Zachary Leo on the Creation of 'Feels' & Finding Internal Success
{interview by Holly Blackmore}
We had the pure pleasure of sitting down with Melbourne muso Zachary Leo, bright & early on a Monday morning.
Zach’s new single ‘Feels’ is out today — a rolling, funk piece that tells the vulnerable tale of standing on the cusp of love. It’s the centre-piece of a new EP which we are eagerly awaiting, set to be released towards the end of the year. Here we dive into his creative process, his experience as a full-time musician and his advice for fellow creatives.
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Holly: First things first, a little bit about yourself — where are you from, what are you doing with your time right now?
Zach: My full name is Zachary Leo Gulavin, so I just took my first name and middle name for my stage-name. I’ve been a solo act for about a year-and-a-half now — before that, I was in a few bands, doing some heavier rock stuff. Then I ventured out into a solo career, which I think was always going to happen, just with how much say I had in the bands, and how much I did — it just kind of felt like a solo project anyway. To put it simply, I’d say I’m a funk-rock muso from south-east Melbourne. Just been gigging for a year and writing for a year.
It’s been a crazy kind of progression. This is kind of the first time — during iso — that I’ve really figured out what my style is. Nothing is really foreign anymore, which is cool but also gives me room to be creative but still stay inside of my little musical genre.
That’s great. So it sounds like a natural progression for you, stepping from a group setting to a solo setting, where you have a bit more creative control. I’m interested in how you got into music. Have you played since you were young? Or was it a more recent thing in your adult life?
Definitely from when I was young. When I was about four or five, I used to just walk around the house and make up songs in my head, which at the time I thought were my own kind of songs, but I was just taking melodies from video games and things like that, and coming up with my own lyrics. I’d walk around the house, and my parents would ask ‘Is that this song?’ and I’d be like yeah, yeah. It probably wasn’t until I was eight that I actually started learning guitar properly but it’s always been a childhood thing. When I started learning guitar, I hated it. I didn’t want to touch it. My mum would always be like ‘Can you play a song for your uncle?’ or whatever, and I was like no, I hate it so much. And my brother was doing it with me and he quit — and I was going to quit too.
Why did you hate it?
I don’t know. I think it was because we were just playing stuff like ‘Happy Birthday’. When I started listening to, really getting into, a lot of Jimmy Hendrix and stuff like that when I was about the same age, about eight or nine — because I really wanted to play the drums, that was my passion — but when I started hearing this music I was like OK, this is pretty cool. Mum said if I learn long enough I can buy an electric guitar, and that was my motivation. When I got that, it was happy days. I loved it from then on, and started writing as many songs — terrible songs, but they were songs.
Since then, I’ve just wanted to do it. Even through high school — eventually I should pick a career that’s realistic, but it never really came to me. I was always like, nope, musician is what I want to do. It got to Year 12 and I was like shit, still want to be a musician. I’ve quit my job and really committed to it now, while I’m still quite young and can afford to take some risks. It’s always been my dream, to put it short.
That’s awesome that you feel like you have a sense of calling. And I think you’re right – at our age, you’ve sort of got to take the leap. I feel like there is a moment when you either take the leap or you don’t, and that moment can define the next couple of decades.
Oh, for sure. I don’t have any massive responsibilities yet — I have a few, but I can pay what I need to pay and still try to make it work. I’d rather be old and have given it a fair-dinkum crack than be older, financially stable, but with a job I hate, without having taken a risk when I was younger.
Yeah, living with that regret.
Yeah, of course. That’s always been my one thing, the thing that makes me feel good when I’m thinking man, I should have stayed in my job. I always get that feeling, that I’ve made the right choice, which is good.
A scary choice, but the right choice. I think it’s always somewhat scary but you know that it’s the right thing to do. So tell us about ‘Feels’ out today?
