Artist Interviews

Q&A: Ocean Reid

By | Published on Thursday 27 August 2009

Ocean Reid began writing music at an early age, moving around the UK, and collaborating with the likes of David Arnold, before settling in Brighton to complete his debut album, ‘Sonnets From The Recovery Position’. His debut single, ‘Talking Dead’, was released via Surreal Records earlier this month. Reid is currently on an epic tour of the UK and will also be heading out to Europe later this year. We caught up with him to ask our Same Six Questions.

Q1 How did you start out making music?
I started taking things to pieces as a kid to see what noises I could make. This got me loads of grief with my parents and school, so I had to knock that one on the head. We had a steal drum at home that I really liked hitting, but didn’t win much parental support, that one always got me the harsh stare, the point and then the slap round the head. My dad had a piano and a banjo, but I had pretty strict on pain of death instructions to never touch these things under any circumstances, ever. Eventually I got my hands on a really mashed up acoustic guitar with three rusty strings on it, and it rocked my world. So I started making little tunes up on that. I made loads of songs that I never played to anyone, mostly cause they were crap. But then something seemed to click and really make sense, almost like I’d learned a new language, I’ve been hearing songs ever since and I’ve never looked back.

Q2 What inspired your latest album?
Life seems to dish up some pretty tasty treats, but also some really twisted dark cruel stuff. Kinda like some really messed up, mashed up sick joke. So I always seem to be watching myself and people close to me crashing into walls as the wheels fall off. I just always seem to be around as the last finger slips off the rail and people lose their grip on everything.

So my forthcoming album, ‘Sonnets From The Recovery Position’, came together as a record of some of the best instances and darkest moments to blow my life to pieces. I seemed to lose a lot of good people in a very short space of time through some pretty grim deaths and circumstances. Stuff that just destroys your head and leaves you with nothing but massive questions that just don’t have any answers and never will. This left me with some pretty big gaps to fill, I wrote so many songs whilst trying to make sense of things, it sounds pretty stupid but it did help to begin finding a small perspective to a large mess.

Too many hospitals and funerals for myself, friends and family, but I guess I’ve said it all on the album, I don’t do names though, that stuff is private and always will be. I think most people’s lives are in constant need of a wheelbarrow and a sweeping brush. Maybe even a skip. Who knows? But we all need somewhere to put the mess, I just put mine into an album. I just call it as I see it. I guess my album is inspired by a skip full of glass.

Q3 How do you go about creating a track?

I hear songs all the time. Some days it’s like a gift and some days it’s a real pain in the arse. Mostly I get the whole lot in one go and sometimes I get parts of songs that I think are different songs, but then they turn out to be separate layers of the same song. I get that lots with string harmonies and vocal lines. I usually record stuff all the time when I’m walking around. I pretend I’m talking on the phone so I don’t look like a dick, but I have pretty poor telephone acting skills, so I probably don’t pull it off. From there I need to find some quiet time, usually in the middle of the night when everything makes sense and nobody is trying to talk to you. This is when I rebuild the songs out of my recordings and memory bullets to put all the parts in to a cohesive format. Sometimes I fine tune but mostly they are done from the seed. It is like taking songs home like really crappy flat pack furniture but actually reading the instructions so you glue the right parts together. You just need to leave yourself the right instructions so you can rebuild the song later in time.

Q4 Which artists influence your work?
We always had music on at home as a kid, lots of Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Band, The Stones, Dylan, Baez and stuff like that. My dad would always play a bit of Beatles and random stuff on the piano when he got in from work. It took a long time to get my hands on a CD player, but when I did, I seemed to buy stuff from years ago, like Pixies and Nirvana. Now I seem to be listening to MP3s of Josh Rouse, Josh Ritter and Regina Spektor. It’s hard to catch up with music as you have to sort out the songs that are in your head before you can listen to songs from outside. It is a constant battle, because I love music, but I can’t listen to music when I’m making music. It’s like following the Fibonacci sequence whilst people shout random numbers at you, why the hell would you do that? That’s just sick.

Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
That song you probably thought was a love song, wasn’t… trust me.

Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
I’m loving it that my tunes are getting interest, and I’m getting tour dates in other countries. I was well up for taking the single and the album out on the road, but now it is going overseas, which is way up there on my list but I didn’t think it would happen so soon. So I’m made up and I’m really glad so many people seem to get the album. My single, ‘Talking Dead’, is already set to tour UK, Europe and parts of the US. Mind blowing stuff to turn pages from my diary into geographically dispersed events. If the album has the interest that the single has I hope it could go out on the road to loads more countries. I have so much material written that I would feel cheated to record any less than ten albums and tour them around the world. As long as my diary doesn’t come to an abrupt end, that is exactly my plan.

MORE>> www.oceanreid.com



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