Redwood release debut album – exclusive interview

Five-piece alternative rock band, Redwood, hailing from Hertfordshire, UK, have released their debut album – Beside A Shallow Sun.  The band draws on influence from a range of genres, from emo to post-rock, combined with thought-provoking lyrics that always resonate.

All Punked Up caught up with Jamie Richards (lead guitar) and Conor Bond (bass) on Zoom prior to the release, to delve into their new album and find out what Redwood are all about.

Be sure to follow Redwood on social media!

Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify

 

For those who are new to Redwood, can you describe the band in 3 words or a phrase?

Conor: Expansive

Jamie: Energetic

Conor: Enigmatic

 

You’re just about to drop your debut album Beside a Shallow Sun, how are you guys feeling?

Jamie: Pretty great, I think including myself, Conor had sent out the vinyl’s, either yesterday or the day before and people are starting to receive them now. So, I’m really hyped.  People are starting to enjoy it and we’re already getting some pretty nice reviews in.  We’ve just been waiting for ages to release, I mean, we recorded it in February – we had a pretty quick turnaround in terms of mixing and mastering, so we’ve been waiting pretty much the whole year to release it, so we want people to listen to it.

Conor: Feeling good. It’s one of the big milestones, when you’re a kid learning to play the guitar. When you’re 10 years old, you think oh one day I’m going to make a rock album and we’ve done it. It’s really strange.  I’ve got a friend in New Zealand, they’re 13 hours ahead and she sent me a message earlier to say she’s listening to the album.  It sunk in at that moment.  We have a full length record that’s about to come out and people will like it or not like it and that’s fine.

Jamie: I remember being in year 6 and doing a presentation about what you wanted to be when you grow up.  I knew I liked music so as a gag, my dad photoshopped my face onto a band and I said when I grow up, I want to be in a band.  I’m living the dream!

 

Who are some of your main influences?

Jamie: We have a range of different influences. Five of us in Redwood and we all come from different musical backgrounds.

Conor: It literally shouldn’t work. What we all listen to on an individual basis, the combination of that just shouldn’t work at all but it does somehow. My music taste has changed since joining the band – I’ve been in Redwood for 5 years now.  The music I listen to now is different but as a songwriter that influence comes through now, weirdly enough.  I was really influenced by early Titlefight, Citizen, Basement at the time – the Floral Green era and then Colourmeinkindness. I was really into American Football at one time too and that was a band we could all agree on.

Jamie: Collectively at that point, we were all sort of into Midwestern Emo and lyrical math rock.

 

How did Redwood first come together and what’s the story behind the band name?

Jamie: Basically, me and the singer, Alex, would spend our lunchtimes in 6^th Form, just going to practice rooms and they had loads of acoustic guitars.  He was already in a band at that point and I was just creating music on my own. We would just jam out together and then we wrote a 4-track EP.  Originally, we were going to call ourselves Pulling Teeth because we thought it was kind of a raw, gritty and emo as heck band name.  It was meant to be just two acoustics but then we thought the songs could be cool with an actual band.  We got a couple of the other boys who were already in Alex’s previous band and they would do Blitz Kids and A Day To Remember covers. Redwood just came out of how Alex loves nature.  We just love those trees, they’re the biggest trees going.  They’re always going to be there.  We wanted to put that tone across.

 

What are the themes behind the new record?

Jamie: Lyrically, I can’t speak for Alex, so I won’t.

Conor: Decent [laughs]

Jamie: Musically, some of the songs I wrote are from years ago.  “Extension of Us”, me and Al wrote that in 2014.  It’s all a collection of thoughts that Alex has had, he likes to write poems in his spare time. Most of it was done at the end of our time at university, so a lot of it is about growing into the person that we’re going to be for the rest of our lives. We’re going through a phase that we’re not sure of who we really were yet.  We were coming to the end of education forever and going into the big wide world.

 

What does the song writing process usually look like?  Do you write together?

Jamie: What would usually happen is, Alex or I would come up with a concept of how we want the song to go and then we get some ideas for lyrics.  Then it gets bounced around to everybody and they’ll have their input.  Then we’d get together and start playing about with it, in a rehearsal scenario.  Then we’ll start playing it live and see how it sounds and sort of finish it from there really.