I’m really excited about ‘Feels’. I wrote it about mid-last year. I was listening to this D’Angelo record and I kind of just entered a trance, in love with it. Got into this really cool space and probably half an hour later, I was just sitting in my room — like I didn’t even have any of his songs in my head, none of the songs were ringing in my head, I was just in this zone. And I grabbed my guitar. I didn’t even have my guitar at the start, I was just doing this awkward [sings]. Going around the house, doing that, and I go into my room. Thinking I need to record this, and into my phone, just came up with this riff. It’s pretty much exactly how it is now. I think it’s like a semitone higher and whatever. But then I left it, I couldn’t come up with anything else. I was trying my hardest, but I didn’t want to push it.
After that, the rest kind of just flowed naturally. I came up with the chorus idea walking through Brunswick Street on the way to uni — I had to run to uni so I could go to the bathroom and record the chorus on my phone. That’s kind of how most of the melodies came. It took a few months to come up with the ideas, but once I had all of the melodic ideas I just pushed them together and created ‘Feels’ on my Logic session.
At the time, I was in this vulnerable position of wanting to fall in love but being too scared to completely let myself fall. The fear of the repercussions of what might happen. I thought, I’m just going to write what I feel. The lyrics flowed. It sounds like it was a really complicated song to write but once everything came together it was really easy. A week after, I showed it to the band and we played it live. It’s one of my favourites. It’s kind of the centre-piece of this EP that is coming out at the end of the year.
I really love ‘Feels’ — been listening to it this whole week.
Glad you like it, that’s awesome.
Also it’s cool to hear that ‘Feels’ maybe wrote itself.
Z: Yeah, definitely did. It’s a different kind of vibe to a lot of my earlier stuff. It’s a lot more chilled. For a lot of choruses I write, there’s a definite peak — it hits a high point. But this one, it does vocally, but it stays pretty much on the same path until the end. And even the end doesn’t go too crazy. It’s kind of the first song I wrote where I had a bit of variation in my song structures, where I could write something that perhaps didn’t have this massive soaring chorus, like it was still catchy but wasn’t too in-your-face. Definitely pioneered a lot of the writing that came after that.
Which is the upcoming EP?
Yeah, which is really cool.
You’ve kind of touched on it — but did the process for ‘Feels’ look any different to your older stuff?
Every song has its own little story behind it. My writing style is a bit all over the shop — sometimes I’ll write a song and it will just come straight away, but sometimes it takes a long time. It’s also good because I know if I’m working on a song and I get halfway through — and I’m like, I’m not feeling it anymore, or I can’t figure out what’s next — I just leave it. I know that it’ll come. And if it doesn’t, that it wasn’t meant to be. Or I can just take something from that song and put it into a new idea.
I actually wrote ‘Lay You Down’ when I was twelve or thirteen. I was really young, but the lyrics didn’t change. ‘She’ was a song I wrote for my band, but when I came into this Zachary Leo thing, I completely changed it. It was a lot heavier, and it was a lot more simple. It still went into that half-time thing, but I just added organs and keys and so many different things. Same with ‘Not That Easy’ — it was a heavier song, and I kind of made it a bit funkier.
I think writing those songs, they came pretty naturally. ‘Feels’ is probably the first example of a song I’ve released where it has come in different sections. So I have a few different ways, but usually I grab a verse and a chorus and put them together, or naturally it just kind of flows.
I think it’s beautiful that your approach is not to force it into something that it’s not, to be patient with it, to wait for it to almost show itself.
When I force the writing, I can just tell. It doesn't resonate with me. When I drive somewhere, I’ll put the demo on in the car. And I’ll wait probably an hour before I leave, not listening to it, and then I’ll listen with fresh ears. So I can kind of be impacted in a way that I can’t if I’ve listened to it fifty times. And I’ll put it on, listen to it, and get really excited — like yeah, this is sick. If I listen to it for the rest of the day and never get sick of it then, this is a good song. It seems right.
But if I listen to a song and the chorus comes in and I’m like, mmmm, that didn’t sound right, then I know it’s been forced. I know it’s just me trying to figure it out — and I’d rather have a song where every section is perfect, rather than hate the bridge, or only like the verse. They’re the worst songs, when I listen to someone else’s song and I’m digging the verse, and the chorus comes and I just go [groans].
[laughs] Do I like this song? Do I give it a heart? I’m not sure.
