Wynona Bleach released the 'Sugar' EP in 2018 which you really really need to hear and now they're ready to unleash their debut album on us, 'Moonsoake'. As with many bands corona has hit them hard and had a financial impact on the release. They're currently running an Indie-Go-Go campaign to help cover some losses and bring this beautiful album to life. After catching some of the songs live I can give the Old Crows guarantee (cause that's a thing now) that you'll love this record, on purple vinyl no less! You can contribute in a number of ways, pre-orders of the album, shirts and if you're super flush a private show!
Check out the campaign video below and then if you can click the link and help 'Moonsoake' come to life. I've already pre-ordered mine. Now more than ever I think we all need to support each others artistic endeavours, especially when they sound this good.
Check out the interview with Jonny below!
Enjoy
Campaign Link
Can you tell me what first inspired you to make music, what made you pick up a guitar and start writing songs?
My parents tell this embarrassing story at ever family gathering ever, which is that apparently when i was about 4 or 5 I wanted a plastic guitar from a toy shop in Dublin, and wanted to play for the people on the street. So they gave in, bought me it, and i did! busking as a toddler. It's always been in me to do it and i know nothing else really. In my teens i was a shredder and i wanted to be Ritchie Blackmore, and then I realised i was way more satisfied writing songs (i was only good at Art and English in school which kinda explains that).
What bands posters did you have upon your bedroom wall and what was the first record you ever bought and why?
I had NOFX and Alkiline Trio posters on my wall, I Mel still has her Marilyn Manson and Distillers posters, and I think even a Slipknot one that was taken by Paul Harries, who eventually was the guy to snap the cover photo of our first EP “Sugar” (we flew him over to Belfast for the day, the hottest day of that year, and i think he thought the place was a bit of a shithole tbh haha! He hadn’t seen it since photographing Therapy? in the early 90’s. Lovely man.
Can you tell us a bit about how the band came together, I know you were previously R51. Has it been the same line up throughout? If so you’ve been together a long time, even longer in band years! Band years are like cat years!
R51 had a different bass player, Anton. We had a tour coming up and he was at the time the only one with a proper real job and they offered him a promotion to move to the USA around the same time as the tour. We had a bunch of people audition but when Carl hit his first note everyone burst out laughing and gave him the gig right then and there. That was late 2017. We changed our name right after that tour and started 2018 off with the new name, and things changed completely because of that. Mel, Matty, Aaron and I have been in different guises forever and Mel and I have been singing and playing together since we were in our teens.
You released the ‘Sugar’ EP in 2018 which is such a great record. It’s actually one of my favourites I play incessantly! Can you talk about making the record, the song writing process, the recording process lyrically what you cover in those songs and did it achieve what you set out to achieve?
Thanks dude!!! Sugar was kinda a really smeared out blur for us. We had just taken on a new management company and they wanted a product pretty quickly, so we got stuck in and recorded everything in our rehearsal unit. I think there was this really weird month of my hitting crazy bad writers block and just not being able to finish any lyrics and it sat for like a month and a half. Like it often goes (and its been going on the album) this mad wave of creativity will strike and of course I wrote the title track after the EP was finished and rushed to get it to be included on the record. I mixed it myself and it was a breaking point for me where I made the call there and then that the next release would have to be by someone else or i’d lose my mind.
I know you’ve been away in Portugal recording a new album. Can you talk about how the album might differ from the previous EP, why choose to go to Portugal to record the album? I’m sure all of if not most of the material was written before you left but did the surroundings influence the sound of the record or the songs or was it a case of it just mean’t you could record in shorts?
I wanted the album to not contain any old R51 songs, as proud of those as I am. So part of the reason for going to Portugal was to give us a deadline to have stuff finished and rehearsed, and the other reason was an attempt to get it done quicker, because we would have no distractions and be working every day, in a valley in central Portugal with nothing for miles. I definitely rewrote and reworked a LOT of the material in portugal. Theres a documentary we made and apparently theres footage of me on the roof of our villa, smashed, re-writing the opening track.
The space we recorded in was the showroom of an old billiard factory. I had gone over a few times before t stay in friends houses and through some chance meetings and conversations, the local successful businessman, Jeronimo offered his now abandoned factory to us. I told our live sound guy Mike about it in jest and he didn’t shut the fuck up about it for about 6 months, saying “ill drive everything down!!” so like stars aligning, a ferry route opened from Cork to Spain, and he drove our whole studio down.
We had bill Ryder Jones co-produce the album with us, at the helm in Portugal for about a month. We came home with basically 9/12 tracks done, as we lost a couple of days to illness. We finished those up at home and then realised we were out of money and i was gonna have to mix it. Thankfully, I’ve been doing the first mixes along with Mastering genius Jon Moorehead at Moosetronix studios, and a couple of other massively helpful new friends have spec’d a few mixes that I look forward to telling everyone about soon.
Having finally got to see you at Output this year I was surprised that live the band becomes a very different beast, it’s a much more visceral experience, more raw and in your face. Is it a conscious decision or is it just a case of volume and adrenaline takes over? Do you take the studio sound and live sound as different things?
I always tried to capture that in recordings and never could to be honest. What we do live is what we do in the studio (maybe at a different pace)! but certainly the pop numbers I do like to add ear candy in the studio on. Its a constant war in us between candy pop production and what we do live. There are many tracks on the album that were almost completely live and I definitely want and have been able to keep that vibe in the mixes.
Jonny, you’ve a predilection for stomp boxes. Do you find the board evolves from release to release? How much of a role do the pedals play in the song writing process? Is it a matter of colouring something after or do they act as jumping off points?
Used to love that shit big time and slowly have started to take stuff off the board. I have the minimal setup that I’d want for now. I definitely write songs out of cool noises, sometimes that cool noise is guitar into a cool amp, sometimes its awash with fx that I almost always end up reeling back in as we tour and play the songs! Aaron and i both have a kind of mirror image of each others setups, he’s much more about chord definition and is a genius for chord shapes and has inspired me to no end. We get a kick out of both of us accompanying each other as best as possible. So whilst I’m a shredder, generally theres no “lead” guitarist.
Having heard some of the new album tracks live at your Output show and how great they sound, I’m really excited for the album. Can you give us an idea of release date, a title and lyrically what themes the album covers, is there any over arching theme to it?
Thank you!! Currently thanks to COVID-19 we can’t accurately tell, but we really hope to sending off to pressing by may, and it would be nice to have it out in september. But i could be talking total bollocks.
Thematically theres a trend of self-understanding and the relationship you have with your own brain. Theres love songs and hate songs and its a snapshot of where i am personally in my head over the last year really. All great albums are rollercoasters summarising the mortal coil and this is no exception
The scene both north and south seems to be stronger than ever, is there anyone you’d want to shout out to?
Yeah big love to Susie Blue, Junk Drawer, CHERYM, you guys in Paper Tigers and donegal-heartbreaker Joel Harkin!
And in the vein of Rob Gordon, what are your Top 5 records?
Impossible to pick 5 but records that I have basically worn out:
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness - Smashing Pumpkins
Sunbather - Deafheaven
Stop Making Sense - Talking Heads
Paracosm - Washed Out
Gorilla - James Taylor
Sunbather - Deafheaven
Stop Making Sense - Talking Heads
Paracosm - Washed Out
Gorilla - James Taylor
Honorary addendum:
Live at Budokan - Cheap Trick
God’s dream - Ringo Deathstarr
Gold Experience - Prince
Live at Budokan - Cheap Trick
God’s dream - Ringo Deathstarr
Gold Experience - Prince
did you ask for 5 or 8? can give you another 50 if you like :P
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