INTERVIEW: Meg Hitchcock on HOLiDAY's new single 'Lover': 'We are an ambitious band. We don't want to have these limitations of being too cool to try."

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Alana Potts

New three piece band HOLiDAY are truly a global band. Hailing from all corners of the world, they formed in Byron Bay and are now based in Tasmania. Made up of lead singer and songwriter Meg Hitchcock (from London, UK) guitarist and vocalist Jesse Higgs (from Australia) and guitarist Marcos Micozzi (Argentina), they released their debut single ‘Next Best Friend’ in February, an atmospheric, swirling guitar-indie track with elements of experimental pop.

Tomorrow they return with their second single ‘Lover’. Sonically the song moves the band into a different direction, a more earthy, guitar orientated indie-pop-alt rock feel with hints of country. “There’s been a recent transition for us as a group where we’ve acknowledged our alternative rock core, and it’s beginning to define our sound and we like it - it’s almost a relief to let this rock edge pierce through our music now into this song,” the band say.

With an anthemic, uplifting feel, at its core ‘Lover’ is a love song. “‘Lover’ is, quite simply, a love letter to cupid,” Meg Hitchcock says. “When I first wrote the song, I was feeling a deep longing to find a partner, one I could be completely infatuated by and happily stay under a rose tinted spell. And to be completely honest - I’d never written a ‘love song’ before. My hardened feminine exterior that I’d proudly built up had a lot of hurdles to overcome before doing so. A lot of mental chatter… ‘it’s too soft,’ ‘you’ll come across like a flewsy female artist singing about love… really original,’ ‘you won’t be taken seriously as a musician,’ you get the idea. But as always, when you come back to honesty and stop caring about what others may think, you tap into an authentic truth that not only frees you but frees others too. So in the writing of ‘LOVER’ and the raw honesty of saying ‘actually I do want love, really big love’ I wrote a song that people seem to connect to.“

‘Lover’ is the second taste of HOLiDAY’s upcoming debut EP, due for release next year. With a sound that floats between genres without being tied to one, that generates a sense of deep connectivity with their music and lyrics, HOLiDAY are proving to be an incredibly exciting new band. They have everything needed to become major forces in music in the coming years, and we recently sat down with singer Meg Hitchcock to find out more about HOLiDAY’s music as well as what the future holds.

Hi Meg, so lovely to meet you. Your music is so beautiful. You fill me with the amount of joy that I only get from watching the final scenes in Grease, where everything's going to be okay!
I'm glad! We really struggled a bit ourselves for the placement of our music at first in Australia. Myself and my partner, Jesse, we've always loved alternative rock music, quite simply. Over here in Australia it seems there isn't as much of a home for it as there is in the UK. It wasn't really until we went back this year for three months over the British summer, and went to a few festivals, including Glastonbury, and we were like ‘oh, wow there is a place for alternative rock music in the world still. This is great, this is us. We don't need to pretend anymore to be anyone else.’ It just gave us a real licence to own the type of music that we love and do.

Absolutely. Australia, with regards to the music industry here, it is such a small pond in with regards to what gets played, particularly if there's a woman involved, they are usually like ‘well, we have an alternative woman, so we're just going to play that one’. And quite often we get amazing, amazing artists that are pretty much forced to leave the country and go over to the UK or Los Angeles, and suddenly they go, ‘oh, wow, I'm actually getting played and heard’.
Me too. And I’m glad it happened quite early on in the project lifespan because I fear that we would have just been a bit disheartened. There's women in the rock and pop bracket, and then there's just a slightly bigger rock bracket that isn't surf rock. But we're definitely trying our hardest to fight the good fight.

Collectively, you are just all incredible musicians that have come together from all over the world and your sound is so different while at the same time seeming so retrospective, but still incredibly strong. Where do you think that strength comes from?
The history of the band is quite interesting. You have myself from the UK, and then you have Jesse, who's from Tasmania, and then you have Marcus, who's from Argentina, and we all met in the melting part of Byron Bay. That was about three or four years ago. None of us knew each other, it was a complete chance meeting of the boys first and then they kind of found me. Then a few years later of exploring and seeing what we could do together musically, we decided to focus on a project all together and that was HOLiDAY.

