Louder Than The Music

British band Lifecolour have been making a name for themselves recently with their creative guitar work, captivating live sets, and heartfelt lyrics. With latest EP 'Where's Your Sting?' under their belts, LTTM caught up with the foursome to find out more.

For those who haven't heard of you before, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved in making music?

Well, we’ve all been friends for years. Sam Frawley and Simon became good friends at high school. Both of the Sam’s went the same church and youth group, and Ging was one of the youth leaders there. So it’s a bit of a complex web! It all began when we learnt that we all played instruments and so we started meeting up and jamming with each other in our garages. We really liked playing with each other and eventually started writing our own songs. We developed more of a passion for it the more we played and it eventually became clear that we wanted to take it more seriously. That was when we were 15/16, from that point on we started playing in churches locally. Then it just took off from there really.

Tell us a little bit about your new EP 'Where's Your Sting' and what the inspiration behind it was?

Something that has become quite important to us as band, in the writing process or playing live, is that it has to sound like it’s just us four. We’d made the mistake on the last EP of getting caught up in overproducing the sound like adding loads of extras like keyboards/synths for example, which didn’t need to be there. And one thing that we realised about our shows was that we never use any production like backing tracks… The sound you hear is just the four of us, completely raw, but yet still achieving a huge sound.

So this is something we wanted to get out of our next EP. We had a phone call from an American producer called Justin Johnson who said he wanted to help us out. He wanted to do something different and capture the live sound of Lifecolour. It was great to have someone be on the same wavelength as us. We had quite a few new songs that we wanted to record, in the end we chose three that shared a common theme. They were all written out of times of depression, feeling worthless and feeling like you’ll never be good enough. But we wanted to say to people that God made you for your own unique purpose, he didn’t make you to be like somebody else. He loves you the way you are. When you feel like you’re being attacked by your past and insecurities, God is on your side, and through him you don’t have to be afraid and you can pick yourself up again.

The title ‘Where’s Your Sting?’ came very much from that. “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” It’s like the victory cry… God is on our side, so there’s nothing that can bring us down!

Which is your favourite track on the EP and why?

This is quite a tricky question to answer as these are 3 of our favourite songs, otherwise we would have recorded different ones! Each of them have their own “special hook” but I think on the whole our favourite would be “Tear up the same”, just down to the fact that we love playing it live. We wrote it to be a bit like our own anthem, and we love hearing people sing along with us at a show.

What's your song writing process?

In the past, it has usually started with the two Sam’s. Sam Taylor’s (also known as Tiz) focus was the music, whilst Sam Frawley’s was the lyrics. Either the lyrics would come first and Frawley would bring them to rehearsals and we’d piece the music together as a band, or Tiz would have written a piece of music and we’d work out parts, put our own stamp on it and Sam would write lyrics to it. But recently the writing process has been slightly different. We’ll be in a rehearsal and a song idea has been born from all four of us just jamming.

But however the original idea is born, we always try to create a solid, tight platform with the drums and bass for Sam and Tiz to then add more colour and texture to it. And with lyrics we always try to be honest and open, but the golden thread throughout every song is always God.

If you could work with any song writer, who would it be and why?

Throughout the life of the band we’ve been pretty big Switchfoot fans. They are probably one of our biggest influences, especially in the earlier days. So I guess being able to write with Jon Foreman would be a pretty awesome privilege for us.

Who are your musical influences?

It’s always hard to answer this question because we all listen to different kinds of music, our songs always vary in style slightly because different bands influence the way we each play. It’s a wide range from Acoustic to Heavy Rock. Bands like Thrice have been a good influence because they’ve come from doing over produced rock records to doing their own thing which is very minimalist and raw. But allowing space and creating atmosphere plays an important part in our music as well so we’ve been influenced by bands like Explosions in the Sky and Athlete too. But as we said, we all listen to different music so it all influences our music in some way. Some of us have been known to enjoy a bit of Rap/Hip Hop now and again too!