In this interview spotlight, I chat with Vaarwell about the latest project, motivations, challenges and more.
Full Q&A along with links and music below. Homebound 456 is now available.
Where are you from and what style of music do you create? (In your own words, not necessarily in marketing terms or by popular genre classifications.)
We’re from Lisbon, Portugal. I think that the style of music we create is what we feel expressed through music. Its usually calm and sad.
What led you down this path of music and what motivates you to keep going?
When we met back in 2012 all of us were doing completely different music wise. Margarida was recording songs as a singer-songwriter, Luis was playing bass in a Rock Band and I was playing guitar in a Punk/Hardcore band. We met because we were on the same class studying Music Production in an Arts School in Lisbon.
Eventually we tried making music together and we really liked the result.
What really motivates us to keep going is the awesome feedback from people who listen to us and our music being able to reach people from all over the world.
How is this new release different than previous ones? Were you trying to accomplish anything specific?
Well, “Homebound 456” is our first full length which means that we had a lot of work with writing, rehearsing and recording (It took us about 1 year to finish it). We also started exploring electronic samples, field recordings and synthesizers. Although we had already tried using some drum samples in “Love and Forgiveness” it took us only three months for the same process.
Name one or two challenges you face as an indie musician in this oversaturated, digital music age? How has technology helped you (since we know it does help)?
A challenge we definitely face is to understand how people are going to listen to our music since there are thousands of new songs being released every day. Another one is to keep our presence on social network – so people don’t feel like we have “disappeared” – while we keep writing music at the same time.
The fact that today Spotify plays are getting as relevant as radio spins has helped us because people are getting music more democratically because they can choose what they want to listen to.
Where is the best place to connect with you online and discover more music?
To connect with us online you can follow our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/vaarwell)
and Instagram (www.instagram.com/vaarwell/).For new music follow us on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/artist/7jz4ptH9vUGJdMpKFryEEG) and Soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/vaarwell).
Anything else before we sign off?
We have new music coming 2018!”
