Q: What was the most significant production choice you made that defined the EP’s overall sound?
Ben Heyworth: Absolutely the decision to keep it as simple as possible, and mostly with just the acoustic guitar and my vocals. And the reason for this? Because after I quit music the first-time round, I sold all my gear and swore I’d never write anything again. What a mistake! So now I don’t even have a basic sequencer and do everything on my phone. How times have changed!
Q: What feeling did you most hope to instill in listeners by the end of the “Creatures EP”?
Ben Heyworth: Utter confusion? No, only joking. There was a review recently that commented on how the three songs inhabit different states of mind, from calm contemplation in “Narrowboat” to something akin to fantastical chaos in “Creature Double Feature” and I really liked that. So yes, we are about mood creation, we are about lyrical abstraction, we are about narratives. I hope people feel joy and curiosity to listen to more. I actually held one track back, a love song, I may pop that out onto You Tube as an orphan track at some point.
Q: What was the core motivation for choosing these three tracks to form the “Creatures EP”?
Ben Heyworth:I’d like to say it was a big, artistic decision behind the song choice, but it was simply the tunes that I think sounded the best after we finished up in the studio, and after playing them to a few trusted friends here and there. It’s always a good idea to live with recordings for a few weeks rather than rush about making a judgement about if a song is working or not – things always sound different and usually better the further away from the studio sessions you are.
Q: For “Narrowboat,” how did you musically convey both serenity and poignancy?
Ben Heyworth: I tried to capture this song live, with no studio edits. This was all about positioning the microphones in the right place, having the guitar nicely in my hands, and just being in the right headspace to get a take from start to finish that was as good as it could be. We ended up with a great take and then on playback we had some creaking floorboards that were not nice at all so the next day we did it all over again. Nightmare! The recording process was not serene at all, but I like to think the soft vocals and gentle folky acoustic that we captured bring that out. And the poignancy comes from the lyrics which lean into this idea that you can be “laid to rest” on the water and that’s a life well lived. I absolutely do not smoke a pipe.
Q: What sonic element in “Image of Roads” best represents the blurring of real and imagined travel?
Ben Heyworth: This is a good question because I was wondering if we’d been to subtle here. But this is the thing that I like the most about this song. With the lyrics suggesting this is a standard road trip song and then turning it around to suggest that nobody is going anywhere, you’ve ‘got back door leaning tendencies of a man at home’. I think this was somehow inspired by all that social media that you see of people travelling when in fact they are sat at home or in the office or something, not going anywhere. And there’s some strangeness about 3D printing and hallucinations in there as well, which I’ll admit is a bit odd. There’s a possibility I’ll do another version of this song with my band Minorplanet at some point, we all like it.
Interviewed by Gwen Simon