 

Any standout lyrics from the record?

Conor: There’s one in “Ate My Weight”, in the chorus: ‘Let this feeling eat your insides’, like that kills me. Alex is very very open with us about his process and everything that he thinks and is feeling.

Jamie: All of the lyrics basically come from his inner monologue.  What he feels in any moment.  He adds the flowery imagery to it but it’s always as straight as it can be.

Conor: Alex has a process of journaling, if something has happened or something becomes difficult to ignore, he will write it down immediately, with the intention of making sense of it later. He’ll get things out on a page straight away and 9 times out of 10, they end up being song lyrics. That’s why the lyrics end up being so cutting and so raw because they’re a reflection of exactly what he’s going through.  Sometimes things can be quite graphic, but he talks a lot about his dreams and can go through stages of pretty mad anxiety. He has stress dreams like every night, and he’ll wake up and write about them and go back to sleep.

Jamie: “Nightshade” in particular is about a dream he had where the person he was with at the time had broken their arm in the night and that song is about that really.  My favourite lyric on the album comes from “Sit in Silence”.  Alex sings, ‘Sorry I’m not all the things you thought I was’, which is just so like bloody poignant man!

Conor: He [Alex] says what he means, and he means every word. He really does.

Jamie: He bloody does!

 

What is your favourite memory from working on the record?

Jamie: I guess recording it because as far as sort of writing it up until this point–[Conor cuts in]

Conor: [thumbs down] I’ve got a better one.  It’s a case of you had to be there but, on the track, “Lilac”, there is probably like our heaviest drop that we’ve ever written or recorded. It’s textured, all the guitars are playing the rhythm part and bass with distortion underneath it. It’s like a wall of sound and that’s where our “heavy” comes from. Hamish, our producer, he has experience in metalcore and pop punk, so he likes to sneak in effects in our music.  We’ve got a sub-drop a couple of times in the record. When the sub comes in and Edan (guitar), was like “Hamish can you turn that up, I want to see how it sounds?”, so he turned the sub-drop all the way up and there’s a bass trap at the back of the studio and he pressed play on the drop and I literally thought the windows were going to blow out.  That was definitely a highlight for me.

Jamie: I would agree, that is a good highlight. I literally can’t remember too much about recording, it was such a great time though.

 

What are your aspirations for Redwood?

Jamie: My aspirations would be just for our music to live on. I think we’ve got the potential to sort of do well regardless of us or not being a band. [cough] #thebandsbreakingupinlike two weeks

Conor: [laughs]

Jamie: I just want people to enjoy our music, if it was divisive that would be really cool because people would have feelings about it either way.

Conor: I agree completely, yeah I mean, following on from what Jim just said, I want our music to invoke feeling. I want people to listen to our music and feel something, even if they hate it.  It’s a reaction. We’ve all individually put so much into the band and into the music, I think people that know us, understand everything we’ve put into it.  That’s why we do it, we actually love it.  It’s exactly what we wanted and needed to write at the time.

Jamie: We’re doing this because we fucking adore it.  We wouldn’t be anything unless we were writing these songs together.

 

What would be your dream tour line up?

Jamie: I’d love to play a show with Radiohead, that would be the most incredible thing in the world.  I take a lot of influence from them anyway, in how expansive our music gets, how sort of weirdly heavy we can be and how experimental we’ve become – I think it would be a wicked show. There are also bands like Young Giant who we also get a little bit of influence from.  Just straight up pop rock songs and I think that would work really cool in a line up.

Conor: I need to look at my Spotify. [picks up phone] 

Jamie: I’d play a show with Skrillex, that would be wicked [laughs]

Conor: I’d love to support The Staves, even though we would not fit on a bill with them at all.

Jamie: Maybe if we did a stripped back acoustic set with a choir.

Conor: Maybe, I kind of just want to be friends with them.

 

Is there anything else you want to add for the All Punked Up readers?

 

Jamie: Vote Biden, nah I’m kidding I won’t get political…[whispers] vote Biden! Just listen to the album.

Conor: I’ll say thank you for reading this far, that’s what I say and thank you Evie for making this readable!

You can listen to Beside A Shallow Sun here and check out Redwood’s video for “Rumour Night” below:

For more APU interviews, click here!