Winterbourne — An Echo Of Youth, 12 Years in the Making

Winterbourne’s James Draper and Jordan Brady have been friends for over 12 years, since the early days of high-school - and they’ve been making music together for nearly as long. The indie-rock duo have just released their long-awaited debut album, Echo of Youth, recorded over a six-month period in a far-removed studio of Byron Bay. We had the chance to speak to Jordan as the band prepared to jump back into touring, on the process of putting together the album and realising a dream 12 years in the making.

Hi Jordan! How’s it going? Sounds like you guys are very busy at the moment.

Yeah, pretty good. We’re actually just loading into rehearsal as we speak.

Wow, must be a packed schedule! I’ll dive right in - you and James met about 12 years ago now. How did that friendship begin?

So, we were both in the same year at high school, and we actually didn’t like each other at first because we both had a mutual friend, and so each of us was kinda like ‘the other friend’. I’d heard about this mythical James character, who also plays guitar and is also funny and cool, and I was like, I guess I gotta meet this guy. And I did, and I was just kinda like yeah, he seems alright (laughs).

But then, of course, a year later we realised we were actually pretty similar, so we started playing guitar together, became best friends… and just went from there.

Meant to be! So you’ve been playing music together pretty much the whole time?

Yeah, basically. The reason we became friends was because we both played guitar and were both into rock music, as you are when you’re 13/14 (laughs). We were bigs fans of ACDC and Green Day, and we started sharing these bands with each other and learning these songs together, and from there we’d start recording covers or recording our own little ideas on the guitar. And it’s just kept growing ever since.

So you must have started off with quite a different sound to what you have now.

Yeah, we’ve definitely gone through a few. Initially our sound was that very three-chord rock sound, and there was no real singing most of the time, just chords and jump tracks and stuff. And then — our music teacher actually showed us Simon and Garfunkel after class one day, and we thought that was sick. Two guys playing guitar together? You know, maybe we could do that. So we started learning those harmonies and singing and making nice melodies and leaning towards that whole thing, taking it down a notch from our old heavy rock days (laughs). And now, I think we’ve kinda swung back around and fused the two, which is working really well for us at the moment.

Yeah! I do feel like the whole new album is a bit of a departure from the paired-back acoustic style your fans were used to… did anything inspire that shift?

It’s weird, because we never really said, oh, we’re going to change sounds, — it’s more like the sound of the record now is the sound we’ve had in our heads since Winterbourne started, five or six years ago. On our first EP, those were songs we wrote when were 17 and were really into that one-guitar sound, and we went into the studio for those having not really done studio before, so pretty much any amount of bass or drums added to our songs felt really great. Now, of course, we go back to that and we’re like, ah, there’s so much more we could have done with that.

Then, with the second EP, we went the other way and were like, let’s just be a bit more experimental in how we record this and how we play with that classic rock vibe. And now, for the record, we pretty much just sat down and went, okay, what’s our sound, and how are we gonna capture what we love about playing music in an album. Also, we had so much more time with this record — we gave ourselves two years to get it done, so it could be a true combination of everything we’ve been trying to do for the last six years or however long.

You’ve talked a lot on social media about how excited you were to see the album on vinyl, and the process of selecting the songs and arranging them and making the artwork — it really seems like you were really in love with the whole process of making an album.

I mean, it’s kinda the whole reason we wanted to be musicians. Obviously, playing live at massive venues is the dream, but you can’t just do that - and you can just make an album. With making the record, it felt like — like this is what we were born to do, this is what we’ve been planning since we met all those years ago, so let’s just give it everything. And it was really fun! It honestly felt like we were making one of those fake albums we’d make in high school, yet this time it was the real thing.

“With making the record, it felt like —
like this is what we were born to do.”

Obviously it’s been such a long-time-coming – how have you been feeling since it was released? It must be a bit surreal.

It’s weird, because we’ve had this album in our house and on our phones and stuff for ages — like it was finished last year. We’ve had it for about a year since it was done, and it’s just been about releasing singles and videos and acoustic versions, so when we finally actually dropped the album, it was … like, there’s nothing more we can do now, it’s gone. We had to come to terms with fact that it’s everyones album now, not just ours.

Also, the promotion leading up to the release – I have to say, it’s got to be the weirdest (and yet, oddly, the most effective) promotion I’ve ever seen.

Are you talking about the Instagram stuff? (laughs)

Yep, that’s the one!

Yeah (laughs), okay, so we did – I don’t know why we started doing it, honestly. We got to the night where it was something like 8 days until the release, and I can’t remember who, but one of us said — well, if we’re going to do a countdown, we have to start at 7 days. And we were kind of like, ah, just another thing we have to do. So we thought it’d be pretty easy to just do some sort of video with a number 7, but we wanted to have some sort of cool effect – so, for whatever reason, we burnt the 7. I don’t even know why — just for impact, or something, but we set it on fire, this piece of paper, and then we got to the 6 and we had no idea what to do, so we just did another video and burnt the six.

