Perth Music

He’s the Irish pop star that now calls Australia home and will soon be married to Australia’s sweetheart Delta Goodrem. Brian McFadden has come a long way from his days in super pop band Westlife, who sold over 30 million albums worldwide. His new single Like Only A Woman Can has just been released to the Australian public and his sophomore album Set In Stone will be released in a month’s time. Brian McFadden talked to Justin Middleton for this exclusive interview.

Click here to download the podcast of the entire interview. (9:08 - 1.1Mb)

Brian’s first solo album, Irish Son, was released in 2004 so a lot has happened in his life since then. Given that time frame Brian had enough time to write and record the album that he wanted to release. I asked Brian to describe the whole process of getting the new album completed and how he feels about finally getting it out to the public. “Yeah I’m very happy with it, it’s taken a long time to do, it’s been almost 2 and a half years in the making. I’m just glad it’s over now and I’m ready to release it. I started writing it about 2 and a half years ago. I just kept writing all these different kinds of songs and I was never really happy with where it was going because there were so many different directions. Everyone wanted me to have an album that sounded like one album and went in a certain way. But I ended up going ‘You know what, I am just going to pick, out of the 150 songs I wrote, I am just going to pick 10 and record them’. So about six months ago I picked 12 songs that I liked, recorded them and ended up just using 10. I started recording in the UK, I did all the tracking with the band in the UK then I flew to Australia and did all the vocals then went back to London to mix and master. The last couple of months were the best when I was recording, the writing was a bit tedious because it went on for so long.”

“Even though I had 150 songs I kind of had a fair idea what the best 20 were. As I was going along I knew which songs were going to be keepers and which ones probably wouldn’t make the album. In the end it was a pretty easy process. My next record will be a fresh record, all new songs again.”

The first single, Like Only A Woman Can, was released in Ireland late last year and went straight to number 1 and has just been released in Australia. I asked Brian how that song came to become the first single off the album. “Nobody else wanted it to be the first single. I know a lot of people get caught up in the whole radio market over here and people said ‘It won’t get played on the radio because it’s a ballad’. I feel it is one of the best songs I’ve ever written so I just think you have to put your best foot forward and if radio doesn’t play it well people will still get to hear it. I just feel that if people hear it hopefully they will like it. So I did take a bit of a risk with it but hopefully the risk will pay off.”

Now living in Australia, Brian has a much different environment to that he became a megastar in. When Brian left Westlife in 2004 they were still one of the biggest bands in the world but much bigger in the UK than in Australia. Talking about being based in Australia, Brian explains “I think people over here don’t know what to expect from me, they don’t really know anything about me. They’ve read stories about me and they know that I am with Delta but besides that they don’t really know me. So it is nice to be able to introduce myself when I am doing interviews and doing TV as something new. So far it has been really good and I’ve been getting a great response from people and I’ve met some great people while going around and I’m really enjoying it. The Australian culture is pretty similar to the Irish culture so it hasn’t been much of a culture shock really. Obviously the weather is the major difference but the whole lifestyle is pretty similar.”

And Brian even plays AFL footy. He explains “I’ve been playing for East Sydney. Well I haven’t actually got a position yet because we are still in pre-season training but I reckon I would be a forward because I can’t actually bounce the ball properly. So I won’t be able to run very far with it so I’d need to just mark it and score. I am a Collingwood fan, which doesn’t go down very well with many people.”

A highlight of the album is the rock song Zoomer. I asked Brian to describe the song “Even though it is rocky it is quite surprising in how it came about. It’s actually written about my Honda 50, my little moped. I came to the studio one day and wrote the song with Guy Chambers and we were just talking about the bike and we said ‘Why don’t we just write the song about the bike’. The whole chord structure for that song I wrote on a xylophone and we just transposed that onto guitar. So it was never intentional or supposed to be that rocky but it just ended up like that. We were hoping to get it onto the Mazda ad, with the whole ‘Zoom Zoom Zoom’. We have to send it to them and see what they say.”

“I wanted every track to have its own identity. I didn’t want the album to flow like one album, I wanted to be kind of like a compilation album of just pop hits.

First single Like Only A Woman Can is out now. The album Set in Stone will be released in Australia on April 19th.

For more info visit www.brianmcfadden.com.au.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 9:42 am and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.