Sophisticated Dingo's Sophomore Ep & Living In The Moment
{interview by Emily-Layne Kapetanovic}
WARRANT had the pleasure of chatting to Lewis – one half of Melbourne-based duo Sophisticated Dingo.
The sophomore EP ‘How’s The Carry On!?’ dropped on Wednesday, August 19 and is a whirlwind of high energy hook-driven hits, sure to get you moving. We delved into the bands history as well as the meaning behind the new EP.
Em: Congratulations on your sophomore EP today, I had a quick listen to it. It sounds bloody awesome.
Lewis: Thank You.
How are you feeling now that it's released?
Oh pretty good. I took the day off work because I like to wake up and just post things for us and schedule them the night before and being up to late and trying to work through that. Its nice to wake up and have a day off and then watch people reposting your posts about it and saying they like it, so yeah I'm enjoying it.
Yeah thats great. Love a day off as well. Are there any other sort of celebrations going on for the EP?
Oh nah not really, we're in Victoria. Where are you?
I'm in Vic as well.
Yeah so obviously theres not much to do, just sitting around the house. Which is kind of nice. We have a group chat with our manager and Jimmy the drummer, so we'll just be pretty usual to be honest just talking there. If anything like a nice repost from someone comes up we might send a screenshot of it to each other and go "nice, thats cool" but thats about the extent of it I reckon. But yeah, happy.
I love it. Its like celebrate within the constraints. Have you get some future plans to play shows once everything opens up, or are you not jumping to that yet?
Oh definitely. we're keen. There's nothing in concrete. If anyone has anything in concrete then that comes with a big level of uncertainty if it'll even go ahead, we definitely don't have a single in person gig booked in. So, I think Covid lockdown started the week before we released our first single 'Vultures' this year, so we had a tour booked and then plans to do another tour when the EP came out for that. So, our release plans haven't changed but we've lost all the touring opportunities that we were going to undertake. We're really keen to at least do, I don't know, as soon everything opens up and its viable for us to get around the country we want to do something for the EP in some sort of belated release.
Yeah, at least you can go bigger and better once everything sorta opens up. Just go so hard, it's fine.
Oh yeah, we'll be going hard. It's just kinda like sitting around and dreaming up what we can do, talking to other bands and like them saying "yeah we're keen". We've got a couple.. I'll keep it secret, but hopefully a couple of co-headline tours that could be a bit of fun just with some mates' bands and some other bands that we see being on a similar level but that we'd be happy to tour with. So yeah that's the plan at this stage.
Geez, that's sick. I'm excited. I hope everything opens up soon.
Oh man, same.
We'll lets talk about the writing process behind the EP, how did it come about and what sort of process, creatively, did you guys take when you wrote it?
Yeah, it wasn't like we finished the first EP and sat down and said lets write the second EP. It's just a collection of songs over the life of the band. Two of the songs were written from the first few practices we ever did as a band, so well before we had our first Ep out. So they've just been hanging around since 2016. And then two of the other songs they happened to come after we recorded the first EP, so it was like around 2017/2018. And then 'What Is Going On?', probably the last song that was completed, that was pulled together maybe some time last year – 2019. So it's been a real just all over the place kind of collection of songs and they're just ones that we looked at the collection of songs we had to make an EP its was like "wow, they fit together nicely", like a jigsaw puzzle so that's why they're on there. It wasn't like writing an EP all in one hit or anything like that.
Is it hard having these songs that you know are good, but you're sorta sitting on them and waiting to release them?
Oh kind of, we weren't sitting on them to say "no, we'll wait until 2020 to release these", the first EP we did that and the songs we put on that kind of all fit together in the way we liked and we were like "oh well that's the songs on that one" and then we had other songs that we hadn't moved in with and when it came to this one it was just time we put it together. So no, it hasn't been painful sitting around waiting to put them out or anything like that, this was just the right place for these songs. So yeah, it hasn't been painful. It's been nice. But now it's time to write some new songs, we're at a point where we need to write some new songs to get the ball rolling on whatever we do next .
Yeah, that's awesome. So you and Jimmy have been mates for a while, longer than you've been writing music together. Does writing songs come a bit easier considering you've been mates for a while?
Yeah totally. We've been mates since we were 12, so we met at the start of high school. I guess our writing relationship just started to flourish when we made a band at high school in around Year 11. So, it's always just been a connection we've had together, because we seem to always be on the same team musically, in terms of what we like, the same music, like the output of being on stage together, the feeling it gives us. I just think we have a very strong bond to understand what the other person wants from the song or a moment in music. So, we know the ground rules without having to say them, even if we don't know what the song sounds like, we know what we want to write essentially and there's no boundaries but we know what the playing field looks like in terms of the song that we want to create together.
Yeah, so when you guys created the band back in Year 11, did you have those same ideas? Did both land on the same sort of sound that you wanted to have or did you have to find it for a while?
Yeah, so that band back in school, we were a five-piece and it's always been me and Jimmy being on the same team essentially, like if there was discussions about ideas or going in different directions in that band, it seemed to be me and Jimmy on the same teams, saying "we want this" and a a lot of the time we ended up being the team that wanted to play songs that had lots of hooks in them and were relatively poppy rather than just explorative jams. So we were always into well-structured but rough around the edges trashy music. It just came to a point some time where we just realised, lets go do this in another space. Let's start something new just us two and explore more of what we know we both like. So, we didn't from the outset mean to know what we wanted to do but it just became very apparent that we both were on the same wavelength and always have been.
So it seemed like almost, it was going to happen because you guys were so in touch with each other and what you both wanted.
That's it.
