, with Adam and Faye talking about the creative process and how Dream Big came into reality, Spotify and the diminishing returns for artists that led the band to start a members’ club, and we talk through some of the songs on the album as well and the ideas underpinning them.
Soda Blonde tour dates:
November 22: The Lexington, London
November 24: Roisin Dubh, Galway
November 25: Dolan’s Warehouse, Limerick
November 26: Connolly’s of Leap
November 30: Cyprus Avenue, Cork
December 7: The Black Box, Belfast
December 8: The Spirit Store, Dundalk
December 14: Vicar Street, Dublin
You were the wedding band at each other's wedding. I was saying that that's where the money is, but you're not thinking about that right now, like three days out from the release of the second Soda Blonde album?
Adam: No, right now, we're hoping that the album is going to keep us from having to do that. But, we had a lot of fun. One of the things I loved about it was that, all I've ever really done is play the music that we write, and learning other people's songs is a really good lesson - you learn a lot about song craft and structure and all these interesting things, so I enjoyed that part of it.
What were your favorite wedding songs to play? Was there Abba, medleys?
Faye: No, actually, we didn't. We did, Prince, Fleetwood Mac, Blondie...
Adam: Did a bit of Queen. We did a bit of Earth, Wind and Fire, have to do 'September'.
Faye: All the classics.
Adam: And then we ended with probably the best version ever of 'Time of my Life'.
Great. I talked to you, Faye, about four years ago, just after the release of the debut Soda Blonde EP. I was going to ask what the highlight of the past four years has been, I presume you're going to say your weddings, personally, but musically?
Faye: Oh gosh, you know, it's funny, the wedding thing, people seem to think you love talking about your wedding. But I'm just like, let it be gone! It was so stressful.
Was it, yeah?
Faye: No, it was good. It was fun. But highlights of the last four years...
I mean, since we last talked, that's your whole career really, to date.
Faye: I think Vicar Street, being able to fill that venue again, having filled it as the previous iteration (Little Green Cars). That was a huge moment. And I feel like we defied expectation in some way.
Adam: We overcame the odds. For me, I'd say making this new album has been the most fun we've ever had making an album. And I think that's a testament to how much we've overcome to get together because we trust each other so much now and so the creative experience is just so fluid.
Faye: Actually, that's probably going to be one of the highlights of my life, I'd say, making this album.
Making this album? Really? Bands always say it's so stressful.
Faye: I think so yeah. No, I find the releasing stuff more stressful, the making stuff is just where the joy is, it's so liberating. And like Adam said, we definitely come to a point where we were just so open with each other in terms of sharing ideas - it's a very safe space. And I think maybe that's not true for a lot of bands making music, it can be a really stressful experience. We filmed a little bit in the studio, and we had one argument and in my mind, it was this huge explosive moment, and it was gonna make great documentary footage, or whatever, down the line. It's just we're so amicable with each other, it's such a shit argument to listen back to...
What was the argument about, can you remember?
Faye: We always argue.
Adam: I think there was two stressful moments. One was, there's a song on the album called 'Boys'. And Faye had written it. And as we often do, we kind of completely changed it and sped it up. And so when it came time to record her voice, it was in an inhuman tempo for her to get these syllables out. And so that was a bit stressful. We were like, 'just keep going'. That was a bit stressful. And then the other one was, we had composed a song called 'Bad Machine' - well it wasn't called 'Bad Machine’ at the time, it was just a piece of music - and we were in the writing process. Faye had brought us this melody, and this chord progression. And it's very rare that Faye ever shares a song with us unless she's finished the lyrics and she has a structure.
Faye: I like to feel like there's a conclusion reached before I'm happy with sharing it.
Adam: And so she reluctantly shared this little melodic idea with us and very quickly, it took fire and we created this big mammoth, electro rock kind of song. It's not a very nice place to be as a songwriter or as a lyricist to have a fully produced, fully realised piece of music, it's quite intimidating, because then you have to find the emotion in the music and it's just a little bit more of an elusive thing. In the studio then, we were just banging our heads off to the wall, trying to get the lyrics together. And Faye kept coming up with all these lyrics. We put her through the wringer trying to get the lyrics out, which was was never something we do, because she's such an incredible lyricist.
Faye: Songs do take on their own journey, I suppose. This was just a particularly arduous one. But I would wake up in the middle of the night and cold sweats being like, 'this fucking song is just haunting me'. For weeks! We actually took a break, didn't we? We wrapped everything up and that was the one detail we needed to finish. And yeah, it was really unpleasant. So I don't know if I’d do it again.
