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About how Mighty Oaks reflect their emotional state into music

About how Mighty Oaks reflect their emotional state into music

| Francesca Garattoni

Leggi questo articolo in Italiano qui

Mighty Oaks did plan to spend their 2020 touring the globe, but it wasn’t possible: they have therefore conveyed their energies in recording their forth album Mexico (Howl Records), planned for release on May 7. Due to the occasion, we had a chat with Claudio Donzelli, who told us the emotions and the experiences that brings their music to life.

 

Back in February 2020 you released All Things Go and after a bit more than a year you are here again with your new work Mexico. What does it mean to you to bring something new to life while the whole world is on hold?

“The pandemic changed everything, including the typical lifecycle of an album. When the lockdown started in March 2020, we had an incredible plan for the rest of the year, tons of great shows in Europe and US. We were looking forward to touring our third album All Things Go but it soon became clear that such restrictions were going to have a huge impact on our tour schedule. In the impossibility to play any shows at all, we thought that we would best invest the time in writing new material. Nobody knew what was coming but we knew that once this nightmare would be over, we would have been ready with new music to release and perform live. It’s been our way to cope with the lockdown and besides that, it kept us sane and focused during times of uncertainty.”

 

The trait I prefer out of Mexico is its particular intimacy. What do you like the most of your album? And what is, in your opinion, its uniqueness, that special something that differentiates it from your previous releases?

“I love when an album is a snapshot of where we are individually and as a band at the time of making it. When I know that we managed to reflect our emotional state in the music we make. I think this is the case for Mexico. We lived through unprecedented times, with climate change, racial issues and broken politics. You’ll find some of that in the album, but you’ll also find represented universal traits of the human experience like love, friendship and death. I love the juxtaposition between the two. At the end of the day each of us has to confront his interior world with the exterior world we live in. I think its uniqueness is in the process. We recorded almost everything ourselves in Ian’s home studio. The result is more raw, direct and unfiltered than ever before.” 

 

Ian Hooper said that recording at home felt like going back at the beginning of your career. Is it an experience worth making again?

”Absolutely, and it feels right and very natural to go back to that way of working at this stage of our career. After three albums out and as many EPs it was time to reshuffle the cards and bring some fresh energy in the studio. The same fresh energy that Ian and I were immersed into as we were recording music the first tracks, laying the foundation of the band, in 2010.”

 

You all come from different Countries and the band was born in Germany: how your different origins influence and/or enrich your music?

“First of all, it enriches our experience of working together. Second our music, but it’s really hard for me to say exactly how our cultural background reflects in the music we make and even if we grew up in different places, the music we heard growing up with was not so crazy different. For example, I grew up listening to mostly brit pop and US indie bands in the 90s/00s.
In general, internationality is really part of our nature, even beyond the band: in our team we have professionals from France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany of course and people with Hungarian and Turkish backgrounds. It’s quite common in Berlin as the city became a huge international hub in the past 10 to 20 years.”

 

If I ask you to sum up your artistic journey up to now, what will you tell me?

“Wow, that’s a really hard question! I’ll give it a try! (smiles)
I think we’ve always been interested in finding powerful ways to tell stories that resonate with people. We do that through Ian’s lyrics that are often inspired by autobiographical events. We do that with the music which serves and supports the story. Our artistic journey unfolds in developing, perfecting and experimenting with the craft of songwriting.” 

 

Last but not least, a piece of advice to our readers: which album recently released would you absolutely recommend to listen to?

Earth by EOB (Ed O’Brien, guitarist of Radiohead) has been the best album I’ve heard in while. It really raptured me. It came out during the pandemic last year and it really made me travel without moving when traveling wasn’t allowed. It’s a wonderful multifaceted record with contaminations of different genres and musical flavors.”

 

Marta Massardo