"I'm Always Changing" Oscar Lang Interviewed
Indie songsmith comes of age on his new album...
“My music is like a reflection of myself,” *Oscar Lang* tells Clash. “I just want it to keep changing as I'm always changing.” Constantly embracing change and fresh input, always on the lookout for new sources of inspiration, the London-based musician’s songs aren’t just indicative of who he is, but also where his music is headed at a given point in his life.
Restlessness is one thing. The genre-bending indie songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist confesses to getting bored easily, and his relationship with music mirrors the role psychotherapy plays to an individual, who identifies a need for this, and benefits from it. “When I write music, it’s like therapy for me,” he reveals. “It’s nice that I can have therapy, and I get something out of it.”
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Issues relating to mental health have figured in Lang’s life for as long as he can remember. Affecting his family for years, his mother suffered a lot, and tragically ended up taking her own life, when he was just seven. This followed a brief touch of success as a pop artist in the 1980s, she also gave him his first piano, and continues to be a part of his drive and aspiration as a musician.
Understandably, considerations on how good mental health is maintained, or the challenges involved in doing so, continue to be on his mind. He admits this can be hard, and many of his songs tackle it. Nevertheless, being sad is also what fuels his creativity and inspires him, and that’s when music becomes therapeutic “I have a desire to make music when I'm sad and a compulsion to sit down and write songs,” he argues.
In the midst of a cleaning sequence of his central West London flat, he talks about how much he enjoys living where he is now, it’s to do with being so close to everything. He has lived in London all his life, he has a little Spanish influence, and although his mum was Spanish, he learnt German at secondary school, which he didn’t use.
His mother was the most musical person in his life, greatly influencing his taste in music and choice of occupation. Vivid memories of dancing around the kitchen with her while listening to The Feeling often revisit him, she was a big fan of the band, and she had an album they used to play on repeat. He attributes events like this particular one as what introduced him to The Beatles. While she dreamt of pursuing a big career in music, prior to becoming a mother, the dream she had is kept alive through Lang.
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Happiest when kept busy, he is motivated by an overriding desire to support others. Songs like ‘Final Call’ and ‘Are You Happy?’ from his debut album were both written for a friend of his, who was struggling after breaking up with his girlfriend, they had been together for years. Following a stressful couple of years, it made sense to write a “nice little song, you can sing to a mate you care about.”
Polished, but unpolished is a way to describe Lang’s music and quite possibly his personality as well. “That’s what we were going for, everything sounds polished, but at the same time the drums were recorded on a tape machine to give it just a little bit of dirt.” He says “When I play guitar, I'm very notorious for breaking strings, because I stupidly got so used to absolutely attacking it, and now nobody wants to lend me their guitars.” His musical influences are wide-reaching. Over time they have encapsulated everything from The Beatles, Ólafur Arnalds, Mac DeMarco, Kevin Parker, Blur, Nirvana - to Middle Eastern and Turkish music – because of the scales – it all inspired him, and it makes his own music stand out.
His inventive first album ‘Chew The Scenery’ offers thirteen inspired tracks full of vibrancy, thought and edgy compositions. Understandably, he feels excited about this record. Having worked his socks off to get to this point, it represents a boost of ambition, and as he admits, it has been a long time coming. “Last year I was just building up and building up to something. It felt like the right time to do a debut album. I wanted to summarise everything I've been doing so far, and tie it together.”
If last year’s seven-track EP ‘Hand Over Your Head’ constituted a nuanced collection of songs, indirectly showing the type of sound to come, he feels that everything started to come together and sound even better after that. It was about bringing back some of the older material that he had worked on, lift it, and make it sound better, and this is also what his debut album achieves.
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Knowing that he wanted songs with stories, he was keen for them to have a strong personal touch. “Being in lockdown has meant that I did a lot of growing up in the last year. Going from being an aging teenager, before the pandemic happened, and now suddenly, I’m 21, it has all gone so fast, and for me there's been a lot of growing up.”
Worth noting is the ease with which he delves further into guitar-based territory. Diving deep into it, his transition sounds natural. Initially, approaching musical ideas from a believable DIY point of view, the former bedroom-like sound is now exchanged for influences from a wide range on the guitar sound spectrum. Broadening, redefining ideas of what has gone before; what is, and what isn’t possible, with real imagination, ‘Chew The Scenery’ celebrates scuzzy indie and Britpop as much as delivering strokes of psychedelia.
There’s a risk of making Lang’s genre-hopping sound like a walk in the park, it only makes sense to say that it hasn’t just been that. He is quick to interject that ‘Overthunk’ - the EP he released last year – felt like a tough one to crack. “That was one of the things I found hard, it took about six or seven months to record. It was a real struggle because I was producing it all myself, I come from a background of teaching myself stuff and playing bedroom piano music.”
Producing is one of his great strengths, and some inner demons needed fighting before he was ready to let somebody else in to this space. Operating on the same wavelength, a prolific relationship existed from previous collaborations, they had already worked together on his song ‘Apple Juice’; and Rich Turvey was a very suitable person for the job. “He's just really helped me bring myself to life,” Lang decides. “He translates the ideas that I have in my mind, and stuff that I can hear. I might say, can we add that? And he just knows how to do it. When we first met, I told my manager that Rich’s like an older me, and Rich apparently said that he sees me as a younger version of himself.”
Recording at Liverpool’s Parr Street Studios was fulfilling, providing the ideal sonic setting for the style of recordings he wanted. “We would just sit in a tiny room and brush out tunes all day. There's an energy to that studio, which is really special.” The piano in the main studio is what Coldplay used to record their song ‘Clocks’, and the band did a lot of their recordings there. “The piano just has some magical essence, and it's where I wrote 'Write Me A Letter’. I was up there at the time, it felt like any time you placed your fingers on that piano, you sensed something special was happening.”
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If opening up to a wider process of working in an established recording studio seemed challenging at first, Lang reckons it also explains why he avoided it for some time. “It was a struggle because I didn't open myself up to it,” he admits. Overtly keen to impress others, he was eager to promote the idea of being the young kid, who's doing it all himself. “I still do most of it myself, but Rich has been there to guide it along and help making things sound good.”
Back in his home studio environment he is gradually re-introducing a little more of doing it all there now. It works well as the sound of the songs he is writing now focus more on electronic music. “It is actually the sort of music I can do on the computer. It tends to be more like the big live band stuff that I struggle with, placing microphones and stuff like that, but I just love working on the computer as well.”
In constant creative motion, a part of his overarching ambition and drive relate to his commitment to helping and supporting others. Having produced, and to some degree, managed Dirty Hit label mate and friend beabadoobee early on, he is interested in starting his own label and recording studio. Knowing how tough it can be for young artists, his idea represents something he always wanted to have access to as a kid and young musician, who was just starting out, and now he wants to be able to offer such facilities for free to musicians, who are in the same boat as he was.
Oscar Lang’s music is already earning him more than mere indie credentials, and it’s too soon to label him an indie artist, he’s too curious and interested in everything that goes on around him to narrow his music down. It is a distinct quality, which ultimately could make all the entire difference to his music journey, and that journey is just at the start of the next chapter, and seemingly, there’s nothing to stop him from going all the way.
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'Chew The Scenery' is out now.
Words: *Susan Hansen*
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