Interview : Blue King Brown
August 31st 2010 09:42
Natalie Pa’apa’a is chilling at home after returning from Europe. “ We’ve just come back from some festivals in Europe where alot of people have seen us for the first time and had a really great response.” She’s also pretty excited to be finally talking about the new Blue King Brown album Worldwize (North and South). For the band this album has become quite a journey starting in 2008 and taking 2 years and flying half way around the world to get to the final product. “It’s a double disc with North and South now and it will be followed with East and West later on.” Natalie explained the reason for the long time frame as “ It longer to realise the sound and the music we wanted to create. We kind of threw out restrictions and committed to crafting each song and making it ready.”
What the group found in removing the restrictions associated with recording an album it allowed the songs to develop more organically and allowed the band to experiment a little bit more. “ We were lucky to have the time to do that and along the way we found our songwriting would improve with the use of more digitally created sounds and beats. So the flavour of this album is quite diverse.”
Worldwize North and South is a global sounding record. Featuring guests such as Queen Ifrica, Jah Mason and Sly and Robbie, the band packed up and relocated to Kingston, Jamaica to record all the vocals and put the finishing touches on the album. “ We started out with 12 to 15 songs to record. What happened along the way, we felt some of the tracks weren’t strong enough so we decided to write more songs. Then we looked at all the material and found that some of the songs had sections that we could chop up and create new songs out of them. We spent a lot of time in post production really getting creative and trying out all the good ideas.”
Known for their stance on global issues and prominence in their activism, Blue King Brown manage to blend their social awareness commentary with making good, fun, make-you-want-to-dance music. “ It’s who we are, its how we write and perform music. As a lyricist it’s what I’m compelled to write about. we’ve found a really great balance between our music and our beliefs and i think thats why fans really connect with us.”
The band are about to pack up the van and hit the road with long time friend John Butler on his April Uprising tour. “ We’ve known John for a long long time. Sometimes years go by and we barely get to see each other so this is a great opportunity to do a massive Australian tour together. After which we get back into the studio to finish writing East and West. We’ll be doing some summer festivals and then over to America in the New Year followed by a headlining tour back home.”
Blue King Brown “Worldwize-part 1 North and South” is available now through iTunes
They are currently on tour with John Butler Trio. Check out the dates at the bands website.
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