Simultaneously, we've all had our own lives in music. Jesse, the guitarist and the other singer, he came from 10 years of performing with a band called Younger Dryas, and they have actually become our live band and also feature on many of the instrumentation on the recorded track. With the combination and inspiration of all of our new music connections together, that's what creates the melting pot of what HOLiDAY is and the sound and why it is quite strong. None of us went into the project wanting to create soft music. We don't want to create soft pop, and so when you've got a song like ‘Lover’ that is more melancholy and a bit more whimsical at the start, we really had to make a decision, we didn’t want it to be like that throughout the whole thing. So it really had to develop as the song goes on and have more rock elements come into it, and the solid rock drum throughout to make sure that it was something we were all really proud of, and cut from our cloth.

It's the building drums and it's the building rhythm that come in with your haunting vocals. It's so beautiful. The song itself is a love letter to love, isn't it, a love letter to Cupid? Can you talk me through that?
Yeah. Before Jesse and I were together as partners, we were doing music together and we were really good friends and love for us was not on the table. So I'm there writing music for the band and I was just having one of those days where I'd realised that I hadn't been in love for too long. I'd been pretending to be the strong woman, like ‘I don't need love if it's not the right love’ but I just had this day where I was like ‘God, I really want to be in love again.’ I was reading this mythology book and it's talking about Eros and Cupid, and I was just like ‘I bet he was lonely, dancing around, making all these humans fall in love’ and then there are stories about when he did fall in love with a human, and that's where the narrative started. I just sat there on my bed and just wrote all the lyrics. Instead of writing your standard love song, it just naturally became this other thing where it was more about a love letter to Cupid and all these whimsical notions about his wings and his life through a reflecting mirror. It just had that real sense of longing in it, I think that was coming from me, and finally being honest that I am longing for love.

I wanted to ask you a little bit about the production because it starts off so personal and small, and then it just builds, but there's more than drums and guitar, there just seems to be this atmospheric sound that comes in. How did you guys go about creating that?
That is an interesting question because we did the song so many times in so many different ways. It's really been a teacher for us in that sense, because we thought each time we did it in a new version we had it. And then we had to perform it live last summer for some festival shows and it flipped on its head again. That's when the big guitar outro came into it. We were like, ‘this is perfect for ‘Lover’, we've got to do it again’. So this final version of ‘Lover’ [was inspired by] being back in the UK and seeing bands like Wolf Alice and Foals, and watching them live on stage and they sound the same as the recording, they've just gone into the studio and everyone's played their own instrument and that's the main bed of all of the tracks. I felt really strongly when we came back from that trip, I just wanted to simplify everything and do the same. I just want to play the parts really well and then add on top of it. So the big ending feels really atmospheric, but there actually aren't that many additives, I think it's more the way that everything's been played. One of the cherries on top of the production of ‘Lover’ was one of our band members T. He took it away and added all of these sound effects that were actually derived from the song itself, other moments within the song that he's looped and changed the pitch of or enhanced and put a big delay on something. He brought all of those elements at a time when we thought the song was finished and it just elevated everything and gave it that sound that you were probably talking about, the bigger essence of things that happens at the end. Now, I couldn't imagine the song without all of that, it was quite a new and surprising addition.