Adam: But we got it there. I mean, the results! It doesn't really matter, I suppose, what the process is.
Faye: No, I mean, we collaborated, that was the thing. And we've done it before, like some of our better songs, I feel, have been the two of us collaborating.
Yeah?
Faye: Yeah. Like, 'In the Heat of the Night'.
Adam: Yeah, it was fun. It's a very vulnerable thing to write lyrics with another person, because you have to justify their meaning. If you're writing in an insular way, in your own bedroom, it's your own poetic licence to express yourself in any sort of way. But when you're trying to write with another person...
Faye: You're really good at that. Because I kind of just go with whatever subconscious things are there and you're able to kind of go through everything.
Adam: Yeah, but I'm envious of you in that way. I am. I'm too conscious, like, I'm too trying to like, 'why does this make sense? Why does this whatever', and, you know, it's not always conducive to the most...
Faye: Sometimes as well. You'll be like, 'Did you say this?' And it won't be that and I'll be like, 'Yeah! that's what I said! (That's actually a better lyric.)'
It was a relatively easy recording process by the sounds of it? You guys have been making music together now for well over 10 years, maybe even closer to 15 years. So it's almost innate, in a way?
Adam: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why it was easy and enjoyable. One of them, I have to say, was going into a studio together, because the last album, we did it on a shoestring budget in our various houses, and in our various kitchens and stuff. It was at a point where we had to record every individual drum separately, so we could get the sound we needed, and then stitch it together in the mix. We're really happy with the result. But it takes a little bit of the musicality and the human feel out of it. And so this time, we decided to go into a studio and set up and play together. I feel like that playability, you can hear it, you can hear that we're having fun. And there's so many moments of magic that only really could have happened in that sort of scenario. So that was lovely.
Faye: Yeah, it's great to play in a live room with a live sound. And one of the songs is actually - I think we had contemplated leaving it as a demo - it's the last song on the album, it's called 'Going Out'. It was just a jam. I was looking back through demos, and I did have a rough chord progression and a section for it, which was totally abandoned. So it was kind of funny, it was a jam that was totally improvised and all the lyrics came in one go, which kind of made me feel better about the issue with 'Bad Machine'. It restored my faith actually, because it was just a subconscious stream of thought that was kind of perfect.
Adam: Channeling the heavens or something.
Do you enjoy still writing the lyrics? Did you feel particularly inspired by it? Did you have loads of lyrics ready to go in the past couple years?
Faye: Oh, no, I don't work like that. I don't collect reams of words ever. I respond to music always. My poetry, I'd say, is abysmal. I haven't really ever tried, but I've just always been taken to those places by chord progressions and melodies and things like that.
And so musically, Adam, are you the main driver behind what the sound is?
Adam: No, no, I couldn't say that necessarily. As I said before, it's a very collaborative process. We trust each other all so much. Because we've been through so much together. I mean, everyone's got their individual taste profile, which is very different as well. So it makes for a really collaborative and open space. No one really wears - or rather, everyone wears different hats at different moments in this band. On the album sleeve, we say, guitarist, and drummer and bass player, but really, we all share those roles at any given moment... there's no one way of doing anything.
Was there a general idea for the album? Like maybe musically, did you look at what worked, what didn't work, the first time around? You said that you wanted to record more of a live sound.
Faye: I think that came with just being in that great studio, I think we had discussed definitely wanting to do something that was a bit more broad-shouldered. And just kind of guitar heavy, you know, because it was just a sound that maybe we hadn't leaned so much into on the first record. So naturally, you're going to want to go in a different direction. There was some sort of maybe foundational, weird trippy sounds that I had been messing around with at home and also, it was sort of written towards the end of lockdown. So I was very sick of emotionally mining and writing these ballads that were piano ballads or guitar ballads. I wanted to be more experimental and respond to that. And then, as Adam said, these things get pulled completely apart and stitched together again. There was a freedom in that for me. I was much less inhibited than I ever have been in terms of writing. And I was sending Adam things that were like, a minute and a half and weren't fully fleshed out. So, I guess it allowed for something more expansive to come from it.
Have you always enjoyed the making of albums, the process of creating an album?
Faye: I think it's becoming my favorite part of it, for sure.
Adam: Yes, but like, it's got better and better. When I look back on the process of making the first album (Little Green Cars - Absolute Zero), compared to making this album, it's like, 'Woah, that really is not how an album should be made.' There's just such an openness. Now, I will say that comes down to what we've learned. And we've become producers. We weren't producers at the time when we made our first album, and maybe we got a bit better at the second album. And now we've learned so much now.
Faye: How do you mean it shouldn't have been made that way? I'm just curious.
