Charlie Simpson talks Steven Loftin through the songs that inspired the DNA of his musical core, the power of harmony, and what it means to be a storyteller.
Since the age of eight music has been pivotal to Charlie Simpson’s life.
With a three-decade career under his belt, one where he’s been a third of the British pop punk teens Busted, fronted post-hardcore band Fightstar, and embarked on his own solo career, it’s these three stages which resonate throughout his Nine Songs choices.
Immediately gushing the importance of music as he’s sitting in a rehearsal studio, dirty-blonde hair swept behind his ears, preparing for his upcoming tour in support of his fourth solo album Hope Is A Drug, it soon becomes clear these are more than song choices – these songs are the matrix to Simpsons DNA. And looking at this musical double-helix, his various projects begin to make sense; rather than a one-way street, it’s a complex of rounding interstates, each offering their own new horizon.
From the parental guidance that led him to Laurel Canyon linchpin Jackson Browne, to forming his own tastes with the likes of Deftones and Silverchair, Simpson has been guided by the impact music can have, each new discovery cruising into his brain, the inevitable craters shaping his journey.
Acknowledging these impact zones is something that spirals out of his mouth at a breakneck pace, often tripping over his tongue as we navigate through them. Deciding at the last minute to change one of his choices to complete the platter of his musical taste (commiserations to Don McLean’s “Vincent”, Simpson’s love of Blink-182 meant they had to make the final cut) and embracing the spritely melodious behemoth of pop punk that Busted bounded into our lives with.
Most important are those songs that form the scar tissue over the dramatically intense first heartbreaks and life experiences in our formative years. His latest solo effort reaches into these layers of understanding to craft an album that is as reliant upon the melodies that first saw Busted capture hearts, as it is stripping them back and leaving Simpson bare, looking toward the Jackson Browne’s of the world instead.
“I thought to myself, I would often layer tracks up and almost hide behind them, and feel comfortable, but I really pulled away from that on this album,” he explains of Hope Is A Drug’s vulnerable moments. “It's really good to leave room for the listener to add their own feeling to the song without being bombarded with instrumentation.”
Simpson wants music to excite. Not only himself, but others. To trigger that internal oscillation that connects with something, be it emotional or on a more human, natural level. “It’s something that you can translate into any form of music,” he enthuses. “And that's why I wanted to make this list quite eclectic, because I wanted it to be a snapshot of all the different things I love.”
“Hurt” by Johnny Cash
Charlie Simpson: “This is my favourite song of all time, and obviously written by Nine Inch Nails, but when I first heard this song it was the Johnny Cash version. It was half term, I was 14 years old, on a plane to Switzerland to go to a festival with my mate to watch Oasis, and Muse were playing. I can't remember why I was listening to this song. It was on a mix I'd been given and I just started crying. I cried on the plane. I can't remember a song where I just cried. It was utterly bizarre.
“It crushed me on so many levels. I think Johnny Cash had just died and it was the last thing he released? But it's the piano line at the end. It's the way he delivers the vocal and a piano line goes 'TCHINGTCHING' - like that, everything just welled up. I pretty much cry every time I listen to that song even now. I might not cry like I did on the plane, but it reaches inside my soul and it hits me so hard. And the weird thing is I love the Nine Inch Nails version, but in a completely different way.”
BEST FIT: That’s a hefty, mature, emotional track to get your head around at 14?
“I feel like it's grown in its meaning to me so much more; it's a pretty fucking dark song, but it's beautiful. With music in general – this comes down to a few of the songs I've chosen – it's melancholic but it's light out of darkness. It's hope out of despair. My favourite film of all time is The Shawshank Redemption. It's that idea of utter despair but then hope is shining through. The record label I'm starting is called Komorebi and that means light shining through the trees in Japanese. You know when you go through a forest and you see the God Rays hit the leaves? That epitomises to me what I'm talking about, whether it's in film or in music; that idea of the God Ray is so beautiful.”
Was that the first time you felt that connection with music?
“I think it was. I loved music growing up but it hadn't hit me that deep before and it probably hasn't since. It was a triple pronged attack, the fact that it's such an impactful song, because of him and the point he recorded it in his life. They captured some magic.”
“Opal (Four Tet Remix)” by Bicep
“It takes a lot to stop me in my tracks these days. I don't know whether it's because I'm older and that you're at a much more impressionable age with music when you're growing up. I appreciate music so much now, but I often listen to it on a technical level or listening to a mix, so you're assessing it rather than digesting it as a listener.
