Hazlett photo by Kristoffer Eriksson
Hazlett Unlocks Creativity For His Goodbye To The Valley Low EP
Australian-born but Sweden-based songwriter and recording artist Hazlett released his EP, Goodbye to the Valley Low, late in 2023, already having released his debut album, Bloom Mountain, the same year via Nettwerk. In that limited period of time, he’s also been on a UK and EU tour with Wild Rivers and Josiah & The Bonnevilles and has more touring planned for 2024. He’s not new to making music by any means, having been a guitarist in a few bands, and also having spent a substantial amount of time performing in pubs to make a living, but he is living in an era where songwriting and recording have newly become the focus of his creative life, working in Sweden with producer and collaborator Freddy Alexander.
Though he’s still young by most standards, Hazlett feels like he’s a latecomer to singing and songwriting, but for that reason, he realizes, he has a surplus of stories to tell and emotional explorations to share and he does that through threading suggestive layers of narrative together in a labyrinthine way and through creating a parallel layering of sounds that creates a really specific atmosphere for each song. I spoke with Hazlett about some of the experiences that shaped him and led him toward a more daring attitude in terms of both songwriting and performance.
Americana Highways: As an Australian who has travelled a lot, can you tell me, how common is it in your culture to travel so much? Do people think your choices have been unusual?
Hazlett: I laugh about this a lot because Australians travel so much, and they also don’t want to be around other Australians when they travel. I feel like a lot of people from other countries stick together and cling to what’s familiar when they travel, but if you get two Australians in a room, no. That happens all the time to me in Sweden. I think traveling so much comes from living so far away from everyone else in Australia, so when we do travel, it’s not just a trip. We’re going to travel, and “Hey, family, I’ll see you in a few years.” It’s so expensive to get away from Australia that once you do, it makes it worth while to stay away for at least a year. It’s also fairly easy to do if your Australian. I think it comes from being so isolated and far away from others, that when we go, we go for a long time.
AH: I can see that. Many years ago, I went to Japan, which was a big leap, and I stayed almost a year. It was worth it to stay so long. For you all, when you get to Europe, traveling between European countries must seem easy by comparison.
Hazlett: It’s so strange. We jump on a bus, and the bus goes to Bournemouth, then it’s going to go on a boat, and we’re going to travel to Germany. I’m like, “What? You can get to another country overnight?” For us, the closest tourist destination is Bali, and it’s a seven-hour flight.
AH: This new EP follows quickly after your debut album, Bloom Mountain. Has this been a really productive time for you?
Hazlett: Well, I had decided that I wasn’t going to do music anymore. I was going to do the grownup thing of getting a full-time job and building a stable career. Eventually, I gave it one last shot, and that’s what brought me all the way up to Sweden, one of the furthest places that you can get from Australia. It’s a nice 27 hour flight. It’s two flights. It used to be 32 hours, so 27 is amazing.
AH: I can’t even comprehend flights that long. I know that you’ve played guitar for other bands, so was it a shift for you to write your own music and do your own vocals, too? Was that a mental refocusing?
Hazlett: It’s not such a big shift, since in the bands I’d been in, I’d do a bit of writing. But I’d usually write something for someone else to sing. I was never trusted with harmonies or background vocals, really. But I seem to get a lot of people asking for advice about getting into music now online, and I don’t think I’ve made it yet, but I kind of tell my story in response. People want the big romantic story, but when I moved back home after playing in bands, I didn’t know how to get a job. I kind of got thrust into playing in pubs to make money and pay rent. It was an interesting way of getting into singing. The only reason that I started singing was because I had bills to pay and a friend of mine worked in a bar that could pay if I would sing for three hours. I needed the money, so my first gig I booked on a Tuesday and I had to play on Friday and sing three hours of songs.
AH: Three hours is a lot! That’s like Beatles-in-Hamburg kind of playing.
Hazlett: I don’t even know what happened. I just remember sweating a lot. Soon I was doing three or four hours a night and I didn’t really think about it. It didn’t matter how nervous I felt. After a while, I started thinking about writing my own stuff. Then I decided to play a set of my own songs one night. And the owner of the bar was there and told the manager never to hire me ever again. That was a bit of a shot to the confidence after I’d built up the courage to sing in public, that when I sang my own songs, they said, “No more gigs for you.”
AH: That’s a story that’s so bad that it’s good. It’s a great, awful story as an origin story. It’s kind of awesome. You were thrown out of mediocrity.
Hazlett: It also stopped me from playing in pubs so much. It takes a certain kind of person to be able to do that, but when I’d come home at night, I’d feel like an anti-musician. I’d see my guitar in the corner, and I’d hate it, and not want to play it. Some people are really good at pub playing, having the time of their life, but it’s a specific skillset.