Your voice is like a guitar. People say it all the time the voice is an instrument, and it is but yours really is. It's incredible. Have you always known that was living in your chest cavity?!
When I was younger, about to the age of five, I was so shy. I was the only kid that didn't like go up on stage for the end of year production, I sat on my teacher’s lap. I was like, ‘I don’t want to go up, I can't do it.’ But around that five, six year old mark, something just snapped, and then I wanted to be in everything and be on stage all the time. I started singing and when you're that young and people have this bodily response to you, you get confused and you don't really know what's going on. So I just sang a bit more, and then my parents got me singing lessons and I did it more and more. I loved classical stuff, ‘Memory’ from Cats and I did choirs and things. I had a singing teacher from the age of 14 to 16, she was an opera singer and she was sensational, and she really unlocked me, She took my perspective from thinking I had a nice voice and I liked being in choirs, and I loved performing, and she really made me see it as something bigger and value it for what it was. She pushed me in all sorts of ways that I never would have without her, entered me into competitions and took me on trips to Paris to sing at these iconic venues like the Madeleine and would make me do a solo. She was a really, really impactful part of my singing and a lot of the way I pronounce words or project is because of how she trained me in that slightly operatic way. All the touring we did as a choir and even as a kid working with people in harmonies and projecting instead of always having a microphone, that was all part of what shaped my voice.

You mentioned harmonies and you and Jesse harmonise just so beautifully. You almost becomes one and that can be quite tricky to do, I imagine. But, if you've trained in choirs, you've done all this stuff, you know that you don't need to shout all the time, you can be as equally powerful if it pulls back.
Jesse's almost had the opposite training vocally. His parents are musicians and he grew up in a family band when he was little, playing the harmonica, and his training is onstage rock and roll vibe. Having that polarity, he once said, makes a classically trained singer with a rock soul, because that's how we can sing together. He's quiet, he's never had classical training, he's more rough around the edges, he does what he feels, not what he thinks, and for us to be able to sing like you said, you have to have that meeting point which is the rock soul.

Your first single was ‘Next Best Friend’, and I loved that video because it was like you broke into a very rich person's house and sung to the ghosts of it. We now have ‘Lover’, but you did mention an EP coming out. Can you give us a little detail on that, or are you just keeping it all under wraps for now?
Nothing is a secret! We've definitely tend to share everything because withholding information isn't good for anyone I don't think. We've got another few songs coming, in February we're going to release a song called ‘Deliberance’, which is a made up word! It is deliberate ignorance. That song again is quite an explosive one. All of them are not here to be elevator music, in the background vibes. They're here to be listened to and to be sung along to. All of these songs that we have coming out on the EP, they've all been heavily developed from how we perform them live. And then we’ve got another song coming out called ‘In Awe’, which almost has a sort of ‘Rhiannon’, by Fleetwood Mac, vibe to it. Quite drummy and a big build at the end. Then we have this song called ‘Work of Art’, which is a bit more dancy, but in this development of our sound, you really do have to figure out some sort of boundaries of where it's going to sit so that it does make sense to other people. And the dancy one, whilst it came out in that way naturally, we almost had to draw upon our influences of like Foals and someone like Jagwar Ma to keep it in that alternative rock realm. There’s another one called ‘Justice’, which is more of a heartfelt ballad if you will, and, again, it ends on a bit of a bigger band moment, which seems, while saying this out loud to you, to be a bit of a signature sound. Every song so people know it’s us!

Everybody always need songs to sing in the car, where the acoustics are amazing and it just builds. That's what it is.
It is. We keep imagining these big festival stages that we can't wait to play, and everyone's just out in the crowd singing the song and it’s a moment where the whole 100,000 people are singing back to us!

That's also really important, because I hate it when people pretend that they don't think about those things. Like, ‘no, we're just writing some music’… I’m like, ‘no, you're imagining everyone shouting it back to you’!
I mentioned the word ‘ambitious’ last year, I was like, ‘oh, we’re ambitious’ and it was almost like I said a dirty word. Everyone's was like ‘what? We're not ambitious.’ It is almost uncalled to be ambitious. But we really just embraced it. We are an ambitious band, we want to perform massive festival stages and do everything that we want to do. We don't want to have these limitations of being too cool to try.

‘Lover’ is out tomorrow. You can download on iTunes and stream on Apple Music and Spotify.

To keep up with all things HOLiDAY you can follow them on Instagram and Facebook.