Interview: Good Morning's 'Good Morning Seven' Finds Music in Life's Mundanity

Melbourne’s Good Morning mark ten years with their sonically diverse and lyrically potent seventh studio album, ‘Good Morning Seven,’ encapsulating the creative partnership between Stefan Blair and Liam Parsons that has maintained their place in the indie music scene.

‘Good Morning Seven’ – Good Morning

I think the hope was that we’d still be hanging out and making music together in some capacity just because that’s what we’ve always done as friends since we’ve known each other.”

For the past decade, Good Morning have made these jam sessions between friends simulate an open studio for listeners, crafting intimate soundscapes where each piece of production and instrumentation feels live. The indie band comprised of Stefan Blair and Liam Parsons unpretentiously finds introspection hidden in the mundanities of life, making their projects approachable while equally absorbing.

Coming off of the release of their studio album Good Morning Seven, released on March 22 via Polyvinyl, Atwood Magazine caught up with one-half of the duo, Stefan Blair, to talk ten years of Good Morning.

Good Morning Seven - Good Morning — Good Morning Seven – Good Morning

In typical Good Morning fashion, we met Blair on a Saturday morning in Melbourne with a warm beverage in hand, back at his parents’ house taking care of his cat who he claims is “not entirely against me these days” after he spent time in the states to tour and record. While Melbourne does feel like home for Blair, since Good Morning, he’s become a bit of a wanderer:

“I’m very much enjoying a lifestyle at the minute of where I end up has been tied in with where we finish touring. So like we’ll finish a tour and I’ll stay somewhere for 6 months or 12 months and just sort of see what’s up there. So I’ve spent a few years doing that which has been pretty amazing. It’s a hard thing to complain about the luxury of travel and getting to experience other places. But it is for me maybe getting to a point where I can see the benefit in having a home and a place to land and come back to. But for the minute whilst I’m young and healthy, I’m quite happy to be floating around.”

In letting the events of life play out, it is this kind of see where the wind blows circumstantial sentiment that has come to define much of Good Morning’s music, and in particular this most recent project. In addition to the musical and thematic attributes that differentiate Good Morning Seven among the group’s discography, it is also their longest album to date – with a tracklist of 17 songs, a decision that was not necessarily intentional as the bones for the project formed amid the pandemic:

“It wasn’t a super conscious decision going into recording it I guess. It was more so we had quite a chunk of time, or we had an indefinite amount of time I suppose at this studio that we set up in Melbourne and the idea was to go in and treat our studio time as if it was our 9-5. During the week we would just sit and write and record music and just kept adding it to this file… We were left with this bank of songs and then it was probably well over a year until we actually revisited them back in the states and started to be like alright what works here and what do we want to piece together and what do we want to focus on.”

The end result was a double album that came to be perhaps Good Morning’s most sonically diverse and lyrically potent record yet.

Every track is distinct in its instrumentation whether it’s the stark percussions of “The Lake” or the warped lush of the synths in “Monster Of The Week,” each track carved its own unique soundscape within the larger project. Vocals in particular Blair notes was something they wanted to emphasize as a sound source in this project:

“We made a big point of wanting to actually sing on this record and use our voice a lot more. I feel like typically in older Good Morning records a lot of it’s pretty mumbled and pretty buried – like we haven’t wanted the vocals to be, or at least personally I haven’t wanted my words to really be able to be understood, and this time around we were like, well let’s sing and let’s write all these harmonies and let’s get more friends to come down and sing!”

With vocals more at the forefront than before comes an inherent spotlight on the songwriting.

Blair states that he and Liam would never really influence one another’s songwriting, which is what makes Good Morning’s storytelling particularly unique and why Blair believes there “probably never will be a Good Morning record that has a through-line in a narrative sort of lyrical perspective.”

Even so, Blair does find that the similarities in their lives and how they grew up can act as a subconscious thread between their songwriting. In the case of this record, circumstance found a way in both of their lyricism:

“We had a shared experience in the monotony of our lockdown life, and I think that somewhat informed the introspection and a lot of them dive deeper on the self rather than external things, which I think is due to the fact that we had so much time to sit around and think.”

At its core, Good Morning is the music product of two distinct persons with the balance between them sustaining their sound.

Looking back at how they came together, Blair explains there was never really an expectation back then other than to keep making music:

“I’m trying to put myself back into the mindset of my 19-year-old self, I think if had a goal I reckon it would’ve been to try and make it a thing that was sustainable so like, be able to make music, be able to perform, and be able to have that contribute to how you pay your rent and stuff like that.”

“And we’re lucky enough that we’re in that position now, where we get to focus our time on music and we can take chunks of time to go on tour and make records… and that, to me, I think would’ve been the only ever goal post, and now I don’t know where my ambition lies anymore because now that we’ve got that it’s in a sweet spot where it’s like, ‘alright we can do this and it’s this sustainable thing.’”

While some artists can become consumed by the pressures of the industry and the societal — often commodity-obsessed — assumptions of what defines success, Blair finds contentment with where he is at:

“I would love to be able to just keep this going at a similar pace I think. It’s a nice little pocket, you know? I’m not racing to play arenas, get on some magazine, or festival, or whatever, I truly don’t mind, I’m happy just being here, and if I can keep contributing the majority of my time to working on records and occasionally playing shows it’s a pretty good deal for me I think.”

Good Morning Seven is out now via Polyvinyl. Catch Good Morning on tour throughout North America this spring – tickets and more information at goodmorning.band!

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