“But with Bicep, it's happened a few times in the last six months where I've had friends around, music has been on in the background, I've been talking to someone and I've stopped in my tracks and walked over to Spotify and it says Bicep – this has happened three or four times in the last six months. It's weird because I'm not hugely into dance music. This kept happening and it was so fucking weird. Every time I walked over to the thing I was like, ‘Who is this band Bicep?!
“There's a particular way with the chords and this is with the Four Tet remix; the bassline is different to the original. There’s something in my musical makeup – the stuff that I love in music – the way the melody rises with the bassline, the way the chords connect. I feel like I'm listening to Shawshank Redemption if it was in musical form. I feel Andy Dufresne is the melody and Red is the bassline. It's weird. It moved me to my core. I’ve been listening to it in my car. My kids listen to it, my wife listens to it. Something about this song struck me at such a deep level. And I'm so happy because I'm 36 and I wondered whether that would happen again, and it happened again.”
It sometimes feels more magical when it happens as you get older because it’s rarer.
“Absolutely right. It's happened a few times, and this is why I think Spotify and their algorithm of recommendation is fucking amazing. I've found a lot of music recently, and it's been me putting a song on at a dinner party, Spotify taking over and it suggest things I've listened to. It's that thing where you're not even listening, you're talking and there’s background noise, but something seeps into you subconsciously that's beautiful.
There’s something even more prescient because it’s instrumental, there’s no guided meaning?
“What’s so awesome about music is it speaks to me on a level where it's like it gets in my soul and no one’s fucking saying anything! It's awesome.”
“Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap
“It’s insane. It's a marvel. It still blows my mind when I listen to it today. When it came out my brother played it to me and he said, “You’ll love this song.” Funnily enough, when Busted signed to Island Records, we got signed with a band called Frou Frou, which was Imogen Heap’s band. So I met her not even knowing who she was. We actually went to the Brit Awards 2001 together and sat on the same table. I didn't know who Frou Frou were and I go back now and I'm like, “Fuck, why didn't I just go chew her ear off!” Because I love Frou Frou as well, I'm really fucking annoyed now!
“Obviously the vocoder she used on “Hide and Seek” has been around for a long time, but I think she was one of the first people in contemporary music to use it on its own with no instrumentation. It was a ground-breaking thing to do - to release a vocal without any music - and if it was on the radio today the production techniques would still sound ground-breaking. And the chord progression and the way she does it is mesmerising.”
It’s a song that manages to flow between being massive and small at the same time
“You’re right, it sounds quite full. It sounds like there is instrumentation, but it is literally just her singing through a piano. She probably layered her vocals and she's so good at that. I’ve tried to work with her a couple of times to get a female vocal on some Fightstar stuff, she said she’d love to do it, but she was in a different country making a record at the time. But she's definitely on my hit list to do a collaboration with, because she's so awesome.”
“I’m Alive” by Jackson Browne
“This song reminds me of my dad. I grew up listening to Jackson Browne. Dad used to play it in the car all the time on the way to school, we used to go on sailing trips together and we would play this. I’ve such fond memories of my childhood and this is one of the things that really reminds me of my childhood, those songs that take you back.”
That’s one of music’s greatest powers, where it can seep in and construct these memories?
“It's crazy how a song comes on and you can remember everything about the place where you were when you listened to it. That's why nostalgia in music is such a potent thing. I don't get as excited about bands now as I used to when I was 16, because you're way more impressionable at that age and it forms the person that you become – the music that you listen to in those years is a soundtrack to that formation.
“As an artist, the fans that you make of people at that age will come and see you time and time again, even when they're older. Every time Jackson Browne comes over, I go and watch him with my dad. I get the sense that it's the same people going back, and he’s in his 70s now. It's great to be able to share that with an audience, that will come back anytime you go out on the road.
“This was the first song that really struck a chord with me lyrically, because Jackson Browne is a poet, he is a phenomenal lyricist. It was the first breakup record I'd heard, and in my opinion the two greatest breakup records of all time are this – he’d just broken up with Daryl Hannah and he very much poured his heart out on the record – and The Midnight Organ Fight by Frightened Rabbit, which is a very hard-hitting breakup album. They’re both unbelievable lyricists. It’s so sad what happened to Scott from Frightened Rabbit, but he was a master at lyrics. You can just read the lyrics and not even listen to the music and it's still really brilliant.
