Getting to know Trace Decay

March 31, 2020

Melbourne-based indie-rock duo, Trace Decay, have just revealed their new single. We asked Jordan from the band to tell us more:

I Am…. Jordan De Pasquale and I’m one half of Trace Decay. I grew up in Brisbane and have an Italian/Scottish background. I first started playing music when my father forced me into guitar lessons at 10 years old but quickly fell in love with it. I come from a fairly musical family with three older brothers who each play musical instruments and my father who plays Piano Accordion (he’s been playing the same fucking 20 songs my whole life i.e. ‘That’s Amore’, ‘Marina’, ‘O Sole Mio’). He even wrote me a song when I was born called ‘Giordano, Giordano,’ which still gets some air town around Xmas and family get togethers.

Sad Dance is…. about my experience of being fairly sociable which can be a blessing and a curse often leaving me either completely zapped of energy and mentally exhausted or apathetic towards people. Everyone is so connected now and the idea of ‘alone time’ becomes increasingly difficult which can severely affect someone’s mental state and leave them feeling fragile and somewhat depressed. Thanks to things like IG, FB, email etc we are now ‘open for business’ 24/7 and are expected to maintain our sanity. I guess ‘Sad Dance’ is an insight into what happens when someone has had enough and removes all care/ subtly from social interactions.

Home is…. constantly shifting and dependent on how content and happy I am. I moved to Melbourne from Brisbane in 2018 and it’s only now truly starting to feel like home thanks to new friendships I’ve made. Some days I wake up and feel like I’m in a foreign territory and miss the idea of being back in QLD, safe within the confines of familiarity and family but it never stays for long. I’d rather be out of my comfort zone and doing what I want then being comfortable and settling for whatever falls within my bubble.

I spend too much time…. deliberating over which burger joint I’m going to order on UberEATS and then ordering the same one I always do anyway. I spend a lot of time working on different creative ventures outside of Trace Decay as well which sometimes feels like I’m spreading myself way too thin. I spend too much time lying in bed at night playing every social interaction in my head over and over and reading a ridiculous amount into situations that don’t require that much thought. For instance, the other night I played out a conversation which was me answering someone’s question about which drum vst/setting I liked in Logic Pro X and then proceeded to spent 30 minutes in bed that night breaking down whether I truly answered that person’s question or not.

I’ve never…. been good at feeling content or happy with my work. I have found myself at times consistently searching for external validation in situations that don’t need it which only provides the most fleetingness of highs. I’ve worked a lot on that over the past two years as it was slowly killing my drive creatively and in general. I’ve also never been to Perth or off the east coast of Australia, so someone book us some shows please.

It might surprise people to learn that…. Trace Decay started as a joke when I needed to take a break from writing and performing electronic music & was actually called ‘The Go-Go Nineties’. The very first song written was a track called ‘Tina’, which is one of the many nicknames I’ve bestowed upon my girlfriend (much to her distaste) and it consisted of me yelling Tina in the chorus over and over again. Was it good? No. Did it spark something that would eventually lead to the release of our latest single ‘Sad Dance’? Quite possibly. Should we have stuck with The Go-Go Nineties moniker? Most certainly. It must also be mentioned, the ‘Tina’ song went into high rotation at family events spurring arena level singalongs.