The Big Moon have been away working on album two, and we’ve missed them.
Their debut album was a howling, cackling burst of excitement. Fuelled by friendship and the hunger for more, it captured what it was to be young, in love and have hope. The eleven tracks made you want to join their gang, while the chaotic, colourful live shows made it feel like you were theirs for life.
And today we stop our pining. No more staring out of windows or looking up at the sky on a clear night out and wondering if we’re both gazing at the same planetary body because The Big Moon are back.
‘It’s Easy Then’ is the first taste of album two and a promise that things have changed. Considered, aching and glorious, it sees the band trade bubbling hyperactivity for something more beautiful but no less infectious. After putting our socks back on, we called Jules up to get the lowdown.
Hello Jules. What have you been up to since touring for that first record wound down?
We took a little bit of time out after we came back from the last tour, but I just got straight back into writing. Going from performing to writing, it takes a while to reset your brain. They’re completely different actions.
And how have you found playing live again?
The first show was a couple months ago, and I was so scared. We were playing new songs, and we haven’t played a new song for years. I expected everybody to boo, hiss and leave the room, but of course, they didn’t. Once you’ve got that first show out of the way, all the others have just been really fun. And playing festivals again has been such a dream. I love festivals.
How have those new songs been going down?
Really well. People have been shouting good heckles during the show, like ‘second album’s gonna be great’, which is nice. People have been talking about it, asking us about it a lot and it feels like people are ready for it. And we are so ready to show our new music to people. We’ve been working on this for a couple of years, and now we’ve finished it. Now we’re just kind of sitting on it. Like an egg.
Did you approach writing this record differently to how you did ‘Love In The 4th Dimension’?
I definitely wanted to make something different. And I think we’ve really pushed ourselves to make something that sounds different. We really challenged ourselves. We wanted to work with a different producer and play different instruments. There are a lot of songs on the album that aren’t guitar-based. We play the piano a lot, and the trumpet and the flute. We just used all of our other skills and learnt some new things as well. It was important for us to make something new because we’ve done one album and we’re really happy with it, but we’ve done that. We wanted to find something new. Why would anyone want to repeat themselves?
Was doing something different easy to do?
No. It would have been very easy for us to make an album of the same kind of rock songs. And actually, when I first started writing, those are the kind of songs that I was writing. We’d just come back from tour, and that’s just what I was used to and also what I thought I should do. After a few months of writing these songs. I just had this revelation. ‘Hey, we could just we can do anything’. The first album, it’s all kind of a bit of a struggle, trying to get it all together and get the band together but with your second album, you finally have a platform, you have fans, and you have the space where you can finally create the thing you really wanted to make. Let’s try and make something different. Let’s go against our instincts.
Also, I realised it doesn’t really matter what instruments we’re playing. It doesn’t even matter what genre of music it is because it’s still us playing. It’s our voices, and our lyrics so it’s still our song. We found that we had a lot of faith in the strength of our own character and decided to just explode it. We wanted to be bold. It’s good to be bold.
So, ‘It’s Easy Then’. What’s it about?
It’s just about how complicated life feels at the moment. I feel like life felt easy for a long time. And now it feels harder and more complicated. We work too much. We think too much, we know too much, and so we all worry too much. We read the news every day, and it just stokes our anxieties. It just feels a bit like this scary panic attack at the moment and that song was really just my way of trying to articulate that really. I wanted to make some music that felt really soothing and cleansing, like a tonic. The lyrics are quite freaked out and panicky, but the music is really fulfilling and relaxing.
What do you hope people take away from that song?
I want people to find some kind of truth in it. We spend half our consciousness trying to articulate things. And I think the greatest thing about music is when a song can say something that just explains something you’ve been feeling in the truest way, that you couldn’t have ever said with your own language. That’s like freedom. I hope people can hear it and feel those feelings.
Why the first track back?
It really sums up the sound of the album. It just sums up where we want to go now, who we want to be, who we are, and what we’re trying to say. It just felt like a good, exciting starting point.
Any worries about people turning their noses up and demanding the old The Big Moon?
No, because a lot of years have passed really since we wrote our first album. This new sound doesn’t feel weird to us; it just feels right. We’ve all grown up, got older, and our music tastes have developed and changed. It’s the natural progression really. Nobody wants to listen to the same music all the time for their whole life. You move on and evolve. We could have made an album that sounded the same, but why would you want to do that? It wouldn’t have felt right.
The Big Moon’s new single ‘It’s Easy Then’ is out now.
Words: Ali Shutler
