“We just played three awesome shows, I thought we did really well,” Yeo says. “What was interesting was really noticing how our audience has grown. When you’ve been playing music for a while, and you’re kind of getting somewhere, there’s a definite shift between all of your mates coming to your shows, and people who are complete randoms who like your music. I think we’re noticing that more and more every tour, which is awesome. Still, I wish there were more people in general coming to shows. I mean that across the board, not just my own shows. I think local gigs suffer these days. People are over-saturated, or are just lazy. Not to sound too negative, because that’s not how it felt on tour at all. The people who came really enjoyed it.”
While Yeo has indeed been playing music for a while now – he first sprung into view nearly a decade ago – he is far from being a crotchety music industry old timer, shaking his fist at clouds and moaning about the youth of today. He’s still evolving his art, and equally intent on developing his musical inspiration as developing his audience. However, Yeo’s head is certainly not in the sand. He’s happy to concede that audience’s march to their own beat, and his guess as to how to encourage live music attendance is as good as yours.
“I honestly couldn’t put my finger on one thing in particular. We’ve been doing this for a long time, we’re not that new any more, and so the hype falls away from us a little. Audiences always rush to see the hottest new thing, so if there’s a lot of buzz about a band who only formed a few months ago and have only put out one great track, that’s still where the majority of people will go. I’m not taking away at all from the music, I think people deserve the attendance that they get. What this motivates me to do is go back into the studio and write.”
In September, Yeo released Ganbaru’s second single, Icarus, following June’s Quiet Achiever. The latest track carries a sentiment that echoes the tone of his debut album, Trouble Being Yourself. However, between these releases, second album Home was strikingly different; sans electronica, the folk-friendly LP was quite removed from his usual synthesised sensibility. Were you to watch the video for Icarus back-to-back with his Balcony TV performance of At Your Own Pace, you would be forgiven for thinking these were two very different artists.
“I feel like I’m still writing about the same stuff. Home was very much a departure, and it’s interesting you bring up Trouble Being Yourself, ’cause more than ever I feel like I’m heading back that way. But it’s still the same guy on that Balcony TV clip and the one who wrote Icarus. I can understand why that’s jarring for audiences, but you really see what I am influenced by, and how that doesn’t really have any limits. I don’t want to follow the rules.
“The live set is about energy, and appealing to audiences who will identify with the later stuff that I’m putting out, because obviously that’s what we want them to get into. So we keep it electronic. On the flipside, I just rebuilt a production for a song off [Trouble Being Yourself] called Two Sides of a Door to play in the set. I think it’s a really good fit, so we’ve kind of gone full circle.”
While this circular trajectory can be heard across his oeuvre, even within his two recent singles a great deal of ground is covered. Both songs are recognisably Yeo, but in very different shades. Intriguingly, this stems in part from dreams. There, a song might emerge that expresses his waking life in ways his ordinary writing would overlook.
“It’s really fun, especially when you wake up and have the time to capture it. Usually the alarm goes off and it’s just, ‘Nup. No chance.’ A lot of times the songs, well, it’s clichéd, but they’ll conjure themselves from very negative feelings. I see music as a bit of a mule for me, where I just make it carry my load until it gets lighter and I can pick it back up again. Just put some wheels on the thing, push it along so you’re not dragging songs through the dirt. Even in that scope, the spark can be a single lyric, something I think is really poignant or meaningful. Or it can be a rather complex idea, which I then have to distil into musical form. ‘How am I going to construct this so that when I perform it, I still feel it? It’s still true to the emotion?’ That’s really the fun part.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
