Evie Bamford: Now Rising, Now Falling
When I meet with Evie Bamford, it's 10am on a Sunday at a coffee shop in Grey Lynn. Because of this, by the time I get there, the whole place is packed with people. Evie is sitting outside at the only available seat. She cranes her neck and, resting her hand above her eyes like a salute, peers between her fringe and her sunnies and spots me. It's honestly pumping, the sun's out and people are lining up to grab a table. I greet Evie with a hug and suggest we get takeaway coffees and relocate to the park to discuss her upcoming release, her 6 track debut EP, Now Rising, Now Falling.
"I started playing clarinet when I was seven," recounts Evie. "I was a huge orchestra kid." Music's been there her whole life. "I started learning guitar off my dad, and I had these two worlds — one playing in orchestras, doing all my ABRSM exams, that kind of thing." Still, seeing herself as a songwriter was always a challenge. "I think there was a lot of doubt. I knew it was something I always wanted to do, and I always wanted to perform with other people, not even necessarily my own music, but I just never really thought I was good enough." Like any good indie kid in the mid-2010s, Evie was enamoured with Mac DeMarco. “I was thirteen when I discovered 2, and I became so obsessed with him." Everyone has their first proper fan moment, where it's not just the music that was played, or their parents' music, it's music they have discovered, and they can become a fan for the first time. “I transcribed the entirety of 2, and then Salad Days when it came out — all the guitar parts — and learned them by ear, and that really opened up a whole new world of guitar playing for me."
For Evie, the label of songwriter has been a process of becoming. “Music has always been such a huge part of my life, and such a huge part of who I am, but I never knew how to communicate that to other people, because it was something so private to me. I wanted to be able to confidently say, 'I am this, and here's an example of how I can do that,' through performing a song." The first 5 tracks of Now Rising, Now Falling were written solo by Bamford well before she had her sights set on a full release. “I wrote these five songs, then went travelling to Europe for a couple of months with Rory, and I was like, what the fuck am I doing? This is such a waste of time, that I've written this music and really want to do this thing.” Distance has a way of putting things in perspective. “I was like, I'm going to get a band together, and it took me ages to find the right people but eventually I did, and I was like, ‘Sweet, I'm going to book a gig. And then we gigged.’"
Building confidence has been Evie’s biggest breakthrough and she cites the response to opening track ‘Through the Day’ as the pivotal moment in realising her potential. “I was so insecure about it. I thought the lyrics were really bad, the chorus was really cheesy, I had absolutely no idea it would go on to resonate with so many people and actually do kind of well in my community." You're not writing towards an EP the first time you sit down, you're just trying to get comfortable with songs. The fact that these songs were originally written without any sense of what a final product would look like is genuinely impressive. There's a cohesion to them, and a clear songwriting philosophy built around observation and allusion. The final track, "Your Girl," was written post-script, and reprises some of the lyrics from "Through the Day," with parts of the piano riff carrying through as well. "Through the Day is in six-eight, and they follow a similar kind of progression,” Evie explains. “Callum, who was playing bass with us at the time, started singing, 'I'm just trying to get through the day,' over it, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, have I just written the same song? That's so embarrassing!’ And then he kept singing it, and I was like, ‘Actually, I kind of like it.’ Then I said, 'I'm just trying to get through to my baby,' as a joke, in rehearsal once." By adding that final refrain to "Your Girl," the EP loops back on itself, so that listening through it returns you to the thoughts you started with and you begin the EP again, able to reconsider those same ideas, but recontextualised. It's a mature songwriting motif, the kind of thing you find when you're building concepts that arc over a whole release. It's a nice detail that the one song not written before the band came together was "Your Girl" itself. It's as though, having now lived through her own songwriting process, Evie is now looking back on the music she's made.
From the outside, songwriting can seem like an idealised process. "I think there's this romantic view of what songwriting is like — going into a room, getting out your pad and pencil and your instrument, having this flow-of-consciousness thing. It's just really not like that for me," Evie admits. Sometimes songwriting isn't miraculous; it involves muddling through iterations and ideas, and grabbing hold of the handle when there's a flash in the pan. For Evie, realising that songwriting isn't glamorous has taken the pressure off and loosened the valve. “In reality, most of the time I'll be about to leave the house, putting my shoes on, and I'll think, maybe I should just try to play something for thirty seconds. It's this actual, very manic — often when you're doing it, it makes you feel a little bit crazy, because I'll get out of the shower, naked, trying to figure something out, or I'll be sitting in my car and lyrics come to me, and I try to write them down in my notes app. It's not this glamorised thing, and it took me a long time to realise that and come to terms with it. I don't know if it's not like that for everybody, but it wasn't like that for me, which was really validating when I figured out that's okay, it is just what my songwriting process is like."
