In Earnest is an unrelenting desire to rid oneself of pretense, letting one’s emotions tell the stories that they may dialogue from two from one who feels too much and a response from t
Interview conducted March 24, 2021
By Dan Locke
sad indie noise from south end on sea. ‘Your dog / good boy’ out now
What is your upbringing?
We’re just two guys and a gal from Southend-On-Sea area of the UK. We all discover a passion for music at an early age and it’s been a major part of each of our lives ever since.
How did you discover music?
Sarah fell in love with The Beatles and McFly, Toby got into folk music and ended up onstage with his heroes and Tom’s a closet metalhead who could play along to every Metallica album at the age of 14.
How did you start to write music?
Tom and Sarah had solo projects before we were ‘in earnest’ and Toby flits between performing as a session musician and composing his own instrumental music.
How did your band form?
‘in earnest’ arrived out of the ashes of our last band, Carousel. We were striving for something more artful, with a bigger focus on mental health and sharing personal stories in our music.
How did you get your band’s name?
The definition of ‘in earnest’ is ‘to a greater extent or more intensely than before’. This perfectly describes how we felt about the new music we wanted to make.
Why a three-piece band?
The friendship and musical dynamic that we have as a trio works well for us, and we like the way that we’re able to still sound big with only three members. No drums mean we tread the line between acoustic act and full band. We like that.
What is sad indie noise?
A half-serious, half-joke genre name that we made up to describe our music.
What was your first performance like?
It was good! We had a great debut London show in November 2019 and were really glad to have had a decent audience turnout. You never can tell what to expect!
What makes a good songwriter?
Someone who can articulate a story or feelings well. We’re big fans of artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Glen Hansard who are able to delve into the human experience so intricately.
What was the title of your first original song? Did you record it?
The first song we put together as ‘in earnest’ was ‘29’, which ended up being the opening track on our debut EP. We still love to play that one.
What is the process of writing your music?
Usually, Tom or Sarah will write a song separately. That song is then brought into the rehearsal stage so that the other two members can contribute to it musically and share others thoughts and opinions. At some point it all feels right and we decide to commit to it, although sometimes we end up changing things right up until the point that we record a song.
Tell me about your EP release party for “In Earnest”?
We decided that since we couldn’t play a real life show due to UK lockdown rules, we would play the entire EP in full as part of a livestream. We wore onesies and drank tea too, which is a very ‘us’ thing to do.
You wrote “Put Me Under” back in 2019. The song deals with how mental health affects every aspect of one’s life. If you had written it during the lockdown, how would it be different?
A big part of ‘Put Me Under’ is the description of loneliness, which might have been much less prominent due to having been around housemates a lot and being locked down with them. The song might not exist at all if Sarah hadn’t been having a difficult day whilst alone and dog sitting.
What is your favorite track on your album?
We all really like ‘Fables’. So do a lot of our listeners it seems!
Tell me about your songs Your Dog/Good Boy?
We wrote ‘your dog’ and ‘good boy’ as a tribute to our dogs, Murph and Doug. ‘your dog’ is all about the questions we’d love to ask our pets and ‘good boy’ is about Doug having passed away a little over a year ago, and details the pain that it brought us.
How was it to record and mix it yourself?
It was interesting! It’s the first time we’ve done that and we think it came out pretty well! There are always things to learn and improve on, so we’re excited to do more self-recording and producing in the future.
What are your feelings about streaming music?
Everything has pros and cons and streaming music is no exception. We are big Spotify users and fans of the platform. Of course, we wish artists made more on royalties from streams but it’s also one of the most common places for new listeners to find our music – we can’t complain too much!
The last show you played, you opened up for Heather Woods Broderick of Sharon Van Etten’s. What was that show like?
It was cool! She’s a cool artist and it was nice to play one of our first shows with someone like Heather.
If “Video Killed the Radio Star” do you think that the Covid-19 virus has killed live music? Do you feel the Covid-19 virus going to affect the music business in the future?
We don’t think it’s killed live music, but maybe it has thinned the heard in terms of promoters and the people involved in live music
What have you been doing with your self-quarantine?