Yeah, do I like it or do I like the verse? There’s a Fall Out Boy song that’s my favourite verse ever, but the chorus just didn’t do it for me. I was twelve, or whenever it came out, and it was my first feeling of — what would I say – like disappointment. It was me in the car with mum, and me vibing the song so hard and then the chorus comes, and me just being like ‘Oh no!’. And I don’t want to feel that for my own stuff. That’s my motivation. Everything needs to fit. If it’s forced, you can tell — that it doesn’t fit, or it just doesn’t have the same impact. It lags a little bit, it just kind of seems to drag on.
You’ve kind of alluded to this, but how does the lyrical side of things work for you? Personally, I find your work so lyrically dense and beautiful. I can’t believe ‘Lay You Down’ was written when you were twelve! [both laugh]
Thank-you for that compliment, that’s really nice. I often get scared that the lyrics get lost. A few people that I talk to about the lyrics, they kind of ask me ‘What does that mean?’ — they can’t relate to it, because they can be hard to interpret. But I’ve always written that way. Lately I’ve been writing a bit simpler, but still keeping my lyrical style present.
I always write lyrics last. For me, melody is more important than lyrics. So I can love a song that has terrible lyrics, but its melody is sweet. Lyrics are still really important to me — I don’t want to write lyrics just for the sake of having lyrics there, both need to be special for me to really love what I’m singing.
I write a lot of poems about a heap of different stuff. It often seems to be mental health, or love, a few different themes that are often pretty present and often they find themselves intertwined. ‘Feels’ is a cross between anxiety and love, ‘Not That Easy’ is the same, and ‘She’ is about mental health. So I take little motifs from my poems and put them into a more lyrical sense. Or I just wait it out and think — what does this melody convery in terms of emotions? Is it happy? Is it sad? Am I on the edge or am I relaxed? I kind of go from there, what I’m feeling when I sing it, and I can kind of find a meaning to write the lyrics about.
I don’t think I wrote a poem for ‘Feels’ — it was just straight up lyrics — but ‘She’ was a few poems. And there’s a song on the EP called ‘Out Of Place’ that’s from poems — not even poems, I wrote these stories based on an experience that I had. Whatever comes to me — and if I can’t think of anything, I’ll look at a poem and see if it fits the melody, and go from there. But I always think about that last, because if it doesn’t fit the melody, it’s kind of hard to mix. I can’t really write a melody around lyrics; it’s easier to write lyrics around a melody.
That’s really cool. It’s funny — my notes for this interview are pretty much just lines from your songs. Just writing down all the lyrics that I like. [both laugh]
Oh, that’s awesome! Out of curiosity, which lyrics did you write?
I really liked ‘How can I forget things we never say?’. So powerful.
Every time someone listens to the demo, they say that they love that line. That was the line which had an impact for me, but I didn’t think people would get it. I thought they would just skim past it. But the fact that people are really digging it — that’s made my day, that’s awesome.
Because it taps into something. It’s not something I can explain, why I like these eight words.
No, me neither. I can’t even explain it, but it just makes sense in the song, and it makes sense in a feeling. Kind of like that fear component — what’s the point if you don’t try? There are so many different ways you can look at it. I think that is what’s cool about it. I can’t interpret it, but it makes sense. So that’s really cool that you dug that.
It definitely strikes a chord. The other thing I wanted to talk to you about — so you had a string of live events last year, solo and supporting the likes of Thirsty Merc and Pacific Avenue. Do you miss performing?
Yeah, I miss it so much. Writing music is my favourite part of being a musician — writing new music, it’s this feeling that I can’t get anywhere else. But playing live is just the best. I love it so much. And I miss just going to a venue, chilling out and then playing, and watching other bands. In the first lockdown, because we thought we would get out of it quicker, I’d be on ZOOM with the band. The band are really good friends of mine, but they’re all session players as well. It’s a job for them, but it feels more like a band than a session group. And they’re really supportive, and they always message me back when I have a demo, give me advice. They’re always like my hype guy as well; they’re always there to be like ‘Dude, this is a banger’, or ‘I don’t know about this one’. We were practising a lot during the first iso. Then the lockdown hit again, the numbers just kept going up and I was like ‘Oh, shit! We’re never going to play again!’. I do miss it — but at the same time, to be honest, I don’t think I would have written an EP if I had gigs still going. I would have been thinking ‘Feels’ and then a tour, another single and then a tour. COVID gave me time to write, and envisage the EP a little bit more. I look at it like, it is what it is, instead of, I wish I could play. I do miss it still — I think everyone does. Even just going to a gig.
