Finally, after five years in the making, my debut EP ‘passage’ is available everywhere.
If you’ve been anywhere near my socials over the last two months, you would have seen this image. It’s the cover art, and I love it.
It was taken in July 2023 by Kate Lund, a wonderful photographer in Brisbane. She took so many great photos, I had trouble choosing the best for the EP cover. If anyone in the Brisbane area is looking for a great photographer who just gets it – that’s Kate, and tell her I sent you!!!
Over the last year, I had phases of liking different pictures more for the EP, and eventually, in March 2024 I did an informal survey with friends and family to quash my endless indecision.
So, you’re looking at the winner, with 10 votes all up. It was followed closely by a cropped version of this with text.
all about the EP
The EP is made up of 5 tracks: Across the Room, Home, Talk, Unaware and Forever. All the songs were recorded at Hunting Ground Studios with Joel Myles of Head Atlas, who (if you remember from my recording blog post from 2020) I worked with for my debut single, Ghosts in 2019.
As I described to my friend Kaysei (Full Form Artists), who helps me out with press releases and biographies (I simply cannot do these myself), I see a lot of myself trying to ‘figure it all out’ through these songs. The EP is a consideration of everything I’ve been through so far, and who I’m turning into.
I actually found the first drafts of the some of the songs recently, since they were written as a part of a songwriting club. The songs, in all their draft-y glory, were sitting there in the archive, accompanied by upload dates! Across the Room was written in January 2018, Talk in June 2018 and Home in September 2018. Forever was a great project – it started off in August 2020, but was originally named ‘the climb’. Since I’m not Miley Cyrus circa 2009, I thought the title (and the song) needed some tweaking. Joel and I worked on it, and mashed up the best bits from the 2020 version with another song I’d been working on at the time of the studio session. He did some co-writing, and from that, we created Forever.
The EP was originally going to be 5 tracks, with Ghosts instead of Unaware. In hindsight, I’m glad I waited, because when I wrote Unaware in September 2023, the EP was still unreleased and unannounced (don’t @ me, I know I’ve been talking about it for years – no specific date was set!).
Unaware fell out of me and I dropped everything to immediately record it. I had to include it on the EP, mostly because I didn’t want to sit on it like I’d sat on the others, but also, I’d played it live shortly after writing and a number of people really resonated with it. So – the continued delay of the EP meant I could include Unaware, which I’m grateful for.
So, as you can see, the songs were written and recorded over a 5 year span. I feel lighter already.
if you didn’t take any pictures in the studio, were you really there? (yes)
I have a serious lack of skill for capturing the moment during the recording process, so most of the photos I have are pictures of me listening to the music as it plays through the monitors or photos of Joel as he works on guitar riffs!
I have a few short videos of me bopping my head along to the tracks as we listened back. It may be a little too mish mash for me to cut together a video, so I might just keep them for me (for now, at least).
Anyway, that’s enough yapping for today. If you haven’t yet, please feel free to check out the EP at the button below, and tell me what you think!
All the love,
Brooke xo