Daily morning yoga practice, writing new material, setting up our own PR company for small, independent artists. Drinking tea as always, and definitely eating too many biscuits…
What is My Black Dog, the mental health charity?
They’re a charity based in London and are currently the UK’s only free peer-to-peer service that is solely staffed by volunteers that have experienced mental illness. Meaning that anyone can log onto a chat with them and talk through anything with someone who probably has a good idea of how you’re feeling and has been there before. We’re ambassadors for them and hope to do some fundraising for them soon!
How do you stay healthy during the lockdown?
Sarah has really gotten into cooking this year and we’re definitely seeing the benefits to both our physical and mental health as a result. We also get out with the dog every day for a good walk or two. That always helps clear the mind.
Have you discovered or rediscovered any new hobbies?
Yoga was something that we’d only started at the beginning of the year. Tom’s gotten into building miniature models made from metal and since Toby looks so much like Mr. Bean, he has been working hard on his impressions.
How can bands keep their fans if they cannot play live in front of them and sell merchandise at shows?
Be inventive with their creative ideas and increase their skills set. We’ve released our first batch of music, learned to record ourselves, made our own music videos from home, set up a PR agency and loads more, all whilst we’ve been locked down. Using our time productively has been key in making sure that there’s a place for us once live gigs and day-to-day ‘normality’ resumes. Livestream gigs, fan subscriptions have become popular as a way to earn some cash from your music.
Is pay to play still a thing? Now pay to play also means things like getting on playlists on the streaming services and opening slots for a major band on tour.
We get ‘pay to increase your Spotify profile’ offers all the time from companies who generate bogus streams and fan counts. We’re not into that but it does exist!
In the past if a musician stop doing music, they find a new career. For example, David Lee Roth from Van Halen became a licensed EMT in NY for 6 years, San Spitz (guitarist for Anthrax) became a master watchmaker, Dee Snider (Twister Sister) voice over work for SpongeBob SquarePants. If you can’t do music, what would you like to be doing?
Running a doggy daycare centre haha.
What is your happy place?
Around our dogs.
Spotify’s ‘Stream On’ event on Monday (February 22), the company confirmed that more than 60,000 new tracks are now being ingested by its platform every single day. This means people are added new tracks uploaded to its platform every 1.4 seconds.
The figure, announced by Spotify’s co-Head of Music, Jeremy Erlich, means that across the course of this year, approximately 22 million tracks will be added to Spotify’s catalog. Spotify confirmed in November last year that its platform now played host to around 70 million tracks.
Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume that, by the end of 2021, SPOT will be home to over 90 million tracks. And that in the early part of next year, it will surpass a catalog of 100 million for the first time.
But still back at the beginning of the year Spotify deleted 750,00 songs, mostly from independent artists. What do you think what that could mean to independent artist?
We guess that Spotify has to clear space and is most likely to remove independent music that no one is listening to. It would also depend on whether the artist has paid to be distributed to Spotify because they probably can’t be removed in that case.
The British government, buoyed by early good news on a brisk roll-out of vaccinations in the UK, set out a roadmap that, as things stand, would see the re-opening of large music events in the UK, with no audience limit, on June 21. Live Nation and its subsidiary, Festival Republic, didn’t hang about after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made this announcement on Monday (February 22).
The companies quickly announced that their Reading & Leeds festival – an annual fest taking place across two locations in the UK with a combined capacity of around 180,000 – would be going ahead between August 27 and 29 this year, and that tickets were on sale.
With this announcement Live Nation USA wants to follow the lead of Live Nation UK. If this happens and live concerts start happening this summer, would you be up to playing live shows again and under want precautions, would you like to have in place?
We’d likely be happy to perform if we were given the chance to, but we wouldn’t be hanging around or mingling in large audiences. We just wouldn’t be comfortable with that just yet and wouldn’t put ourselves in that position. We’d also need confirmation that the backstage/artist areas were Covid-secure and that decent safety measures were in place to keep everybody safe from as much risk as possible.
Anything you would like to say in closing.
Thanks for the interview, UnRated Mag! It’s been a pleasure.
