I'll Explain Later is out now!
Image: Supplied.
British artist Korby has unveiled his debut EP, I'll Explain Later. We caught up with the musician to go behind-the-EP and unpack his artistry.
My technology's been crazy today, but I'm glad to be able to chat with you tonight. [Ding] I don't know how to make this stop dinging. I'm very bad at technology. I've had this problem for years where I don't know how to mute the text on the laptop.
[Laughs] Do you have a MacBook?
Yeah.
Okay. You can put it on Do Not Disturb. Should I show you?
That would be incredible.
You see in the top right? It has the time. Then it has the date moving to the left. Then it has that little Siri thing. Then it has those two little sliders - click that. Do Not Disturb should be somewhere in there.
There it is, Do Not Disturb. Oh my gosh, I feel so dumb. Thank you so much.
[Laughs] No, no, no. It happens. My pleasure.
This has already become the best interview I've ever done because I've learned so much and we haven't even started [laughs].
Well, we can end the interview there then [laughs].
Again, thank you so much for your time today. Obviously we're here to talk about the debut EP. But before we delve into that, can you tell me a bit about your musical background and what led you towards this path?
Yeah. I played piano for a while. I had my first lessons when I was six, but even before that, it had always been something that I'd enjoy. It was always something that was in the house around me. It wasn't necessarily encouraged specifically, but there was always music, music playing around me. My dad played the drums and he'd always be listening to music, tapping along in the car. He'd have the best CDs. His friends would make him CDs and he'd play them in the car with us. That was always something I'd look forward to from even before I started having the piano lessons or learning any instruments. It was like, that was so fun for me. So learning the piano became the first major step into music - where I was already on the diving board, ready to jump kind of thing. Then learning the piano kind of just pushed me in. From there it was kind of nonstop learning the piano. Had lessons in that for a while and eventually stopped and just kind of did my own thing on that instrument. Learned the guitar. Funnily enough, the first few songs I learned on the guitar were Justin Bieber covers. So I had learned the guitar, learned the chord, and sang along with Justin Bieber songs. Crazy time [laughs]. Then learning the bass guitar more recently, during the pandemic actually, I used to work at a youth centre and they had bass guitars, and someone had shown me like a few movements on the guitar. I was like, 'alright, that's all I need.' And then from there kind of just built my way around it, playing along to like John Mayer and other people and just jamming along. Eventually I got to a point where I felt pretty confident on that. I played like earlier on after my piano lessons, I played the piano next to my dad, played the drums, and I played the piano in my church. Then as I learned the guitar, my brother started learning the piano. So then I was shifted onto the guitar at church, and then my brother was on the keys, and then my dad was on the drums. So that was almost literally every week for like five years, six years of my life. It wasn't fun all the time but it was never something I was not going to do, if that makes sense. I was never not gonna do it. I was always gonna do it. Even if I was like, not in the mood, I was like, "oh, this isn't cool right now. All my friends are playing football on a Sunday [laughs]. I'm playing the piano and singing," but it grew into this I guess. I'm nothing but grateful for the past and all the journey.
It seems like there's a rich tapestry of music not only embedded within your own life, but your families. How do you think that your training as a multi-instrumentalist has fed into and influenced you as a songwriter?
I feel like I've got more, like a lot of tools. If I can't say it with my voice, maybe I can say it on an instrument or if I can't express what I'm trying to express with that instrument, maybe I can write it and make it rhyme. And that is what I was trying to express. It just gives me more ways to say and express what I'm trying to say with the song, if that makes sense. And also, what I ended up listening to wasn't... I had to kind of find what I enjoyed listening to, what I enjoyed playing. Which then influenced my taste and how I feel comfortable expressing the music.
I back that. Your debut EP, I'll Explain Later , has arrived. It's such a fun one and a great listen. In my opinion it's a documentation of human connection, and this overall theme of the human existence. Can you unpack the themes and concepts explored across the EP ,and the importance to you with documenting them within your music?
So a lot of the music is just me letting it out. Like just saying what I wanted to say. A lot of it is quite conversational and it's kind of things that I would want to have a conversation with someone about. And I may not have the right person to talk to about, or it maybe just wouldn't have come out in conversation or I wouldn't be able to express it to that person, or whoever I'm with doesn't, wouldn't understand. Like, they just wouldn't get it. So it kind of just ended up being me, compacting everything that I wanted to let out and express to someone or express to anyone who would listen. Just me letting that out in I guess the seven different tracks that it turned into. They turned out to be the seven tracks which kind of felt the most, they felt most...
The most freeing?
Yeah, exactly. It wasn't even a conscious thing that I tried to do. It just ended up being like, "oh, let's make this, let's make a song today. This guitar melody is inspiring me, come out of this melody." And then only listening to the songs back, and that kind of connecting the time and the music, I kind of realised, "oh, that's where that came from. Okay." I kind of just needed to tell someone, I needed to get that off my chest at the time. I was like, it's lucky that I have music to be able to do that because I'd probably just implode. I was just like, [laughs], I'd so self-destruct or something like that. But yeah, the themes is a lot of just me understanding myself and then realising, 'all right, cool. We're not all too much different from each other.' So me letting this out and trying to process these emotions, someone might just relate to it. From what I've heard from people listening to it, it does. And that's kind of crazy to me because it was just quite personal experiences and personal themes that I was like getting through on the tracks. But to hear that it resonates with people is kind of like the biggest, it's the biggest honour I could have to be able to allow people to process their own life with my music, or share some emotion with them or have some common ground. Some emotional common ground of people just through the fact that I've told a story about my day driving home, or like having nosebleeds or someone around me not being able to sleep or like those kind of things. I didn't set out to do that, but I'm happy, and I'm so happy it turned out to be what it is.