“I could have also chosen “Sky Blue and Black” from this record because I also love that song, but “I'm Alive” is a brilliant way of describing a breakup without being too direct about it, just using beautiful imagery and poetry to try to describe the heartache. I'd never heard someone do that in a song before. He was the first guy that I thought, ‘Wow, these lyrics are fucking amazing.’
“I'm a huge Jackson Browne fan. He's one of the biggest influences for my solo stuff. I love that ’70s Laurel Canyon, Eagles, Crosby, Stills & Nash era and he was very much at the centre of that. It's a mastery of songwriting. The storytelling with Jackson Browne took it to another level, and that's a really important part of that genre.”
“Emotion Sickness” by Silverchair
“Silverchair and Deftones are the two bands that I really locked with when I was about 12 years old. I could have picked a whole number of Silverchair songs, but the reason I chose “Emotion Sickness” is because it was the first time I'd heard orchestration with rock music, and that blew my mind. Metallica did it with the S&M show in the ‘90s but that was old songs made to sound orchestral. This was an actual fully-blown, written album with a massive 18 or 20 piece orchestra. In the same way that Imogen Heap did, this was ground-breaking to me.
"It shocked me to begin with, because I was a huge Silverchair fan from the first two albums that were much heavier but this just floored me. It was something I hadn't heard before, and that hugely inspired Fightstar’s third record [2009's Be Human]. I remember sitting in our studios with an 80-piece orchestra. We differed from Silverchair in that I actually wanted to do strings with really heavy music, “Emotion Sickness” is quite light, [Neon Ballroom] is not really a heavy album, but it had a huge influence on me using orchestral music with rock music which is awesome.”
What was it about orchestral music and rock that spoke to you?
“It's a weight that you just don't get with normal sounding instruments. It’s crazy, it sounds like you’re listening to a film score. I felt like that was a real moment in time for me.”
What was it about Silverchair that drew you in?
“I loved Daniel Johns’ voice and I loved the riffs. It was emotional, it moved me, but it was heavy, and I hadn't come across that before. I listened to a lot of metal when I was growing up, like Sepultura or Pantera, and that was really heavy music, but they didn't move me. I was just loving the riffs and the aggression of it. Silverchair aren’t as heavy as Deftones, but hearing melancholic, beautiful melodies and sad songs over heavy riffs ticked all the boxes for me. It was everything I wanted.
“I used to watch Headbangers Ball on MTV in the late ‘90s, “Pure Massacre” came on and he was so young at the time. I remember thinking, ‘Fuck, he's 15 years old and he’s writing riffs like that. It’s amazing.’ It's always stuck with me. Daniel Johns and Chino Moreno from Deftones have always been my two musical idols when it comes to bands.
"I remember watching Silverchair play on the Radio City Hall for the VMAs in late ‘90s with the PRS guitar. I was thinking to myself, ‘One day I will play that guitar' and when we signed a record deal the first thing I did was go down to Denmark Street and buy it.”
“Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” by Deftones
“I remember reading Kerrang! magazine a lot and seeing the picture of the girl in the swimsuit pop up – the front cover of Around the Fur. I’d heard a lot of people talking about them and I heard “Lotion” first, but when I heard “Be Quiet and Drive” I was like ‘You're putting everything I love about music into one song.’ It was heavy, it was melancholic, it was beautiful. It was the first time in my entire life that everything came together, where it was ‘I love this music, I love the way this music is making me feel. I love everything about it.’
“It’s a masterpiece. It's a heavy ballad but it's got massive production, huge guitars and Abe Cunningham is one of my favourite drummers. It’s one of those moments where everything fits. It's different to Johnny Cash and Imogen Heap, because they’re songs that really struck me. I love Johnny Cash, but I wouldn't say that he’s one of my favourite artists. But Deftones are my favourite, every song they did was amazing. Same with Silverchair.”
Were those the first bands you discovered on your own?
“Yes, and another big thing was all the other bands I'd been listening to had been given to me by my brothers. Metallica, Guns N' Roses, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, that was all stuff that I was listening to but my brothers would pass it on. Then I found Deftones and Silverchair and I don't think I've been influenced by two bands more, but the other side of it Blink-182 were another huge influence. That was when the pop punk thing was a huge influence on me as well.
“A lot of my friends got into pop punk, but I'd already been very much into music before that. I got into music super young, because I had two older brothers. So I feel like my journey, had I not had any influence, would have started with Deftones. I started listening to bands when I was eight years old and that's quite young to be listening to this kind of music and finding your own bands.”