Adam: Just when I look back on it. I mean, we worked with an amazing producer called Marcus Dravs. I remember feeling like I locked horns with him a little bit, because he was very much the producer and in the hierarchy of the studio, he kind of called the shots a little bit. That's a way to make albums and obviously, I'm sure if you go into the studio with Brian Eno or other people - and he's a student of Brian Eno - there are people who take over in that way, and they direct the band. But I've always kind of felt I knew how things should be. I remember there was a time where Faye was recording vocals for 'My Love Took Me Down to the River', and we weren't allowed to be in the studio, like nobody else in here. I didn't really like that, I don't want to be shut out of my own fucking band.
Faye: I remember being really frustrated with that, because I just couldn't - the pressure was like this surmounting kind of pressure. And I remember just doing 70, 80 takes and hearing them back and being like, 'This is just not...' And also, we were working off the demos that you had produced as a 17-year-olds. It wasn't like he came in and rearranged any of the music. We really were beat for beat going from those demos. So I suppose frustrating to be locked out of that when you're such an integral part of the whole thing.
Adam: We can't really knock him too much he was responsible for, I would say, the entire production of 'The John Wayne'. He definitely took that in a direction. And 'Kitchen Floor' he did a good job on as well.
Where did you record this album by the way, the new Soda Blonde album?
Faye: Black Mountain Studios in Dundalk, with an absolutely wonderful man named Peter Baldwin.
Adam: He's our engineer.
Faye: The light of our lives. Just a great guy. I think I'd always like to have him around.
Independence always seems like it's been an important thing to you. I think that we talked about that before, Faye. It sounds like maybe those things which Adam was just talking about might feed into this idea of wanting more control over the band. Did you have offers for this album? Were you tempted by any record industry stuff? Or were you like, 'no, no, we still want the control'.
Faye: I think if the right offer came along, it would be something to consider. But I guess it would have to be something pretty phenomenal for us to relinquish the rights to our music. The landscape is so different now. We're trying to be innovators, I think, in how people are buying music. We've just started a members' club. Adam painstakingly went through back and forth trying to get it going. You talk about podcasts, there's a paywall for anything that you want to listen to. We've put thousands of euro into music videos, and it's very hard to sort of get a return. And while I'm saying this, I don't want to be overly negative and point the finger, I don't want to be too down on everything, but I just do think it's time that there's a renaissance and that people connect with the music like they used to, and feel like they have an ownership of the music and that they're a part of something and that they're a part of a movement and that they're a part of a scene. And our fans are definitely interested in that avenue. But you know, if somebody wants to offer me 1.5 mil, then I'm not gonna say...
Adam: I was thinking this morning, a lot about the title of the album, Dream Big. And we've given a few definitions as to why we titled it that and I'm not sure that we totally hit the nail on the head yet, purely because, you know, we're not always great at talking about our art, because we like to leave the window open to interpretation. The process of making art is you're dealing with abstraction; it's colour and it's light. Even when we use words, it's in an abstract way, so not always the most eloquent at breaking it down. But I was thinking about it this morning. I think, for me, we started playing music when we were like, 15, I've always dreamed of being in a band, I've always dreamed of playing on stages around the world, winning a Grammy, making multiple albums, playing on Jimmy Fallon, all those things, you know. In the 10 years since we've been making music together, the music industry has completely changed. And we've accomplished some great things. But with the advent of Spotify and digital distribution, all that sort of stuff, what it's meant is that the barrier to entry has completely come down. And what that means is two things. It means one, if you love music, like we do, there's just so much variety now, and so much culture and so much perspective, and so much choice, which is great. But on the other hand, it also means that the landscape is so vast, and there are 100,000 songs being uploaded to Spotify every single day. That's 100,000 artists, with the same dream that we have, the same ambition, they're going to bed and they're waking up and they're agonising over, 'how am I going to make this work?' And 'how am I going to achieve that dream?' I just think the dream needs to be reimagined. We need to revise 'what is the dream?' Like, what is the dream for a young person trying to make music these days? I think what it comes down to is taking in, cultivating the community that you're in, which is what we're trying to do with this.... I think the other problem is that the world now is so obsessed with numbers. You're obsessed with how many likes you have, how many monthly listeners you have, how many followers you have. And what that's really poisonous for is that it creates this comparative thing in your mind. So you might have like 30,000 monthly listeners. But then you look at Johnny and the Rockets and they have like 40,000 monthly listeners and you're going like, 'What are we not doing? Why am I not good enough? What are we not putting out to make us that?' It's nothing to do with that really. It's impossible to connect with that sort of number thing. But like 30,000 people listening to your music every single day, if you put 30,000 people in a field, that is a fucking lot of people. But you can't really feel that - you can't connect with that idea in your mind when you're looking at Spotify numbers. But on the other hand, if you played in a small room full of 100 people, you would feel on top of the world, and we do feel on top of the world. And in any scenario like that, you feel enriched, you feel like a megastar. But yet 40,000 monthly listeners or 30,000 monthly listeners doesn't feel right. And so it's about trying to make that human connection and reconnect with the fans in a tangible way. And so that's what we're trying to do with this members' club. We feel that it's a way that every band should move forward. I think it would change the industry. If everyone had a €2 a month, €1 a month subscription, it takes the power back, takes the value back. And that's my tangent over.
