“Being kinder to myself was a big part of this record”: Inside Slowly Slowly's new album, Forgiving Spree

“It’s such a strange thing to be standing onstage, claiming your emotions to everybody, like, ‘Look at me, look at me!’ I always think, ‘What is wrong with me to want to do this?!’” laughs Slowly Slowly’s Ben Stewart.

“But, it’s because I’m such a private person in my life. I’m a person who doesn’t tend to talk about their feelings very much, but music became a vessel for me at such a young age to put everything into, so I’ve always seen making music as something that is autobiographical.”

While pouring his innermost into music – ruminating on everything from childhood to being a husband – Ben found himself with “close to 100 songs, maybe more,” that gradually transformed into Slowly Slowly’s infectious new album Forgiving Spree. Finding space to explore the frontman's past, present and future, the Aussie alt. crew strike a balance between brain and brawn with swinging hooks and earworm melodies.

We caught up with Ben at his Melbourne home to explore his songwriting process, the joy of the craft, and learning to forgive himself...

Since you feel as if you’re more private on a daily basis, how do you view the relationship between your emotions and songwriting?
“It started off, like many people, as a private thing in my bedroom. And on our earlier records, everything is very metaphorical and the meaning of songs were very clouded. I love playing with language – you get the same catharsis, but you don’t have to tell anyone what it means. Falling in love with the craft of songwriting later, and throughout my journey with it, it all became and felt different. I write songs for different reasons now.

“Playing songs in a live setting has changed the way I approach songwriting now because now I know where they’re going to end up. So, instead of writing a throwaway song in a bedroom that’s going to sit on a demo tape that you don’t have to show anyone, I often think about the psychological effect of knowing they’re going to end up on stage, potentially sung back to me by other people, or picked apart by Slowly Slowly fanatics.

“I try my hardest to not be as self-aware in the songwriting process because that can muddy things, when things are becoming like a product. I don’t ever want to be someone at a label who calls music ‘content’. I try to keep things really honest and tap into that space that I was in when I was younger and writing songs, when it was kind of like, ‘Dear diary...’”

It’s interesting to see your ‘brawn vs. brains’ approach to certain tracks on the record considering your history with metaphorical songwriting.
“As I said, stuff being built for the stage, it definitely bled into the writing process, specifically for this record because I became quite obsessed with everything being concise and to the point and built for the stage. I had made an intimate record under my own name that was released just before this record, and I fleshed out a lot of things that allowed me to want to make a fat-free rock record [Forgiving Spree]. I wanted the record to package up everything we do in its most concise manner. There’s a lot of interplay – I like the way you say it, brain and brawn – and it being kind of macho and in-your-face and it borrowing from heavier bands, but we pull things in a sensitive space. I became obsessed with trying to package that all up.”

Did your solo record allow for the themes of forgiveness that we see in Forgiving Spree?
“Totally. The title-track came quite late in the process, and that really surmised a chapter of my life. All of the songs represent different fragments of the last couple of years, and then the title-track felt like a song that wrapped up the ethos. I think forgiveness comes in lots of shapes and sizes, not only to others, but yourself, and I think being kinder to myself was a big part of being comfortable enough to cover all that ground.”

How did you manage to find a balance amongst all of these moving and changing parts within yourself?
“The balance was so hard to strike, especially within a nine-track album. If there was a challenge in this record, it was covering all of that ground within such a short amount of time. And honestly, we did it by writing a lot of songs, because you can set out to write a type of song and it never works out that way. They always get mangled by the process and end up as something very different. You can set out to utilise elements of your favourite song, but it will never end up the same. So, whenever I’m talking to people who are just getting into songwriting and kind of don’t know where to start, I say to copy someone else’s song and they will never be able to do it because songwriting is not linear. So for me to cover all of that ground and get it into the record – and try and have songs that have lightness and darkness – was by writing a lot.”

How many songs did you end up writing for this record?
“When I get stuck, I often do this retrospective thing where I look back through a bunch of ideas from the past that didn’t work. So, half-written songs or old lyrics that I can’t remember what song they were for, or even a poem. There’s often so much to choose from because you have all of these finished songs that you’re writing. It’s hard to find where initial ideas started, but I reckon there would be close to 100 songs, or more, that are in contention for every record. I’m in love with the process of writing…”

And what is it that inspires to write?
“To me, it’s a lifelong pursuit… I see songwriting as the ultimate time capsule. You get to package up all of your sonic preferences in one place. And I think when a song soundtracks a certain portion of your life – as a band or a listener – you can get a million memories just from listening to it. For me, it’s a real legacy thing. We have a really short time on this earth and art seems like a way to capture your life. It’s nice to leave something like that behind that’s not going to go anywhere.”

Forgiving Spree is out now via Nettwerk

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