That's so beautiful. I mean that, that's the purpose of music, to connect and to make everyone feel like they're understood. That's so beautiful that you've already had so many people experience that with your music.
Yeah, kind of crazy.
Sonically it's such a dynamic and textural body of work, full of light and shade. How did you go about crafting the overall sonic realm that the EP exists within?
I work a lot with my friend RJ, he's like in formal terms the executive producer. But in informal terms, that's my broski. Like my actual just bro, we kind of have a vision for what music is to us. And like it turns out that we, as you said, we kind of focus on creating a world around music, and a world around each song and letting each song be its own planet. That was a good one. That was good [laughs]. We kind of do consciously try to do that with each song and kind of make sure each thing, each element we add, is essential to the song. And just the overall idea and essence of it, that's kind of... once you got past the general ideation and like messing about and having fun and putting melodies down, once you got past that bit, we nerd out on like, 'all right, what is this song supposed to be and what is it going to be?' We kind of spend a lot of time on just creating a lot of soundscapes around the lyrics or other way around, we create the lyrics around the soundscape that we've created. I feel like when we do it that way, the song has no choice but to be expressive and in that way and then create its own type of narrative, because we kind of allow the song to have its own story musically and lyrically.
That is such a great insight into your process. And the Planet analogy was incredible.
[Laughs] I love analogies man. I love a good analogy.
I do too. You touched on it there with the sound, but when it came to working on each song and everything involved in it - did you find that you had quite a distinct creative process or did each song kind of take on its own form?
It was a general process. Very, very general process. Each song definitely had its own life story. Like for example, there were two songs on there, Wait For You and Feel My Face, which I started literally right here, like in that side of the room. I started them here on a super chill night where I was smoking up and just getting super danked out. And I was like, 'let me just mess around.' And then it was this guitar, just messing around on this guitar, this bass, and then chopped in some drums, played in some piano. I bought a piano for 50 pounds on Facebook and it was outta tune, wonky, like really badly, really wasn't well looked after, but it still had something. So I kind of throughout, there was like a week of my last year where I was like, 'I need to make something out of this, I need to.' And then I just, every time I come across the piano, I just fiddle around, see if I can find something that is actually in tune. And then one day just by chance, it was five or six notes that were in tune of each other. They weren't actually like tuned, but they were in tune of each other. So they all out of tune to the same degree. Then that was all I needed and came back upstairs, recorded it on my phone, I'm pretty sure. Came back upstairs, plugged it into my laptop, jammed some bass and then that song was born from that - Feel My Face and Wait For You similarly. Then other songs like Making Faces on the EP, I had spent the day just running around, running around London, went to see my girl, pick her up, we'd gone for a drive and then she'd asked me something like, "when are you gonna marry me?" And I'm like, 'yo, when am I?' But it was the first time I'd ever like actually considered it, and that was a weird emotion for me. Something I never ever felt, which is kind of what a lot of the songs were. Just, 'what is that feeling?' And then having to get that feeling off my chest. I just had to tell the story to someone. So that song, Making Faces, I'd spent the day with my girl earlier on and then went to see RJ at the studio. We'd had someone play an amazing drum, Elliot actually, our Australian friend who plays the guitar [laughs]. And I'd just spoken to RJ, I was like, 'okay this music is already great. We have an amazing drum loop, we have an amazing guitar melody, like what do you even talk about on something like this?' And he's like, 'yo Korbs, just tell me about your day, like talk some shit.' And I'm like, 'oh, okay. I got some shit to tell you. I felt something interesting earlier.' And then that song kind of just fell out. Like it just became that kind of song and what I'm really proud of - a lot of the songs, all of it's true. Everything is actually true. Everything has actually happened, which is quite nice to say. I'm not making up stories for the tracks. But yeah, to go back to the question, the process differs between each song.
I'm so glad you got to make use of the 50 pound piano off of Facebook.
Yeah. Same, same, same. Because it was so, it's so out of tune [laughs], but it's on three tracks. To Let Go, that's the main piano that runs through the whole song, it's that same piano using them same few notes that are in tune with each other. To Let Go, Feel My Face and there's another one I can't remember but yeah. Maybe two tracks.
That's so awesome. If you had to pick one song from the EP to play to someone that had never heard your music before, that you think would make them an instant on the spot diehard fan - they're gonna come to all the shows, they're gonna buy all the merch, they might get like a lyric tattooed on themselves. Which song do you think would best lure them in?
Oh, okay. I'm literally, let me flip a coin. I'm stuck between two. Feel my Face and To Let Go. Yeah, it depends. It depends on who it is. I'll just like do a quick like scan, alright. Would they like Feel my Face or To Let Go, but either of those songs, if I play that to someone, I'm sure they become a fan.
I agree. Speaking of lyrics to get tattooed, is there like a particular line, lyric or musical motif from the EP that you find gets like stuck in your head more often than not?
Yeah, on To Let Go. There's a line where it's like, "I would be tighter than whiskey on a cold night when you miss me." Yeah, that one
Now hopefully you'll perform these songs at some point in Australia. But um, what can like audiences expect from one of your live shows when they attend?
You know, I've only ever performed like a couple times. Like I know I've only performed it like 2, 3, 4 times, three times maybe. Got a performance coming up soon. But I'd say just like the energy. I don't know, I feel like I turn into a different person. I just let it all out and that's the feedback I've got and that's what I feel as far as I'm performing. It's like just letting it all out, letting loose and just being free in the music and just enjoying the moment that that you are in. That's what I think people experience most from my live performance. Just enjoying the moment and freedom.
I love that. Honestly, throughout this whole interview and taking to you, I've sure like the energy at your live show would just be like so electric and so great. And that's not even having seen you perform, it's literally just based off words. So hopefully you get to Australia soon.
I'll Explain Later is out now!
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