Perth Music

Over the past 4 years, Seany B has dazzled partygoers with his hip hop, house and electro style, from Perth to the Gold Coast, Darwin to Launceston, playing in excess of over 100 shows a year. He had his biggest hit 2 years ago when he teamed up with TV Rock and released the smash Flaunt It which stayed in the Top 10 of the Australian charts for 22 consecutive weeks, giving it the title of the longest Top 10 charting single ever by an Australian artist. As well as establishing a successful solo career as a performer / rapper, the songwriter has now co-produced a solo album and is already gearing up for a year of live shows with a new band and great DJs. The first single from the album, B Good 2 Me was released a couple months ago and his new single, Happy Today, will be released in a couple weeks. Seany B caught up with Justin Middleton for this exclusive interview.

“It’s hard to tell a story when you’re living it. I have this thing when someone calls you from a party to tell you how good it is, I always wonder if it’s so good why do they have time to call you.”

I asked Seany B to describe what he went through while writing his first solo album. “The recording process was grueling man. I was incubated over winter I guess because it was a good time to write and I had a lot of time to think about what I had done the past few years. I wrote the album in a real intense place in my life and I was doing the music as well. I don’t mean to say anything about the other works that I have done but on the new record these are songs. I wrote the lyrics to all these songs first where as traditionally we write beats first and then try and put a loop on top and then craft words but with the new songs I wrote stories. It’s a collection of stories that are three dimensional so there are 13 or 14 songs for me to express myself on. It really helped me diversify myself in being a story teller and not just picking the right tone, the right groove and the right vehicle to tell these stories. They aren’t all rap and they aren’t all dance, there are some slower tracks with some great instruments on this album, we used a lot more real guitars and I didn’t want it to be just a generic dance album.”

“I wrote the album in about three months which is really quick when you think about it in industry terms but not that quick when you think that I had my whole life to come up with these songs. I think you can see the album developing when you listen to it and the character kind of blossoms. I think it’s a good representation of me as a person and as a musician. I think you connect to different songs depending on your mood. The songs that I usually connect to are the ones that usually aren’t the singles. The thing about a single is that it’s your favourite song but it’s also everybody else’s favourite song. I hope I put a broad enough spectrum on the album so that each song is someone’s favourite. I like to think that there’s a full mood swing on the album.”

He adds “Each song was something I had to vent whether it was good things or bad things. B Good 2 Me, the first single, was an ode to my hip hop roots, sampling and bringing the electro beats. The next single, Happy Today, is about all my love for roxy music influenced by Bowie with a touch of Calvin Harris. B Good 2 Me was the first track I recorded for the album and Happy Today was the last so there may be a bit of bipolar between the two singles.”

I asked Seany B to explain his philosophy on song writing. “I think it’s hard to talk about something that is important to you in simple terms because you have all this pent up shit that you want to talk about and you’ve thought about it for so long without vocalizing it and then you have so many different ways to say it. But what makes you the person you are is the way you can articulate it in a way that is palettable for other people to connect, it’s all about connection. To write the stories wasn’t the hard thing and marrying it to the music wasn’t hard either. I guess i even made the subtle shift back then when I did Flaunt It which is introducing the story and the narrative to something you can dance to.”

“You can dance with your eyes closed or you can listen with your ears open.”

For more info on Seany B visit www.seanyb.com

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Album Releases, 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.