Well, let's talk about the EP. Actually we'll talk about the three singles leading up to the EP and I want to talk about the artwork, because obviously the three tracks that you released, and obviously the EP, they all have the same aesthetic. What was the thought process behind that?
Oh that's awesome that you picked up on that and want to talk about it because yeah I think that's a really cool part of it. We just worked with, he's a friend of the band Dan Blitzman, from this other band called Tall Relatives, and he has an art page and he's an artist under the moniker of 'Millk Man'. So, we just approached him and said "do you wanna do some art for us? Just a single and an EP." and he was keen. The only rule we really had was just that we wanted to kind of tie in this similar theme without saying what that theme would be. So I mean, we just landed on the idea of having a really strong block colour with a bit of grain in it for each single and the EP cover, and I mean it ended up looking like if you whacked them all on t-shirts I reckon you could have kind of like a Wiggles coloured t-shirt set up like the yellow the blue the purple and I guess we should've gone red for the EP bit it's orange so, thats cool. But yeah sorta just solid block colour background and just the focus in the front with the two dingo heads each time and then the EP is obviously the dingo heads on the bodies. That's all we said to Dan and he just kinda went with it and I think he tied in loosely the theme or message or title of each single into the artworks. I mean the 'Vultures' one obviously has two birds and 'What Is Going On?' has the speech bubble saying "what is going on?". He put some halos over the dingo's heads though so I think the idea was that all dogs go to heaven or something like that. It was quite nice. Then 'Don't Wanna Be', that's cool, I mean it's got the no entry symbol over the dog collar. So it's like no collars, like you don't wanna be locked down with any chains or anything, you wanna be your own person, or your own dingo in this case I guess. Then 'How's The Carry On!?', I mean that's just the dingo people, the odd humanoid creatures and they're carrying the carry on – the carry on luggage– which is a very literal translation of 'How's The Carry On!?' without getting into the deeper meaning of 'How's The Carry On!?' in the title.
I remember seeing when you dropped 'Vultures' and I was just like "this artwork is really cool" and then sorta seeing "the carry on" into the other singles and then to the EP, I think it's super cool, plus it's super eye-catching. Now you mentioned the deeper meaning of 'How's The Carry On!?', do you want to elaborate?
Yes, I was weighing up whether to say deeper because it's not overly deep. The way that the artwork is carrying literal luggage I think that's funny because 'How's The Carry On!?' is just a title, the short story of 'How's The Carry On?' is like saying the phrase of being like why is there so much carrying on and whinging or just so much baggage attached to anything in life. It's kind of just trying to say that you can overanalyse anything and things can have so many different meanings whatever way you look at it but sometimes you can just step back and enjoy whatever is going on in the moment. So yeah, thats the basis of it.
I feel like that's also very relevant at the moment.
Yeah it's also just like, thinking about it, like music you can put so much effort and worry and everything into something, be it a song or an EP. Whatever you're doing, like the artwork or a photo for your band or something, and stress so much over it. I found that the more you build something up like that or put weight into putting your own personal worth or meaning into the result of something you do with your band like that creatively, the more potential you're just setting yourself up for disappointment in a way. If it works out then great, it's not about lowering the bar, but if you just step back and go "hell yeah, I created that, this is awesome lets not worry about it too much but I put the effort in to write that song, that's what was important, lets put this thing out, do the best we can", I don't know I just found I seem to just enjoy the spoils of what comes from that and any positive response more than I do if I'm deeply into thinking this means everything to my life. Like "whatever happens with this song going out or this EP coming, this will determine how my life will be lead after this", it's much better to just take a more relaxed approach in my opinion now. But that's about not having the carry on around all that.
Yeah, that's a super good mindset to be in. I feel like if you a lot of weight on something and it doesn't turn out the way you think, it's so easy to get disappointed. Where as if you go in open-minded and you don't expect anything, everything's welcomed.
Yeah, like you wont sit back and listen to it and go "oh that third crash cymbal doesn't match up with my guitar chord strum" or whatever, you won't be fretting over that, you'd just be sitting back. I think the ultimate goal for me is just to be able to sit back and listen to my own music as though I'm someone who didn't write the music, isn't so involved in it. I feel like people, you always get from your friends, they're always like "oh, I really liked it" and you're like "ahh, but I don't". If you can get to that point where I can sit back and say "hey, this sounds alright", thats a good place to be because you have more outside perspective on it as much as you can on something you've made.
Again, such a good mindset. So talking about the EP, if there was one thing you wanted listeners to take out of it, what would it be?
Great question. I have not thought of that.
Sorry to put you on the spot.
Nah, it's cool. I like it. Really good question. I would just want that, what we talked about. I would like listeners to, I mean they can take whatever they want, but if they're listening to it, if any message came through and it was anything that could help them, I would want it to be something like, whatever is going on in your life, it good to analyse things but if you can just sit back and take it all in. Take some time to smell the flowers or whatever it is in your life and just enjoy it where you can. I think that's a better result than over-analysing things.
Oh that's awesome. See you didn't even need to stress about the question. Had it all there. I'll just wrap it all up, whats the plan for the future both distant and immediate? You guys gonna knuckle down and do some writing while in stage four or are you gonna take a break with the EP for a while and see what happens?
Immediately, I want to get into demoing some song. I've got heaps of little ideas here and there, I want to flesh them out into some fully fledged demos and then when I can go see Jimmy, practicing them and then start thinking about what we can do release wise in the future. Then longer term, oh we just want to keep writing music, putting out more music and then take over the world – go see the world playing shows.
You can stream ‘How’s The Carry On!?’ here.