Good Morning unwind on latest double track ‘Excalibur / Toy’, Good Morning Seven LP due Mar 22
PRAISE FOR Good Morning
“Lush retro pop balladry... melodious pop-rock, magnificently rendered with a gentle touch”
“Toil and talent”
“Polished and accomplished... they've evolved”
“The music has the easiness you feel looking out at the ocean”
“Everything's looking good for Good Morning”
“Reminding us just how proficient they are at arranging”
“One of the country's most beloved acts”
GOOD MORNING SEVEN TRACKLIST
1. Arcade
2. Ahhhh (This Isn’t Ideal)
3. Monster Of The Week
4. As The Dogs Were Playing
5. The Worm Turns
6. Dog Years
7. Queen Of Comedy
8. The Lake
9. Diane Said
10. One Night
11. Excalibur
12. Real I’m Told
13. Just In Time
14. Toy
15. Jelly Legs
16. Dogs On The Beach
17. The Fear!
’Excalibur / Toy’ is out now, buy/stream it here.
Good Morning Seven LP
Mar 22 via Good Morning Music Company Worldwide / Polyvinyl
PRE-SAVE + PRE-ORDER HERE
Good Morning today share their latest two-track release ‘Excalibur’ and ‘Toy’, from their seventh studio album Good Morning Seven. The 17-track epic arrives on March 22 via Good Morning Music Company (ANZ) and Polyvinyl (ROW) ahead of their North American tour dates supporting Waxahatchee. With the release comes a transitory new music video for ‘Excalibur’, a fan favourite that’s spawned continued online fever since its first appearance in a live set eighteen months ago. LISTEN HERE + WATCH HERE.
Seasoned songwriters, Good Morning possess a consistently high output in their creative tenure. Few times though, have they bore witness to those random, yet fully realised, strokes of inspiration as on ‘Excalibur’ and ‘Toy’. Here Liam Parsons and Stefan Blair find themselves at the hands of that remarkable happenstance with both tracks appearing so seemingly out of nowhere. An experience that recalls a similar dreamstate genesis of ‘Yesterday’ whose writer, in such disbelief of its sudden allusion, was convinced of its existence many years beforehand and by another artist entirely.
Unlike Good Morning’s recent succession of double-tracks and their discography as a whole, casual demo tinkering captured the subconscious ‘Excalibur’ and ‘Toy’ in real time. Just as they first appeared in the spur of the moment, both singles share a relaxed, soft-rock quality of swash-buckling calm – the breeziest and most lounge-like lean the two-piece have unearthed musically. The sheer coincidence of their recording made all the peculiar when noting their conception in two isolated instances. Much like their collaborative relationship, taking place both entirely separate and parallel at once.
A live set staple and heavily anticipated by fans, ‘Excalibur’ – like the sword – manifested itself in what Liam initially thought might come out as placeholder mumble while writing on tour. “It was one of those weird times where I had all the words in my head ready to go without ever explicitly thinking about them,” he shares. “Las Vegas is a strange and messed up place at the best of times, but when you feel like the world is gonna end it becomes even weirder. I remember walking around in the morning and the streets were pretty quiet and it was the day that the Killers put out that song ‘Caution’ (Las Vegas banger). I listened to that on a loop and was looking at all these mock versions of world landmarks and just quietly freaking out about my future.”
Lyrically ‘Toy’ considers a pub encounter “in which I probably shoulda just left” Stefan explains, swooning instrumentally through a crescendo of strings, woodwind and synths. Formed by the trigger of Chet Baker’s cover of ‘You Better Go Now’, while hanging out in a public park, the opening string suite sparked ‘Toy’s composition. “I paused it immediately because I could hear what became ‘Toy’ in my head,” he continues. “I hurried home and demoed the song pretty quickly, nervous that I would forget what I had imagined in the park. Don’t think something like that has ever happened to me before, but it’s cool it can.”
Previewed with today’s double-track and the recent ‘Just In Time’ / ‘Ahhhh (This Isn’t Ideal)’, ‘One Night‘ / ‘Real I’m Told‘ and ‘Dog Years‘ / ‘Queen Of Comedy‘, Good Morning Seven marks a moment in the two-piece’s history as a product that demonstrates the investment (and pay-off) in taking time. Typically the duo write and record independently from each other, in a matter of days, releasing albums, EPs and double tracks all in a quick sequence of each other. That was, before Good Morning Seven. The upcoming album will see the two display a confident creative partnership, with every intentional step laid out for indulgence.
Over the past decade, Good Morning have carved out a peculiar, hard-to-define indie career for themselves, amassing a global cult fanbase and hundreds of millions of streams despite (or perhaps because of) their defiantly DIY approach. The band/duo/recording-thing from Naarm / Melbourne, Australia come together as Stefan Blair (29, brown hair, 6 foot something) plays most of the instruments and sings half the songs. Liam Parsons (30, brown hair, 6 foot on the dot) plays the rest of the instruments and sings the other half of the songs. The band name is intentionally impossible to Google but hasn’t gotten in the way of them getting shouted out by Tyler, The Creator, sampled by A$AP Rocky, going viral on TikTok (for their 2015 track ‘Warned You’), or touring the globe (including the US, Mexico, China, Japan, Thailand, and beyond). Their 2021 album Barnyard, both thoughtful and catchy, released internationally via Polyvinyl was met with widespread acclaim from Rolling Stone, NME, Stereogum, The Line Of Best Fit, Consequence, Alt Press, Paste, DIY Magazine, Northern Transmissions, KCRW, 6Music and more – setting the scene for their seventh record Good Morning Seven.
Narrowing down 70 songs penned in preparation, the cohesive 17 that you’ll see on the 51-minute double record – their seventh and longest ever album – come together as Good Morning’s most ambitious project to date. Made possible thanks to their own decade-long friendship, Liam and Stefan stretched days into longer periods of gestation, steadily developed their own studio spaces with gear accumulated or kindly borrowed, and a string of collaborators invited to contribute for the first time ever. While it’s written, recorded, engineered, and produced solely by Good Morning, they further expand their world with an integrated community of contributors in mix engineer Tyler Karmen (Noname, DIIV, Devendra Banhart) with parts overdubbed at Stella Mozgawa’s (drummer of Warpaint) Joshua Tree studio, Fred Kevorkian (The White Stripes, Iggy Pop, The National, Willie Nelson) who mastered in Brooklyn, string arrangements by Chloe Sanger, Greer Clemens and Dannika Horvat on harmonies (the only guest vocalists on record to date), and Stefan’s father Glenn Blair even played woodwinds. The double album filled with strings, synths, samples and singing marks their 10th year anniversary of being a band. It’s all down hill from here.
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