Faye, is that what you were thinking as well? 'We're putting all this stuff out, we put hours and thousands of euro into it and yet we're not seeing a return.' This is like a small bit of a return in a way. But also, it's called a members' club, it's for the fans as well...
Faye: Yeah, I'd be lying if I said we would like to broaden our horizons in terms of what we can actually afford to keep making. Because it comes down to wanting to make more stuff. And if we make a music video, we can't really make anything that's not a certain quality. So we're dropping a good bit of cash every time we try and create stuff. It is actually just a way of making sure that we can continue, as well. It doesn't have to be as sterile as needing more revenue streams, and all that kind of stuff. But also, like, we were boxing up all our vinyl yesterday, and putting all the stickers on it and writing a hundred million bajillion postcards to people and that - I had a really crap day yesterday, and that just makes me reconnect with what we're actually doing, just touching something, having something physical and seeing somebody's name and where the address is - this is going to Singapore, this is going to Japan - that makes you feel that you can carry on because it's not an easy thing to keep doing, especially with no label, no management and all that kind of stuff. And I think people look at us and have a lot of respect for what we do. And I do feel that, from the industry and the community. I think we're very confident that we're going to continue doing this to the highest standard, and make some absolutely incredible music.
Adam: The revenue thing, the income thing, is definitely a part of it, but it's only a part of it. To me, it's actually more of a value thing. It's value on art and value on human connection. As Faye said, when we were boxing up all the vinyls last night, seeing all the names, that is the complete opposite of what Spotify feels like; you can often just feel like you're screaming into the void. And at the end of the day, how Spotify works is you put out some music, if you're lucky they'll select you for an editorial playlist. And then you have to go, 'Thank you so much Spotify, everyone, go check out this playlist.' So you direct everyone to Spotify and Spotify just directs everyone elsewhere. Nobody finds a band really through Spotify, it's about songs and you skip on to the next song.
Faye: I will say it does make me sick people just on their knees thanking Spotify for maybe an automated playlist [that] they're thrown into. I don't even know if there's real people editing these playlists or if it's just an AI thing now. It's just a bit grim.
‘Midnight Show’
We haven't really talked about the album. Is it almost like a meta commentary? I was thinking of the first line on the album that you sing Faye, 'Everything is changing, but I don't grow. Nevermind, I have a midnight show.' And so from that to the title track, where you sing, 'I know what I am. I know what I could be put me in my place, but nothing can hold me.' Is it all kind of a meta commentary on the music industry? This is my very small thesis that I'm putting together.
Faye: You're absolutely not wrong. Particularly with 'Midnight Show', that was something where I was coming from that place of examining the industry and questioning whether to submit to it or not because that is always the thing, you have that voice in your head going, 'Should I just give up and become an Instagram influencer and do that and submit myself to the prostitution of everything?' And as I said, a lot of this stuff, when I'm sitting down to write it, is starting from a subconscious place, particularly with ‘Dream Big’. For me, I was commenting on just the cultural situation. It wasn't just about the music business; to me, to dream big was just the very simple idea of having a roof over your head, which seems next to impossible for anyone of my generation. It was just a broad commentary on what was in the atmosphere, I suppose.
‘Bad Machine’
Adam: One thing that we wanted to bring to this album was a little bit more rage and a bit more bite in the way of guitar. This was the first time where I feel like we achieved something in that. It's funny, lots of articles keep saying - the reviews that came out about it were like, 'Oh, Buzzy synth, synth-laden, synth-driven track'. But actually it's all guitar, it's a big dirty guitar going on. That is the first time that we started to tap into that, I think.
'Boys'
One of the things with this album is it sounds like you're having fun playing around with what the sound is of Soda Blonde? This is almost a dance song, the way it starts, like Disclosure or something.