AH: It can definitely make people steely. It causes a lot of internal struggle, I think. Often it’s about survival, like it was for you.
Hazlett: But as far as being a singer, as much as I hated playing in pubs, I owe so much to playing in pubs. If you do that for a few years, you’re kind of equipped for anything that goes wrong. You have to deal with drunk people, strings breaking, people heckling, and little things like that. It’s really helped me with playing as a support act, too. A lot of people care about the supporting act, but a lot of people don’t. And playing in pubs taught me that the louder you play, the louder people are going to be over top of you. So when people get loud, play super-quiet and people get nervous to talk. It’s quite funny to do. It works every time.
AH: It’s definitely a situation of escalation otherwise. I know what you mean. In contrast to all that chaos, is the writing and recording a zen-like, quieter experience for you? You had almost left music, so how did you bring yourself to focus in on a period of writing and recording?
Hazlett: It was nice because, as much as I was trying to write my own stuff before, I hadn’t done a lot of digging deep kind of writing. But after all the playing in pubs, and traveling around, I had so much built up experience that it became quite therapeutic, in a sense, to flesh out all the stories that I had built up. That’s kind of the way it’s been ever since, a bit of a therapeutic thing. I’m actually not the biggest fan of playing in the studio. I used to be afraid of playing in public to the point it would make me sick to the stomach, but now I have turned a corner by focusing on whether I’m connecting with the song rather than worrying about whether people are enjoying it or not.
AH: That’s a really interesting strategy.
Hazlett: I went from hating to play to it being my favorite thing now. I love the writing part, but I don’t love the recording part as much. I also get a bit stir-crazy if I’m in the same studio all the time. Much to my friend Freddy [Alexander’s] annoyance, sometimes I get him to pack up some of his gear and we go to another studio, like we did on the last album. It’s helped a lot to have different places to record and different areas to write in. I need a new window to sit in or a new tree to look at while playing guitar.
AH: Aside from the logistical problems of that, why not? The world is so big. If you go down the street, you have a different feeling than you did in the previous location.
Hazlett: When people ask me if I have any regrets about my music, is that I wish I hadn’t gotten into singing so late, but the other side of that is that I wouldn’t have written the songs that I have done if I did it when I was 17 or 18. That’s the same with going to different places and writing, that’s not something I might have done when I was younger, but since I’ve gotten into it so late, I already feel like I’m on borrowed time, so why not? I think because of that, it’s unlocked a lot of creativity in me that I otherwise might have been too nervous to try in the early days.
AH: With these songs on the EP, there’s a lot of density in terms of what’s in each song. Your songwriting has a lot to work with since you’ve built up so much material. And maybe that’s why you’re not sparing with your writing. You’re not teasing out one particular idea or feeling and making that an entire song. I don’t fault people who do that, but your approach seems to be to pile a lot of ideas into the mix. Each song has a generous portion of ideas. That’s nice because it’s not really the tendency in current songwriting.
Hazlett: Thank you very much for that. I think it comes from one of my biggest fears, which is to be called “just a singer/songwriter.” I’ve pushed so hard against that. People think singer/songwriter means a person with an acoustic guitar and classic songwriting. I hope to do more than that and be more in depth than that. I’ve tried to do that with the EPs and working with sonic layers and things like that. It is singer/songwriter at its core, but there is more depth and layers to it. I try to put as much depth into the songs as possible, so they don’t come out seeming cookie-cutter.
AH: I’m noticing more artists internationally who work on their own or with one other person who don’t really brand themselves as singer/songwriter, particularly since they work with more electronic elements and layers, and I can understand that distinction. When it came to recording the music side of it, was there writing that you needed to do in terms of orchestration? I’m wondering how these layers were built up.
Hazlett: I do everything with my friend Freddy, which is one of the reasons that I moved up to Sweden. I’ve written and recorded every song I’ve done ever since I started putting music out. We’ve now reached a point where we very silently communicate. It’s very hard for us to not be on the same page nowadays. I’ll have an idea for a song, we’ll go and record it, and he laughs at the language I use. I’ll say, “I want this part to sound like leaves crunching and the color orange in the background.” He used to look at me like I was an idiot, but nowadays, he says, “Okay, cool, I got you.” He’ll put something on and it’s the exact thing that we need.
So the layers happen kind of naturally as we work through the song. We’ll say, “It needs more this,” or “It needs more that.” That’s the good thing about working together. Freddy is ridiculously talented and a cyborg computer person, and he’s very quick. I come from a very different world. But that’s part of what works so well since we are two different worlds coming together, but very much a collaborative effort.
Thanks very much for chatting with us Hazlett! You can discover more on his website, here:
https://www.thisishazlett.com/