"Writing lyrics is really fucking hard,” laughs Evie. “And a lot of the EP is very literal, at least from my perspective. It's something I've really gotten better at since writing those first songs. That's painful in a way, because I want to be putting out a lot of the music I'm writing right now, because I feel like I've developed as a songwriter, but that's just how it goes." There's a creative lag to songwriting. By the time something comes out, you've already moved on, a year or so ahead in terms of the music you're making. "I wrote 'Through the Day' like three years ago," Evie stresses. That lag can be uninspiring, but it also puts you at a point where you can really reflect on it. Because it's in the past you have a chance to fall out of love with it a little bit, and find love with love it again once it's released, as other people starting to hear it for the first time, and discovering things you never even picked up on. I find it interesting that Evie speaks a lot in first person, not everyone writes lyrics this way. There's the trope that artists work through their emotions by writing songs, but if you listen to Evie's music you can really hear that process happening. "I remember Huia, after I did the Fancy New Band live-to-air, saying, 'Wow, your songs are so vulnerable,' and I was like, 'No, don't you dare say that. I don't want you to look into my heart and my mind!' You think you're being inconspicuous, and ambiguous in your songwriting, but you realise people will interpret whatever you're saying, even if they completely get the wrong end of it." That’s the challenge with vulnerability and keeping distance. The great thing about music is that lyrics get two interpretations: the interpretation of when they were written, and the interpretation of when they're heard. They never have to match up — in fact, the whole point is that they don't.
Lyrics change for the songwriter too. Over time you're not the same person writing the song as you are performing it two years later, and different emotions surface from the same lyrics. "I also think there are things I've written that I haven't really understood until much later, especially with 'Moneybag'. I wrote that song about really wanting to get a job. I loved it when I wrote it, but now I'm pretty over it. That song was about really wanting a job, but in reality I got the job and really hated it, and it made me the most depressed I've ever been. So in hindsight, that song was actually about recognising that even something you think might be good for you at the time might end up being the thing that absolutely destroys you." It's a good example of how that realisation often comes about, especially when you want something a lot — it could be better in a different way, it could be worse, it'll never be whatever you thought it was going to be. It's a great example of how lyrics develop over time too: you can be singing the same words and thinking about a completely different theme, that sometimes the thing you think you really want can be the thing you really don't need.
Evie is especially proud of how people have responded to the lyrics on ‘Daily Bread.’ “I was very close to not releasing ‘Daily Bread’ as a single, because it doesn't really have a chorus, and it takes a really long time to get going. So I thought it wouldn't be ‘single material’. But then someone told me they were feeling really anxious one morning, and they listened to that song and sang along to the 'I have nothing to be so scared about' part, and it made them feel a lot better, made them feel like they could take on the day — that was pretty special." She's had similar experiences with 'Through the Day' too. "I was down in Christchurch this week for work, and my sister, who's just recently had a baby, started singing 'Through the Day' to him when he was crying. She said it's the only thing that gets him to stop. We were singing 'we're just trying to get through the day,' together, and then he stopped crying, and I thought, holy shit, that's pretty fucking crazy and beautiful and meaningful.' So those are lyrics I wasn't necessarily super proud of at the time, but have since become so." It hasn't just been the lyrical content either. "One of my favourite tropes in music and songwriting is when the harmony changes but the melody stays the same," Evie explains. "Somebody who does that really well is Andy Shauf, who's been a huge inspiration for me, and a fellow clarinet player. He uses dissonance in a really interesting way, and creates a sense of consonance even though it's actually dissonant, just because of the context of everything else. The thing I really like in 'Daily Bread' is that the melody of the bridge stays the same even though the chords change, and it gets mirrored earlier in the song by the clarinet part — two notes, just before the bridge, playing the same two notes over different harmony. I remember writing that and thinking, this is totally what I'm trying to say. I felt proud that I'd figured out how to implement something I'd always liked, in my own music."
Evie is currently on a “small three-stop tour." In this economy, that basically constitutes a national tour. "I've been unsure whether to call it a mini-tour, or if I'm talking myself down. But we're playing Auckland, Wellington, and Raglan. It's a North Island tour, a North Island mini-tour." I laugh and point out that this implies the existence of a possible South Island tour. Evie laughs too, then says more seriously, "I would love to play a show in Christchurch, and I would obviously love to play a show in Dunedin, I've never been, so any excuse to go." The first show is Wellington, 9 September at Eyegum Wednesdays. "We all went to music school there, every single one of us, so we're happy to go down, see our friends. Then hopefully, next time I go to Wellington, I'll have developed a bit of a community there to put on our own show independently." Auckland is a Sunday evening gig at Whammy, on 13 September. I tell Evie I'll be there (I really do love a Sunday show); the only catch is I'll have to skip family dinner. "It's worth it," Evie counters, "You can go to your family dinner and come up after." The final show is Raglan, which I found strangely specific. "Three people in the band, Jeremy, Rory and I, surf. So I thought, we can just go on holiday, I'll get a nice Airbnb for us. The venue's really cool, the town's really cool, I think the people there could like my music. Hopefully they'll come." That's as good a reason as any, and I'm sure they'll head along.
You can find Evie’s EP on all streaming services, and you can get tickets for her tour from UTR HERE