Going to a gig, I know.
I took it for granted. If there was a gig and I really wanted to go, but I was being a bit tight, I’d just give it a miss, just wouldn’t go, because I’d been to one the night before — like [sighs] just stay home and chill. But now — why didn’t I go?
Never again. [laughs]
Why did I stay home? Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
It’s as if COVID is the great reset, it’s the chance for everything to stop. Now you can sit back and think about what you want to do. You’re creating an EP which will have heaps of gigs down the line. It’s just a delayed process, but maybe that’s important too. You have time now.
It’s definitely given me the inspo to do the EP. There’s a general theme to it. I don’t think I would have tapped into that if it wasn’t for isolation. I wouldn’t have had time to listen — there were so many things that influenced the EP which aren’t COVID, but I don’t think I could have tapped into that if I didn’t have as much time on my hands at home to think.
Stillness, definitely. And lastly, did you have any advice for young creatives that want to take the plunge and become a full-time musician?
That’s a really good question. The advice I usually give is to do your research. It’s really important to identify who you are as an artist, before you start to get out there. It’s completely sweet to develop along the way, but it’s really important to have an initial understanding of who you are. You definitely need to sell yourself, and you need to sell your art. If you don’t know who you are, it’s really hard for someone else to know who you are and relate to you.
I found that was my issue early on — I was still finding my feet and working out who I was as an artist, and even as a person at the time. Now I know the music that I’m writing, I know what I’m writing about. I know my image. It’s important for a young creative to know who they are, and be themselves, and be passionate about what they are creating — instead of feeling intimidated by what’s around them. That’s important too, to not be too competitive or intimidated by the acts around you. We do music, we write and we play gigs because that’s what we love. It’s a hard industry, it’s a career and it is competitive, but I think it’s important not to get too caught up in that. Not to be too caught up in us-against-them. Sell an artist that is down-to-earth and true to who you are. Don’t try and be like Ocean Alley because everyone else likes them, or try to be like, you know, someone else that’s big. Those artists are sick but, don’t try to be like that artist just because everyone else digs it. If you don’t want to write that music, or don’t want to be that image, don’t be. I kind of got caught in that bubble of ‘I need to write this song so that Triple J will play it’.
Yeah, that’s so common.
Then I thought, screw it. Now I’m going to write stuff that is what I want to write. I’m going to write stuff that I love. That’s the first box to tick — do you love it? Yep. Then it doesn’t matter.
This EP is the perfect example, the first thing I’ll put out that I’m one-hundred-and-ten percent proud of. I’m going to be proud of it whether Triple J plays it, or whether no one listens to it. That’s the feeling I want everybody else to feel. As long as you love your music — and I feel like someone else is going to love it if you love it.
That’s the thing. You’ve found internal success, right, you’ve produced something that you are entirely at peace with. The external success maybe isn’t where you want it to be yet, but once you’ve done the work to succeed internally, the outside just falls into place.
I think so too. At the end of the day, the internal success is the first goal. That’s basically it. A lot of my friends will say ‘Dude, no one is listening to my song. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to get around this’. My main thing is if you dig the song, sell it and be true. If you love it, convey how much you love it to everyone else. Someone else is going to love it. If you don’t like it, how are you going to sell it? How are you going to tell everybody else to like it?
How can anyone else like it if you don’t like it? How can anybody else love you if you don’t love you?
Yeah, exactly. You just worded it perfectly — the internal success before the external success. One-hundred percent agree with that.
You can stream ‘Feels’ here. To find out more about Zachary Leo, head here.
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Thank-you for your endless support — we are so grateful to have you as part of this community <3