9. SlowdiveJust For A Day
What makes you put Slowdive above the other more well-known 90s dream-pop or hoegaze artists like Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil and My Bloody Valentine?
I love all that music, it really shaped me growing up, as we were saying about The Cure, music keeps you company if you find something that you love. Sometimes you have favorite records you listen to as a teenager but then you look back, cringe and think ‘what was I thinking?’ You find that bands you thought were profound back then are actually corny. With Slowdive I still listen to them a lot and just love the harmonies and the swirling gorgeous deluxe guitar sounds. I had this record on cassette tape and I would listen to it a lot driving around {hilly, I love all their records but this one especially, even their new one is extremely gorgeous too. Being a big fan I really wanted to know what Neil could do with the harp, like what if I could combine the sound I really love to listen to, with the sounds that I’m making, what would that sound like? One of my favorite things in the world is to admire someone’s music and then to meet them and to experiment and see how their sounds match with mine, like with Juliana or Meg or Growing.
That is a really healthy attitude. Certain people find art they like and there is a distance, a partition between the artist and them, they end up venerating them and forget we’re all just people at the end of the day.
Yeah, It’s a conversation you know, a musical conversation, I think about how combining two different sounds would be a cool conversation. I would say I’m pretty lucky to play a weird instrument, if I were a guitar player it wouldn’t be so easy to just call somebody up and say let’s have a jam. That’s one of the reasons I don’t like Spotify at all, there’s no way for artists to interact with the people who are listening, it feel like the music could be made by a computer or a robot. The person is kind of taken away from the music, it’s not easy to see who engineered the record, who played violin, who produced the record, it just kind of depersonalises everybody.