Faye: When we started arranging it, I was like, 'This sounds like Ultrabeat or 'Born Slippy'. It was just making me feel nostalgic for being a very, very, very young person and hearing club tracks that just made you want to move. They were so crushingly sad. There was something about it that's really nostalgic for me. Like, hearing my older cousins getting ready to go out clubbing and I was too young to go with them and hearing all these songs, and I just remember feeling so sad. I'm not sure if it was because I couldn't go with them, or what was the thing, but there's just something in that music. I guess it mirrors what the club experience is: It starts off good. When you actually step back and look at it, you're like, 'What's going on here? This is actually a pretty...'
Adam: Ritualistic thing.
Faye: Yeah, absolutely. So I hope we always sound like we're figuring out what our whole sound is because I don't think I'd ever like to be beholden to one sonic soundscape.
Can you remember where the start of this song came from?
Faye: I had a demo that initially I wasn't sure (about). Because I, unbridled, sat down and wanted to write something that had a dancyish feel and was something outside of the box. I wasn't really sure how I felt about it. And then I showed it to you.
Adam: I can't think of an instance ever where Faye has brought a song into us and we've been like, 'No, that's not good.' It doesn't really ever happen like that... she played it for us and we just absolutely loved it. I think it was Dylan, maybe, that put that break beat underneath it. And we took the instrumentation out of the front. A lot of these decisions aren't necessarily conscious, you're just being governed by taste and emotion. And if there's one thing I think that this album is more of, it's just music that we want to hear. This is the music that we want to hear.
‘Space Baby’
And so from 90s dance to 90s pop music on 'Space Baby. Lovely guitar sound. Faye, in ye're interview in the Irish Times at the weekend, you talked about giving away a lot in the lyrics and the effect of that on family and stuff. But is that the only way that you know, lyrically, that you have to put yourself in the song? I feel like 'Space Baby' is one of the tracks where you're putting yourself out there.
Faye: I don't know if it's the only way that I know. Like Adam said, it's not something that's too conscious, I just sit down and do what I do. That was one of the songs that was very openly about parts of my relationship. My husband's always very frustrated, because he's like, 'Why don't you write anything nice about our relationship?' I'm like, 'No one wants to hear that.' Sometimes if I'm hitting a wall, I might draw inspiration from other styles of lyrics or a certain poetry. There's certain people that I go back to, but it always ends up coming out sounding like something I would write at the end of the day.
‘Die for Danzig’
Faye: I do love history, I'm certainly not gonna sit here and give a history lecture. That's not what the song is supposed to do either. It was capturing this feeling that I felt was mirrored and in the zeitgeist, for me now, which was people not really understanding what they're upset about. Or having enough context to justify their rage. That's not to say that I don't - that everybody feels that way - but it was just something that I felt was mirrored online. People have a tendency, I think, to jump on a bandwagon sometimes, and, in a very primitive way, get something and feel relief from being angry and expressing rage. I don't think we've come very far, really, it's a super primitive thing. And I think it applies to lots of things regarding politics at the moment. But in terms of history, I'd heard Zelenskyy says 'Why die for Danzig?' That was an article that was written in the [Second] World War by a French journalist, it was essentially saying, Why would we send in troops to Danzig, like Why die for Danzig? It's one place where obviously it kicked off, we had World War. It was just interesting when he said that, it just struck a chord with me. And it was like, where do we all stand on this line?
That's interesting. Like, in contrast to the personal writing and putting yourself out there, this is almost the exact opposite of that, in a way, is it?
Faye: Yeah. I was also just very inspired by Sinéad O'Connor and thinking about how she was so able to talk about her own rage. I'm so different from her. I'm always coming at it from a more guarded point of view. I wish that I maybe had more passion, and more belief, because I struggle with that. I, again, will go to history and look back on things. I guess I'm leaning into the way I was brought up, which was to... leave emotion out of things, political things, sometimes. I think that's what gets people into trouble. We're actually too emotionally charged, we need to step back and view it from a bit more of a pragmatic viewpoint. It frustrated me. I very much respected what she said at the RTÉ Choice Awards when she said it's not just about Ukrainian refugees, you know, it's not just about that.
‘Going Out’
The final song, I think it's the longest Soda Blonde song. Did you have fun making it all fit together? It's over seven minutes long...
Adam: That's the one Faye mentioned earlier on. We set up in the room and we jammed and this is not something that's ever happened in our career together. But Faye, on the spot, came up with all the lyrics. What you hear in the recording is the band live in the room and literally just magic flowing through. We considered like, is it long, is it too long? Should we cut this down? It just always takes me on a complete trance every time I listen to it. It just felt like the perfect way to wrap up the album.