Scruffy Bear: Honeymoon Full Of Inspiration
Hailing from North Yorkshire and recently bringing other worldly creatures to the music scene are soulful rockers SCRUFFY BEAR. Having just released their new EP Good Intentions Of A Grumpy Sun last month, singer Georgy Lafferty and guitarist Sass Lafferty spoke with Distorted Sound all about the “chaos” they surround themselves with and how this contributes to their music and artistic vision. Whether it’s running their own music venue based on a farm or causing a little bit of a stir by bringing some extra-terrestrial life to one of their local villages – this band certainly likes to have fun.
Sass explains that the band’s approach to their new EP was a slightly different experience to that of their previous, Face The Rain. “There’s been a lot of chaos surrounding this release, which I think has been a really good thing and a bad thing. With Face The Rain, we had our beady little eyes on every single little detail. Whereas with this one we’ve had to be a little bit more open, which I think can also be a good thing because we are like big overthinkers a lot of us. We take what we do very seriously, but we also try and have fun with it. And I think with this release, we’ve had to take some of our overthinking out of it and just let things happen.” He talks about how they hoped this new EP sounded a bit more mature as they have grown as people, but in some respects less mature, “obviously the the longer that we spend time together, the more that we write, the sillier it gets.”
When asked about how SCRUFFY BEAR goes about creating the foundations of a song, Georgy shares that the lyrics often tend to be very personal, but she approached this EP slightly differently. “The song Good Intentions is very introspective, whereas I normally write a lot of the lyrics from myself because in reality, that’s all that I know. But with Good Intentions, that is definitely very introspective, whereas the other two Selfish Dreamer and Pity Party, they’re about other people which was a completely new thing for me. And I think that sort of then fed into it musically resulting in it sounding different to our other stuff.”
Georgy details that this personal take on her lyrics can be translated over to anyone who listens to SCRUFFY BEAR, and she wants everyone to feel like their true selves. “I think for me the most important thing is people feeling like themselves. I know that’s a really broad thing to say, but I think everybody being themselves and the best version that they can be, that’s the most important thing. For me to just not try and be anything other than me. And I think with the wonderful world of social media and everything else, it’s so easy to get yourself wrapped up into everything else everybody else is doing. And we try and be as authentic as we possibly can be with our music. We would never do anything just because, oh, that might be popular right now or anything like that. So for me it’s just stick to your guns, be yourself, do what you love. That’s my sort of goal with everything.”
The band were keen to share all the fun moments from the creative process for Good Intentions Of A Grumpy Sun, with Sass adding that the track Good Intentions was created on the couple’s honeymoon. “Georgy and I got married two years ago and we went on a honeymoon to Portugal. I think we were there less than 48 hours before I said we need to find a music shop and I need to have a guitar because we’re away for 10 days and it felt like I was without my right arm. From the first night that we had the guitar, the idea for the track Good Intentions came about and then there was a full demo of it. In one of our last night’s away, we’d written the whole thing start to finish, which was quite weird because in our creative process, our band members Jack and Ryan are heavily involved in everything we do.” The pair thought it would be a shame to not include any of this moment of inspiration in the final song. “If you listen really closely to the start of the studio track, it is actually that demo from when we were away. That’s the terrible guitar, and you can hear the birds chirping before it swells into the the full track. And I think that got us thinking about the EP as a whole and what we wanted it to be.”
To round up the interview, we asked the pair why people should go and listen to their new release. “The first thing that sprang to mind is it’s mint and you’ll love it, but not everybody will love it. Not everybody will think it’s mint. But I think it’s something different. I do truly believe that we are. We’re a UK rock band, there’s a lot of UK rock bands, but what we’re trying to do is be different without trying to be too weird, if you know what I mean. We’re not trying to make decisions to be the odd one out, we’re just trying to be ourselves at every turn. I think if you truly want to hear four people in their late 20s trying to make rock ‘n’ roll the way that they think rock ‘n’ roll should be made, you should go and check us out, because it’s a bit weird.”
Good Intentions Of A Grumpy Sun is out now via self-release. View this interview, alongside dozens of other awesome bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS114 here:
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