And then we were like, well, now we’ve gotta friggin finish this off and we’ve set the bar at burning crap, so we’ve got to keep it up (laughs). And we did every single number on the day, which made it so stressful and stupid, and by the end I’m just thinking — I need this friggin album to come out. (laughs).

From a viewers perspective, I promise it looked much more thought-out.

Well, there you go! That’s good. Just the illusion of being in control.

You guys have been writing together for so long — has your songwriting process changed over the past 12 years?

We still write most of the stuff together, but we started doing writing sessions about 4 or 5 years ago, where you go into a room with a producer or a songwriter and write a song together. It can be really frustrating, because you wanna do things a certain way and you can end up having to go with someone else’s ideas, but occasionally you get a good one you never would have written otherwise. Like, ‘Take the Golden’, we wrote in Berlin with this writer/producer, and his ideas were so different to what we’d usually do, but we ended up pushing each other with our different styles and eventually wrote something really cool and unique. There’s a few songs on this record that we wrote like that, and it really worked out.

You guys come from a background of busking — how did that shape your approach to the band and music?

It’s interesting — when we were busking, we would try and write these energetic songs to busk with, and we haven’t busked in a few years now but we can still recognise the energy in our songs from those days. But yeah, busking was this really good rehearsal of playing in front of people, keeping people’s attention and interacting with a crowd — all experience that we still draw upon to this day. It was so great for shaping the band and launching us.

“We’ve got this fantasy of doing these huge shows and tours,
but then still doing a busking set in Pitt Street beforehand.”

Do you have a favourite place you’ve busked, or somewhere you’d like to go back and busk one day?

Well, we only mainly did Pitt St Mall, in Sydney. It’s kinda weird to walk back through the mall now — it’s this weird mix of love and hatred and nostalgia. We just spent so much friggin time there, but of course, it was so great for us back in the day. (laughs) Back in the day, what am I saying. So, yeah, we’d love to do Pitt Street again — we’ve got this fantasy of doing these huge shows and tours, but then still doing a set in Pitt Street beforehand. That would make us really happy.

Do you have a favourite lyric off the new album?

Hm! I haven’t even though about it! Probably?

(laughs) Good answer!

I love the lyrics in Sunday Night, which I had absolutely nothing to do with (laughs). James wrote that whole thing. But I reckon it’d be weird if I said one of my own lyrics. But that whole song - it’s so raw, and the first time I listened to it I got so emotional, it’s one of the realest songs he’s ever written.

So I really like that one. I like the lyrics of Colourblind, too — every time I deconstruct those lyrics I get really excited and I just want to tell people about the meaning I think they have. And I love all the lyrics in Revolutionary Man, too, because they’re so ridiculous and weird, but if you listen to the message of them they’re very true and honest.

Yeah, Sunday night is my favourite, lyrically.

Yeah! Definitely. 4 years after I first heard the demo I still get a bit – have to put my sunglasses on when I listen to it, you know.

Wow, 4 years. So you’ve had a lot of these songs written for a while?

Yeah, Sunday night was an early one. So was Better, and The Actors — we’ve been playing that one live for a while. There was never a, let’s sit down and write an album moment – we had about fifty songs written over the last few years to choose from, and we just had to whittle it down to the top 12. We found a draft album list the other day, based on the demos we had at the time - and six of the songs didn’t even exist at that time, which was only a few months before we recorded the album. So we wrote quite a few right before we went into the studio, too. A good mixture of timing.

Whats the weirdest interaction you’ve ever had with a fan?

The weirdest and best is we signed a mans chest on his 21st birthday, and he got it tattooed to his chest that night. He got our signatures literally tattooed to his chest, so we are forever on that mans body, somewhere in Melbourne.

That’s incredible.

Yep. That was like a bucket list thing we didn’t even know existed.

What’s the best bit of advice you can throw out to a young band - particularly one that’s maybe just busking at the moment!

First of all, don’t listen to the advice of a band like us. (laughs). I mean, we’re still just tryna figure it out ourselves. But I think, the thing we focused on was to just keep at it and keep active. I think there’s a temptation to slow down and set your sights on a certain thing, like – you might really want a record deal, and if you don’t have a record deal you might feel like there’s no point and kinda trail off. Whereas we found, particularly through busking, that if you just keep playing, it doesn’t really matter what you get — if you get radio play or a label or whatever — it doesn’t really matter, as long as you’re still playing. And if you can find a way to play in front of people, theres always things that can happen from that. There’s no bad shows, really.