“I put a lot of personal pressure on myself to keep making it bigger and better,” says Grossi. “That was the focus of the album, just to make it much sharper and more professional-sounding, as well as stronger songs. I think some people just stay in the same gear – which is totally fine – but, for me, I want to grow as an artist, but also as a live show.”
The new album encapsulates this growth. From humble beginnings centred on Grossi’s voice and harp playing, Active Child has now expanded into a full band setup. Accordingly, he’s taken a more mature approach to songwriting.
“The record is a reflection of the ups and downs of the different relationships I’ve had over the past four years,” he says. “It’s been a couple years since the first record and I wanted to show the different perspectives on love. I think the record has a little bit of everything – more hopeful reflections on the positive side and then it gets darker with introspective feelings of regret and guilt. You know, things that have gone wrong.
“It’s a reflection of my growth,” he continues, “as a person and an artist and on the subject of love, which is like 90 per cent of my music. It seems to be something to continually come back to. My manager comes to me sometimes and is like ‘You know, do you ever write anything else?’ and we sort of laugh about it. But I’m not going to force anything out of myself that doesn’t feel natural.”
Considering love is so central to Grossi’s songwriting, the obvious question is whether there were any great love stories that inspired Mercy? “Almost exactly a year ago I went through a rough breakup with my girlfriend, who I’m back together with now,” he says. “We took some time apart and went through a tough period. I did a lot of the album’s songwriting at that time. I was a little bit lost creatively at that point, but it became the inspiration for the album and the artwork. It all came from how much I need music to make sense of my emotions. That was the idea of Mercy; that whoever was giving me that ability to do that, it felt merciful because I’d feel really lost without that.”
With such personal events forming the basis of his work, playing the songs in front of the woman that inspired them was bound to be heart wrenching: “She was at my first show in San Diego,” says Grossi. “The last song on the record, Too Late, is a pretty frank reflection on that whole experience and it was the song we finished with. I could see her in the front row, pretty much gushing, and I lost it too. It was one of the moments where I couldn’t physically sing anything.”
The conversation now turns to his day off, and Grossi admits he desperately needed the down time. “I write music and get trapped in it for so long and end up getting a little bit burned out,” he says. “We rehearsed for a solid eight weeks before tour, and at this point we’ve only played ten shows and we’re all pretty tired of the music because we’ve been playing it for the last two-and-a-half months straight. I think you have to continually raise the bar – that’s how I feel.”
BY SHAUN COWE
