INTERVIEW: Sydnee Carter on new single 'Bruises'

Perth based Sydnee Carter first started releasing music in 2015, with her style travelling along the indie-folk-pop lane. Last year, she expanded her sonic palette experimenting with more pop based sounds and appearing as the featured vocalist on a number of electronica and dance tracks.

She recently released her new single ‘Bruises’, a gorgeous, mellow pop-R&B track written with Matt Riley (WasteLand) and produced by Chymes’ Cameron Taylor. With beautifully constructed lyrics and a heartfelt vocal performance, the song is personal and raw and details the process of healing after being involved in difficult relationships: “I’ll show you what my bruises look like / I’ll show where the darkness hides” she sings.

‘Bruises’ is the first step in a new era for Sydnee Carter, with it being her first release since signing to TMRW Music sub-label Risqué. With music this good, the future is looking bright for Sydnee and we recently caught up with her to find out more.

Hey Sydnee! How is everything in your world right now?
Hey! It’s going really good! I am very humbled to have a great team behind me who want the same things as me! I am so so excited for what’s to come!

Congratulations on the release of your new single ‘Bruises’ it is a beautiful song. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind the track?
Thank you guys so much! I’m so glad the song is being received as I had hoped. We wanted to come from an imagery perspective on the song, and draw on the idea of bruises being symbolic of unseen damage from past relationships/friendships. It then tells the story of finally finding someone who you are starting to trust and hope that they are finally the one to help heal those bruises. Someone you can fully let your guard down with and know that they want the same thing.

What was the creative process like for ‘Bruises’?
I wrote the song with my fellow Perth pals Matt and Justin; we only met a few months before this song and we just clicked. They are two of my favourite and go-to collaborators, even though they are now based in Sydney. We just bounced melody and lyric ideas off each other after starting with the piano chords and built it from there. 

There is a real beauty to your lyrics in ‘Bruises’. They are quite poetic, very personal but also very relatable to listeners. Words are clearly something you excel at, have you always loved words and writing?
I was always the kid who sucked at maths in school but did pretty decent at English! I just love being creative and I’ve always loved reading, so I definitely think years of delving into fantasy worlds and understanding descriptive language from a young age helped me. I just the other day found a little short story saga I had written when I was a kid called ‘The Carter Adventures’; my family and I had a good little laugh at it. I am quite an open person, but always find it very easy to be open and vulnerable with my collaborators and so once we decided how we wanted to approach the song, it came quite easy. I believe even if someone hasn’t had the exact same experiences as me, they are still relatable in their own way to the listeners experiences. 

Throughout 2020 you did a number of collaborations on dance tracks. How do you find that experience differs from working on your own tracks, both from the collaboration aspect and also creating music that is in a different genre lane from what you previously made?
I am a people person, so I love love love collaborating! If I can write for as many genres as possible and it sounds half decent then I will definitely give it a crack. It just so happened that 2020 was the year for Sydnee Carter dance tracks! It helps me be disciplined when it comes to my own writing where I can typically write about whatever I want to, however dance tracks seem to pull towards more “happy-go-lucky” type vibes, so it means I can’t get off track. I find it quite therapeutic to write for different genres as sometimes when people hear my music and they meet me in real life, they can be so different! My music is quite soft, naïve and emotional, whereas when you meet me, I’m super loud, bubbly and quite out there! So it is helping me navigate what aspects of the collaborations I like, and would work really well with my own music. 

Music has been a constant throughout your life, do you think there was ever a conscious moment where you decided to pursue it as a career, or was that desire always just there, as a given?
I would have to say it stems from being the middle child who was always wanting to be the centre of attention. I love to make people laugh, still to this day, it’s my favourite thing to do! As a kid, my parents loved music and we would definitely have music playing all the time through the house and in the car on rides to and from school. When I was about five or six, I decided I wanted this cool red electric guitar, and I got it for my birthday one year and broke all the strings just absolutely jamming it out as a joke when I would put on “shows” for my family. As I got older I really loved writing, singing and playing the guitar (properly) and my passion for it grew and from the age of about 13 I knew I wanted to be in the music industry in some capacity. 

Who are the artists that you love and follow, both when you were growing up and also today?
Growing up, I would listen to whatever my parents did, so a lot of Michael Jackson, Motown, Supertramp, Rush, Pink Floyd, Gabrielle, Rob Thomas, John Denver. Basically whatever they had on CD was what we would listen to. I always loved Michael Jackson and would dress up like him whenever I could ha ha! As I got older my tastes changed and as much as people will think this is cringy, I found Justin Bieber before he went massive, I just thought wow! This guy is amazing and he is making it on YouTube! That kind of gave me the inspiration to learn guitar chords and start recording covers. I have a love for a broad range of genres and my heroes would have to be Ed Sheeran, Lorde, Halsey and Post Malone. There are probably so many others that I am forgetting, but there are too many to name! 

There are so many aspects to being a singer - there is songwriting, recording, making music videos, performing live at gigs…what part is your favourite?
My favourite has always always always been in the studio! I absolutely love writing and recording music. I love all aspects of being a singer/songwriter, but my favourite is the songwriting and recording aspect in the studio. I find myself at ease when I am in the studio, there’s no pressure. I do enjoy a cheeky music video, because 99% of it is bloopers of me being an idiot, but always having fun! 

The music industry has long been a difficult space for women to exist in, partly because it has been run for so long by older, white, straight men. What are your thoughts on gender equality and sexism in the music industry?
I have been in the music industry since I was 17, and a lot of things knocked me back and would constantly knock me down and I would have to work even harder to prove myself to the music industry. I never really knew if it was because I was so young, or if in fact it was also because I am a woman? I definitely think it still exists and there is so much of it coming to light now with the amazing movements on social media, I have just been very lucky to not experience it at its worst. I am a huge believer that things are changing, and changing for the better, but only because there are strong independent people out there who are sick and tired of the inequality and are fighting for the justice that the women in the music industry deserve. 

What’s up next for Sydnee Carter?
I’m hoping onwards and upwards! More writing, more collaborating and more recording! I hope to move over east at some stage and continue to release music, hopefully play more shows once the whole COVID-19 settles down. But I am so excited no matter what, I have an amazing team behind me and I feel like good things are coming. 

‘Bruises’ is out now via Risqué. You can stream and download here.

To keep up with all things Sydnee Carter you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.