The vocal-melting musician joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky to talk about his new tunes, life in lockdown and buzzing about getting back up on stage.
Talking about life after lockdown
He told Chris: “I’ve been writing with a couple of new people and a couple of people I've written with before. It’s nice to be out and about again in studios doing our thing and playing with the band and all that stuff. We’ve got rehearsals coming up this week. I'm absolutely buzzing. We're going in to rehearse the new single which we've actually not played live as a band yet because obviously we couldn't get in together. Gigs are starting to pour in and promo is starting to come through. We go to France next week. We’re leaving the UK which seems like a massive thing these days. So yeah, it's all good."
On working with Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody and award-winning Iain Archer
"They're both just incredible songwriters. So we were down in London for a couple of days, writing some new tunes for the album, one of which is definitely going on it and the other one I sent to the label last night and I’m waiting to hear back.
"I think I've written 100 songs for this album. I've got this theory that one in every 10 is good. So I think you send a lot of rubbish and then hope that one of them's an absolute banger. The thing is with songwriting, you get into the honeymoon period. So you write it and you're like, Wow, this is great. This is absolutely the best thing I've ever done. And then for the next few days, you’re buzzing thinking, yes, I've smashed it. This is great. Everyone's gonna love it. And then by seven days, you go back and listen to it and sometimes you're like, it's still great. And sometimes it's like, yeah, that's definitely not as good as I thought it was.
Pre-pandemic, he said: “We had 35 festivals booked in in 2019, obviously that all went out the window. It was gonna be an amazing year for festivals but normally I think the year before we did 130 gigs, but we didn't do as many tours because I had to write the album so it was basically just doing all the fun festivals that we wanted to do over the summer… Unfortunately, that got cancelled. A few of them got rolled over and we did end up doing some of them."
On his new album
It'll probably be around the end of 2022 I would imagine. Well, we'll see, it might be a bit sooner.
It was quite hard writing songs in lockdown, I’m not gonna lie. There wasn’t that much to write about. It was about all my friends, my family and the experiences we all had together and then it was all about DIY projects and Netflix."
Something Beautiful ft Masked Wolf is out now.
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