Inspired #191 - Outlaw Boogie
Outlaw Boogie talks us through the inspirations behind his music and his brand new shimmering EP ‘The Circle’.
Who are your top three musical inspirations?
I think for a lot of people, it’s almost impossible to whittle down all the artists you love into a tiny podium of three. I’ve basically got a Top 5 in my life right now, and they are all in there for the same reasons. All five of them have the almighty combination of great song-writing, great production, great lyrics and great performances on majority of their records. I would gladly explain all of them in fine detail, but I don’t think anyone needs a music history lesson (plus Wikipedia exists). The Top 5 is Steely Dan, XTC, The Beatles, Grateful Dead + Neil Young & Friends (it’s the blanket term for all of the Laurel Canyon crusties from the 60s, Neil being my favourite).
Is there a certain film that inspires you?
When I started Outlaw Boogie back in 2012, I was 22 and I’d only just discovered the work of Sergio Leone and all the other Italians making films in the Spanish desert with failed Americans. I used a lot of lesser known Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef films as song titles/artwork, and one that is still one of my favourites from that period is ‘Play Misty For Me’. It stars Eastwood as a jazz radio DJ in Monterey, but he has a regular caller who requests the standard ‘Misty’ every night. Eastwood obviously ends up bedding this woman, and she inevitably turns into a stalker/psycho. The soundtrack was great, and Jessica Walters (the mother from Arrested Development) is crazy as hell as Evelyn Draper.
What city do you find the most inspiring?
In the last five years, I travelled a bit more around Europe than I did at any point in my life. I was always a bit nervous about going to new strange places, but recently I’ve been to Berlin a bunch. It’s a big cliché at the moment, but I’d always been incredibly fascinated by war history and the cold war in general, so when one of my friends moved out there, I was super keen to have a look. It inspires me a lot in these moments of lockdown, as it is probably the first city outside of England that I could get lost and find my way back home. One of the reasons I love London, is that I can walk for hours and find something, and Berlin is exactly the same to me.
Who is the most inspiring person to you?
This is the hardest one to answer, because it’s really easy to just throw you a famous musician and say I like their tunes. It’s been hard for anyone to inspire truly with such prolonged absences last year, but I get great inspiration from my partner Anna and my brother Dick Dent. Anna is pretty unique and changes my perception on a lot of things, whilst Dick is making some incredible music all on his own, and building up a profile without anyone else. They make me want to be better and to work harder, so I’m gonna go with the obvious; family and girlfriend.
What were your inspirations when writing your new EP?
When I started writing for ‘The Circle’ back in 2019, I never had any real ambition to use material for a new Outlaw Boogie EP. ‘The Circle’ song itself is about a good friend of mine, who died that year. In the week after I found out, I was at a pub with a friend, and we spoke a lot about where we thought people really went after their time is finished here. It gave me the inspiration to write the song for everyone in our friendship group who was suffering, and as a way to tell the whole world that our friend was so important to all of us. She was the circle that brought us together, and that whole period gave me a lot of ambition to do something special with the song. With the other songs, they all came from either a random thought I had lyrically, or just a great groove that I had to turn into a real song. Another song that means a lot to me on ‘The Circle’ is a song called ‘Still The Same’. I wrote it in 2018, but I never recorded it properly, and I was always a little wary of how personal the lyrics were. However, because the song was about the end of my five-year plan (DM me for details), and I’d just got there, it seemed almost too perfect not to finish it. I wanted to tell myself that things will be fine, and whilst I am getting older, I don’t have to settle down.
How would you like to inspire people?
I don’t think I would ever want the responsibility of being a true role model for anyone. I still have a lot of growing up to do, myself! In all seriousness though, if someone was to take anything from an Outlaw Boogie recording/interview, I would like them to believe that you don’t necessarily have to play someone else’s game to be successful and that you can always become a better songwriter. Don’t believe your own hype, because it’s a long road.