Zachary Leo walks us through his new EP, On My Mind

June 14, 2024

Naarm/Melbourne-based funk-pop artist Zachary Leo has just unveiled his new EP ‘On My Mind’. Here, he walks us through it, track-by-track.

Track 01 – ‘Time After Time’

‘Time After Time’ was probably one of the first songs I’d ever written that felt 100% true and honest to who I was as an artist. I’d been going through shocking writer’s block and decided to lock myself in my room one day and only come out once I’d written something decent, resulting in this song. I was so proud of it, but I never intended to show anyone until my band found the demo on Soundcloud titled ‘Big Ol Bucket of Chicken’, and the secret was out. Their reaction gave me the confidence to take the song a little more seriously.

This was also one of the first songs Tobias and I worked on together. I just remember how creative and seamless those recording sessions were, just two guys in a tiny room, playing around with synths and outboard gear and just getting super excited about anything we did. Tobias really helped me express myself artistically on this song and anytime I felt like holding back, he kind of pointed towards doing the opposite, which I loved. This is a personal favourite of mine.

Track 02 – ‘Can’t Get Enough’

‘Can’t Get Enough’ was one of the first disco songs I ever wrote and one of two songs I got to work on with Alex Markwell. We took a lot of sonic inspiration from the 1970s with this one. We recorded most of the song live at The Aviary Studios in Collingwood, before taking it downstairs to Alex’s studio to do overdubs. I came up with the riff for this song in a Chadstone Shopping Centre bathroom stall, just mumbling the idea into my phone mic and then showing Alex the completed demo the next day. I think this song represented a big change in the music I would come to write in the future, as I had just released my first EP only months before and had gone from writing Red Hot Chili Peppers-inspired Funk/Rock songs to disco songs with sparkly electric pianos and synthesizers. I often get asked whether the song is about a particular person or situation, but in reality, it was more about certain things that became habitual for me during COVID, like drinking, which at the time I loved, but when too indulged, just had negative effects on my mental and physical health. But the song can be interpreted in many different ways, as it technically is also about someone who is just captivated by another person and can’t shake their feelings for them. This is still one of my favourite songs to play live.

Track 03 – ‘Pretty Girl’

‘Pretty Girl’ was a song that took many forms before I finally settled on what you hear now. I first wrote this song three or four years ago and it was originally a much slower acoustic song before I decided to funk it up a little bit. It then went through four or five different verses and varying interpretations before it finally found its form. This is definitely the happiest song off the record as it’s all about love and finding that one person that makes you feel like nothing else matters.

This was a really enjoyable song to work on in the studio as the original demo was a bit more clean-cut sonically so there was plenty of room for adding more grit and personality to the final product. The percussion in this song is a personal highlight for me, as I just remember Tobias grabbing random objects from around the studio like mugs and pens and blending them together to make this incredible rhythm section. It’s been cool playing this live recently, as there seem to be more and more people singing the words back to me, which is a really special feeling.

Track 04 – ‘Suffer’

‘Suffer’ is, in my opinion, the perfect ending to Side A, as it slows things down a bit stylistically after 3 pretty upbeat tracks. The song is about being intimate with the person you love and only wanting them by your side during your hardest days. I wrote ‘Suffer’ back in 2021, while Alex and I were doing the sessions for ‘Can’t Get Enough’ and ‘So Good’, and still to this day, these are some of my favourite lyrics I have ever written. In the studio, Tobias and I took a lot of inspiration sonically from Sly and The Family Stone and songs like ‘Poet’ and ‘Just Like a Baby’ and spent a lot of time getting things like the snare and bass tone to sound how we wanted. From there, anything else that we added was purely colour. Something I love about this song is that during the recording process, we took a fresh approach to the production and tried new things like adding clavinets to a section instead of fuzz guitars or doing a simpler, more expressive guitar solo instead of just shredding. It helped us to keep things simple and refrain from adding anything unnecessary to a song that could really get its point across with only bass, drums and vocals.

Track 05 – ‘On My Mind’

‘On My Mind’ is a song about the debilitating nature of anxiety and depression and the effects of it constantly consuming someone’s mind. It’s about trying to reach out to someone close to you to tell them something is wrong but struggling to find the words to explain how you are feeling. I wrote this song about my own struggles, and the constant back and forth that occurs in your own head, trying to rid yourself of dark and consuming thoughts. This song also acts as the overarching theme behind the EP, as, in some way, each song is speaking about a form of turmoil going on inside my own head. While musically upbeat the contrasting lyrical themes of the song, were a way for me to represent the idea of struggling on the inside (lyrics) but putting up a front on the outside (music), which is something I did for years. In the studio, this was probably Tobias and my biggest challenge, as I couldn’t quite put my finger on how I wanted the song to sound sonically. We began production in early 2023 and worked on the song for a few months before taking a break and letting it sit for a bit. I then went overseas and came back with completely fresh ideas. We eventually re-recorded the drums and the rest kind of fell into place from there. The incredible Ainsley Turner played Electric Piano and Mellotron on this song and helped bring it to life.

Track 06 – ‘So Good’

‘So Good’ was one of the first songs I wrote when I started the Zachary Leo project back in 2019. It would have been February or March and I was at home in bed, about 2am on a Saturday morning and I couldn’t sleep, so I picked up a battered old classical guitar that was leaning on my bedside table and came up with the whole song in about five minutes. I just remember it all flowed out so seamlessly, lyrics and melody. I then spent the next two-three years playing it live and changing it up stylistically until I brought it into the studio to work on with Alex (Markwell). This is the second song Alex and I worked on together, and similar to ‘Can’t Get Enough’, we took a more traditional approach to the recording process, tracking the whole song live in the studio before doing synth and guitar overdubs downstairs. The song is about the end of a relationship where one person doesn’t feel the same way as the other but can’t seem to figure out why. In the end, it just wasn’t meant to be.

Track 07 – ‘GMSG (Give Me Something Good’)

The final track from the EP, ‘GMSG’, is about not being able to sleep and is the second song off the record that delves more directly into my battles with anxiety. I originally wrote the song back in early 2021 as a bit of a jam before the band and I started playing the song live later that year. I then cut the song from the set completely in 2022 and only recently came back to it when Tobias and I were picking the final songs for the EP. I remember the two of us (Tobias and I) discussing how we were going to tackle the song during pre-production, and if we were going to cut it down and turn it into a single or let it do its thing and be this grandiose funk song. Two days later, I had completely rewritten the verses and added a twwo minute extended outro, kind of answering the question for both of us. The verses for this song come from a poem I wrote called ‘It’s Alright’ and list the struggles I have going to sleep when my anxiety comes out to play:

“Done with dreaming lately, so much that I’m saying, head pollution maybe, solace couldn’t save me, but I guess it’s alright”.

This felt like the perfect closer to the EP as it brings together all the musical and lyrical influences of the record and then leaves you with a little outro jam to dance to.