A Band You Should Know: Good Morning

Good Morning is a band/duo/recording-thing from Melbourne, Australia made up of Stefan Blair and Liam Parsons.

They’ve been around for ten years and have just released their seventh album, namely Good Morning Seven. It’s full of all the sounds that make you smile, which at this point, is all we really need right now. A melodic, bright record with lyrics that pull you up off the floor, perfect for those days when you don’t really know what you’re doing. Which is everyday for me. Here’s my chat with Stefan about the release.

How are you? 

I'm good.

Where are you right now? 

I'm at my studio in Melbourne. 

Oh, nice. Because one of you lives overseas or don't you?

Yeah. So Liam lives in London and I've been living all over the shop for the past few years. I've been in the States for the most part. But yeah, I've been back in Melbourne for a few months. A friend of mine got married here end of last year and I stayed for the holidays and stuff and then found myself working at this studio. So I've been here, but my time here is slowly coming to an end. 

Oh damn. How do you actually do a band if you don't live in the same country?

I feel like it's pretty easy for us because even when we do live in the same city, it's not like the band is constantly making time to do things. It's more like we just have these condensed little bursts. I was living in LA last year and Liam visited there maybe three or four times throughout the year. And likewise, I went over to London a few times, but every time we're together we just work really hard for two or three weeks and mix this record or do this recording here or play some shows there. Then we go back to our own separate little lives wherever they may be. It's kind of nice. 

That's pretty impressive to just be able to be like, let's go. How do you just get into that zone?

All the stuff that became the record was all just sort of poking around for the past three or four years. Last year was more of a process of meeting up and going through all the stuff that we recorded and picking the ones we wanted to turn into a record. Then we just had to mix them and finish them off. The bulk of the creative lifting had been done, I would say by that point. But then we decided to test ourselves last year, and booked ten days in a studio. Just met up and decided to try and write and record a record in that time, which we did. And I don't know, it's not finished, so it's yet to be seen the outcome of that, whether it's a thing that can work for us, but I don't know, it's nice to put yourself into a situation where you just have to make it work. It's like there's no other choice. We can sit around and twiddle our thumbs or we can just try and work away at something. 

I guess you've already spent the money and booked the time aside and stuff like that. 

Yeah, yeah, totally. So it's about trying not to waste those opportunities, particularly when you are spending money to travel and to record. 

Do you think being overseas helps people know your music? I feel like people from the outside don't really know a lot of Australian music. 

I actually think I feel more inspired when I'm back here in Melbourne and I get to sort of exist within the scene of musicians that we operate in within here. I always find it really refreshing being able to just walk down to the pub on a Wednesday night and see some friends play, and see what they're now doing. As opposed to last time I saw them being last year or something. But you're right, I found that interesting living in the states, bands that I grew up with and thought were the be all and end all, a lot of the time, if you mentioned their names in the States, you be responded to with a confused “huh”. I don't really think living overseas has affected the way that I make music at all, but I think it's shifted my perspective on how Australia is perceived, but it's also made me appreciate it a bit more because, we've got this special unique thing going on down here, which it's their loss that they're not more interested in. 

That’s a nice outlook. On the whole America thing, have you recovered from ASAP Rocky sampling Don't Come Home Today? I would simply not recover.

I'm not too well versed in his music to be honest. I like the bits and pieces that I've heard, but also it was a very faceless process. We've never spoken to ASAP Rocky himself. That process is basically being approached by a lawyer from Sony or from some label somewhere, and it's all just very official. It was cool though, and I'm really glad that there was a producer somewhere who heard the track and was like, this is cool. That's awesome. And you get a little bit of a payday, which we spent touring Japan and making a record.

It's not like you’re bros with ASAP or anything now though?

No, not at all (laughs). All. He would not say hi if we passed him in the street.

Do you think social media has helped you as a band or not? What's your take on social media? 

Yeah, I mean, I think it has helped us as a band for sure. We're a band that basically has a job because of the streaming economy effectively. And I think a lot of that is to do with random little bouts of good luck, such as the ASAP thing, or just other people sharing it around with their friends online or their followers, whatever. And I think that has had a big effect on how many people stream our music digitally these days for sure which translates to the money that we then spend to pay our rent. But it's an interesting one. I feel like we face this sort of conundrum every time we go through releasing a record, which is we have a whole bunch of people telling us that we should be more focused on socials and trying to build something through that. And I know that I don't have much of a relationship with it. I don't think Liam has a huge interest in it either. And so perhaps we're shooting ourselves in the foot a little bit by being a little bit staunch saying no we don't want to get on TikTok and we don't want to do these things. But we've also benefited from it, and gives us our job.

I get it, yeah. It gives you exposure and opportunities, but it'd be amazing if it just didn't exist and you could get those same opportunities without it.

Totally. But it's the entire way that people consume now. When I was a teen, you were seeking out blogs and different things that you'd go through and sift through someone's music taste and pick and choose what you liked. And these days it's all done by AI based playlisting, and the scope of searching doesn't extend much further than the streaming service of choice that you listen to music on, which I don't think is a good thing. But yeah, 

That's so true. There's probably so much music that doesn't even get filtered through the algorithm or whatever. 

I'm assuming it has to have a certain amount of plays for the algorithm to consider it within the playlisting, and it's like, where does 80% of this shit even find a chance when those players just don't exist? 

Yeah, for sure. 

It's funny, I’m against a lot of it but I can't hold that stance because that is literally how we pay our bills.

Yeah, it's the same with Monster Children Magazine though. We wouldn't exist without social media, even though I wish we could.

Yeah everyone is in the same boat.

Definitely. It's just the way of the world. What do you think your ambitions were when you first started to now, and how they've changed? Or are they the same? 

I think I just wanted to get to a point where I could just do music. I've always been happy working other things and I still do these days, but it's a little bit more reframed into engineering or recording or something. So it's still music based, which I'm really happy about. And I think when I started, I just wanted to find a way to just be able to make music and do it as a thing that I won't have to spend another forty hours a week doing something else to fund that habit and that lifestyle. And I think luckily we've reached that point, which is really nice. And I think, I'm not saying that I have zero ambition left, but I feel like it's definitely on a smaller scale now. It felt like a huge leap to be able to make a life out of music. And now that we're sort of doing that, I just hope that I can maintain it and just keep going in this way that I work now, which I quite enjoy. I'm not going to speak for Liam. Maybe he has ambitions to be playing arenas and stuff, but I don’t.

That's such a cool thing to be able to live off your art. I mean, I feel like that's the goal of a lot of people when they start and so many people don't make it even to that. So that's huge. 

Yeah. I feel pretty lucky that that's the case. I want to keep doing it until I don't want to do it anymore and then figure out what else life has. I think it would be a big left turn. I think it would be stopping doing music entirely and just getting into gardening or something else like that. 

Honestly same. On that theme of sustaining a creative life, a lot of your music explores that as well as the whole existential dread that comes with growing up, particularly coming out of your twenties. Are you someone that is freaking out about that?

Actually not. I'm pretty chilled about turning thirty. I'm hoping it'll be far less chaotic than my twenties. I'm hoping I have better check over my own emotions and just myself generally. And who knows if that will be the case. It probably won't, but that's sort of what I'm envisioning for my thirties at the moment, which would be ideal. 

Hopefully just less chaotic. That would be nice. Well, thank you so much for chatting today. That's it. That's all I've got. 

Thank you!