Both Sides Now

For singer-songwriter Bryan Estepa, there almost wasn't going to be a fourth album, let alone the one he's just released, Heart Vs Mind. After releasing and touring 2011's Vessels, he admits he found himself all out of songs in a way.

“I get a collection of songs, record them and switch it off – I'm not a prolific songwriter. But I helped organise a Neil Young tribute night in support of Beyond Blue, the charity helping people overcome depression, and I learnt 30 or 40 Neil Young songs in a very short space of time, and that sort of got the creative juices flowing and I wrote a song very much influenced by Neil Young, that '90s sort of heavy guitar sound – Come What May. As soon as that song came, things started to flow slowly – I sort of got my confidence back – and ideas flowed from there.”

Not that Heart Vs Mind sounds like it's trying to be a Crazy Horse album. Estepa's inherent pop sensibility and gentler vocal style takes this latest collection of songs to other places, embracing the kind of music he grew up listening to while also reflecting his own Australian indie pop roots.

“AM radio was always a staple part of my sort of musical diet growing up, and growing up too in the Philippines, classic American pop from the '70s was a big part of our musical psyche, I guess. I grew up listening to everything from Simon & Garfunkel and Seals & Crofts to Steely Dan. It was hard to avoid, so I guess, like anything, you grow up and you start listening to new things and explore new sounds, but eventually you'll… That kind of stuff is my comfort food,” he chuckles, “So you can't escape from it – it's always there. That's my bar really, besides my musician friends, who also have the same sort of influences. I set my bar to them as well, but that is a massive influence on what I do and what I write and how I want things to sound on record.”

As often happens, it wasn't until he'd written and recorded a lot of the songs on Heart Vs Mind that Estepa realised a theme of sorts was emerging.

“Around the time I was writing the album, there were a lot of people around me that were ending or getting into new relationships, starting families – there was a lot of end of a circle or a full circle, that dichotomy, the Yin and the Yang – everything was either really great or really bad for certain people I know and I started writing the lyrics for some songs and then I realised I was dipping into the idea and being really conscious of it, and the theme sort of ran through a lot of the songs, which made it really easy for me to write the lyrics. It wasn't till much later on, after I'd sort of demoed most of the album that I realised I was writing about a fictitious couple, influenced by the people around me.”

The other big influence on the way Heart Vs Mind turned out was Estepa's choice of producer – former Red Riders singer and guitarist Adrian Deutsch.

“Maybe it's a false sense of bravado, but I always felt like I knew exactly what I wanted out of each of my records,” Estepa suggests. “But in reality, I was always digging for other people's ideas and seeing what they thought. For this, when I started doing it I realised I really needed to work with someone new, someone who also wasn't necessarily in my inner circle of musician friends. Adrian, I loved his solo albums – he released two really great albums that were pretty much in the '70s, singer-songwriter stuff that I love.”

Bryan Estepa will be playing the following dates:

Friday 19 April - FBi Social, Kings Cross Hotel, Sydney NSW
Friday 17 May - Pot Belly Bar & Bistro, Canberra ACT
Saturday 18 May - Retreat Hotel, Brunswick VIC