Fear of inactivity

“The void of not having something to do is the reason why you make music to begin with,” Parkes admits. “For me, not having it is the fear that drives me to continue to do it.”

Everyone has their own reasons that compel them to create art, but quite often, it’s this desire to feel as though you aren’t taking your creative spirit for granted or wasting time focusing on something that doesn’t motivate you in the same way. “My dad’s a labourer, so I suppose my life was pretty teed up to become a labourer, and I tried being a postman for a while,” Parkes adds, noting how his life could have been significantly different had he not had music to lean back on.

Major life events that happened to him at a young age were what ultimately drove him towards music as his creative outlet, and suddenly, the things that interested him from a young age no longer had as much of a bearing on his life. “Around the age of 14 to the age of 16, I dislocated my kneecap twice, and before that, I wasn’t really finding anything that I felt was interesting,” he explains.

“I used to skate and do all the other stuff that young people do, not doing much and just thinking in my head. I went from a very physical world into a very muted, heady world, and all of a sudden, music became like the saviour for that. I thought that had great significance, more significance than kick-flipping.”

Elemental forces

If you’ve ever stopped to take stock of the small things in life that occur around you in everyday situations, it sometimes becomes tough to imagine a world without them providing a sensory backdrop to every action you take. “I think elemental forces with lots of power and dynamic stuff like wind and heavy rain and thunder and the oceans, but also birds and horses, or people laughing, is just inspiring to me on a daily basis,” Broughton passionately exclaims.

However, while these insignificant features of nature’s score have been around forever, focusing on them intensely highlights the gaps between more noticeable actions. “On an auditory level, silence can be quite inspiring,” Broughton continues. “High wind or strong rain on a window is like a form of silence because it doesn’t change, but it’s the lack of sound in that space that makes you inspired to fill it with something.”

“I think perhaps it all stems back to that I did spend a lot of time outside as a child just imagining things,” the frontman reflects. “I was very insular for a lot of my childhood, and made up a lot of my own games and things. I guess my imagination is very vivid. There’s a lot of things that aren’t actually inspiring in the modern world.”

Starting again

Despite the band having begun as Broughton’s solo recording project, the gradual introduction of other members into the songwriting process, as well as making the live shows revolve around an eight-strong ensemble, has allowed the other members to approach their roles in the project in a variety of ways that keep things fresh.

For Henning, his assumed role in the group is far different from anything else he’s ever been a part of. “The exciting thing for me at the moment is that I’m playing bass,” he explains, adding that his first instrument is guitar and that he has plenty of experience as a drummer. “When Jamie asked me to play bass, I saw it as another instrument, another band, and a chance to do something different again.”

“Everything is inspiring right now in that regard, because I get to certain points with different instruments, where I don’t have that childish approach anymore, but now I feel like I have that again,” Henning confesses. It’s this naive wonder and fascination with the inner machinations of how to approach something with a fresh perspective that has given him a zest for the project, and even if not everyone is always on the same page, sharing a space with people who can enlighten him to new things allows him to subconsciously draw influences from this new space.

Deerhoof

San Francisco art rock stalwarts Deerhoof aren’t the sort of band you remain indifferent to after hearing them, and if you like what you hear when being introduced to them, then the likelihood is that they’ll become something of an obsession.

While Broughton himself confesses to being a fan of the band, when Parkes became involved and heard the songs he’d created for the first time, Deerhoof was the first point of reference that he found himself latching onto. “It’s the way they do the same thing where everything’s a hummable thing, but it’s just so fucking crazy,” he says, drawing comparisons between the two projects. “It feels really timeless, but also really rooted in the history of rock and roll. But it’s not, you know?”

“When Jamie was showing me these songs. I was hearing so much of that, so I was really gassed,” Parkes admits, heaping praise on the earliest material that Broughton made under the Big Long Sun moniker. “He’s a lot more songwriter-y, but I’m still gonna heavily always think of Deerhoof as being one of my main inspirations.”

Pixies and their hooks

As Parkes alluded, timeless hooks rooted in the history of rock and roll play a vital role in the way Broughton writes his songs, and the project’s de facto leader chose to nod to this as being the final pillar of influence that drives the band. “I really love music with strong hooks like Abba, Kurt Cobain, The Beatles, or Lou Reed; anything that’s singable, but in a context that’s strange and challenges the listener on some level. That’s a big part of the ‘big long ethos’, I guess.”

Despite reeling off countless acts who act upon this ethos, one stands out above the others as being a mainstay for Broughton. “Pixies is definitely a big one for me as a writer, and it’s definitely important in the kind of ethos of what I wanted to set up Big Long Sun to be,” he notes. “I feel like Pixies, more than most bands in the tradition of underground, take things on from there but use something very alternative with something very commercial.”

Despite many of the aforementioned acts also sharing an ability to write captivating lyrics, Broughton dismisses the notion that this has ever had a significant bearing on his songwriting process to the same degree as hooks do. “Lyrics, for me, get in the way of the music,” he confesses. “I don’t really listen to lyrics until maybe the fourth time I hear a song. They’re kind of a means to an end for me. I’d far rather write a lyric that sounds good to sing than actually has deep meaning or metaphor.”