We sat down with Joe, Luca, Nick and Jack from the 4-piece Pōneke based band Wet Denim on Sunday. Appearing at Homegrown the night before, the band was stoked with how Kirikiriroa came out to support and bust a boogie, commenting: “Yeah, it felt like the main stage was just packed, especially later in the night with the stage lights: you can just see a sea of people. Everyone’s there.”
With the Band having just released the single “Living Room” (go stream on all platforms!!), and still riding on Saturday’s high, we discussed their time at Homegrown, and the intricacies of song writing. Unfortunately, our transcription software was too hungover from Homegrown to tell us who said what, so it’s up to you to decipher who’s who in their nameless responses. See the full interview online.
Have you guys played Homegrown before? How was it?
It was awesome and actually so much fun. We played the Mānuka Phuell Nexus stage, it was a really cool set up and quite a big stage, in an open area where people walk between stages. That gave us a great amount of foot-traffic throughout the set, and even though we started out with not many people there, by the end there were a bunch of people in the audience singing our songs and stuff, that was cool!
So, when you guys are writing, do you find yourself coming back to any consistent themes or things that you focus on?
Musically we all kind of draw from our own corner of taste, and like rock, pop, alternative music, so someone will have a musical idea; it could be anything like a guitar chord progression or like a kind of drum groove or like an ambient thing, and then everyone else can bring their parts and contributions to it. We end up with these songs that don’t necessarily fit in one particular pocket, which I think is really special about our music.
We all write lyrics, there’s been portions of songs, whole songs, parts of songs that each person has written, but for me personally lyrical writing is very much about the personal events that are happening, so the themes do tend to group together when you write a group of songs at one point in time.
Do you have a favourite song that you’ve written?
Mine is an unreleased song called ‘Silence’, but if we’re trying to talk about released music, I think ‘Calm’ is my favourite. It’s the closing track of ‘On The Line’. And we generally end most sets with it as well; it just has a massive musical crescendo; it’s just a big wall of noise. We all go a bit nuts when we’re on stage, it’s probably our heaviest song so far, we’re all gravitating more towards slightly heavier sounds at the moment.
When I think of the Wet Denim song, for me it’s ‘The Why’. It’s a special one; we wrote it at my family bach. We wrote and recorded the whole thing in a weekend, it feels sentimental.
It was the first time of being extremely collaborative, with us all there at one time, writing a brand new song. I think ‘The Why’ was one of the first songs that has a lot of classic Wet Denim elements: it has a really groovy bass line, really big drums, really atmospheric guitars, and also, they’re kind of lyrics about internal mental processes, you know? I feel like that was the song where it was like ‘this is a thing that works.”