“You Know How I Do” by Taking Back Sunday
“I got into Taking Back Sunday just before I left Busted and just before I started Fightstar. I was listening to a lot of very underground emo; bands like The Appleseed Cast and Sunny Day Real Estate. I was hugely into Deep Elm [Records] bands. Fightstar releasing our first record on Deep Elm was one of my greatest achievements. It felt like some real underground shit and I loved it all, but it was all very much in the shadows. It hadn't hit the mainstream at all. With Deftones, and the context of nu-metal and stuff, I was listening to Korn but nothing had fused and Deftones fused it. And I was listening to Pearl Jam and all the rest of it, but Silverchair fused that in my mind. With Taking Back Sunday it’s the same thing.
“I got a Victory Records sampler CD and I heard that Taking Back Sunday song, I could have picked any other Taking Back Sunday song, but this is the first one I heard. In this genre there's everything I love, because I'd never heard someone writing, singing, being that unashamedly emotional over rock music.
“It was writing the very relationship based stuff with no metaphors. With lot of rock music I feel you sing [and] you paint pictures, it's quite abstract, and I always love that. But I was like ‘This guy’s got his heart on his sleeve, he's spilling out this shit about this breakup’, and I hadn't really heard that before. I was so apprehensive about doing that, and then with the early Fightstar stuff I wrote, it had a huge influence on that lyrically, because I was like, ‘I'm going to say that. I'm going to be that open’ and it's the first time I'd really been that open.”
There’s an unapologetic rawness to it.
“Unapologetic, exactly. With Taking Back Sunday the lyrics hit me in the feels as much as the music did, like Jackson Browne did. Taking Back Sunday was the first time that I was actually listening to the stories and the emotion in the lyrics as much as I was listening to the music itself.
“I was about 15 at that time, and whilst the pop-punk thing was happening, that took me into a whole new world. Jimmy Eat World and other bands. I was becoming more of an adult, I wasn't this kid listening to music anymore. With Deftones and Silverchair I was too young to resonate with it lyrically. I wasn't really paying attention to the lyrics at that point. I think the reason Taking Back Sunday hit me so hard was I was 16 and in my first very serious relationship, but when that ends, you're torn apart or really cut deep. Those records then began to become the soundtrack to my own life, that was a huge change and that's why it was so important.
“I think that's why Taking Back Sunday would've done well in that genre. Emo ended up being a pastiche of itself, in the same way that nu-metal ended up once it became mainstream. Suddenly all these bands came out of the woodwork trying to do it and make it more radio friendly and all the rest of it and it happens with every genre. But emo became particularly painful to listen to when you got some bands with really trite lyrics. It was the rawness of Taking Back Sunday, the genuine spilling your guts onto the record. I love that and it was at a time where I was very impressionable and emotional myself.”
“Adams Song” by Blink 182
So which Blink song are you going to choose?
“The first one jumps into my head! My favourite Blink album is actually the fifth self-titled one, but I was already a huge fan by that point. I feel I should pick a song from Enema of the State because that's what was most impressionable to me. I'm going to say “Adam’s Song”. I remember hearing that song and it was weird because the name derives pop-punk, but I really love good pop music. If there's a pop banger that comes out - Justin Timberlake has fucking bangers - I've always appreciated that. I was always drawn to pop melodies, but I love aggressive music and what Deftones managed to do was fuse these really lovely melodies with heavy music.
“In the same way Blink-182 was the first time I'd ever heard literal pop music in a rock form. It was like, ‘Oh my God, these are full-blown, banging pop melodies.’ I was always a fan of Green Day. I was a massive fan of Dookie when it came out. But it hit differently because I was a different age. When Green Day came out I was super young. It was a moment where pop-punk had been on the rise, but Blink-182 are the ones that really fused it in the most awesome way.
“I remember getting in a band at school, we called ourselves ManHole, and all we did was play Blink covers. That was the time when I started getting into serious bands and starting to play live. I thought they were such great showmen; they were really funny and it’s definitely another really important moment in my musical makeup. Pop-punk is so good because pop music when done well is brilliant. When it’s done over rock music, it’s a match made in heaven.”
There’s a recurring theme through your choices, each presents melody in a different way. Often challenging, but this is one of the most blatant?
"Absolutely right, and I think there's nothing wrong with that. That's another reason it's good to have “Adam’s Song” on the list because it is unashamedly pop and it's brilliant. If it's bad, then it's terrible. Country-pop done well is excellent, country-pop done badly is toe-curling. It just comes down ‘is it a good song?’ And if it's a good song you should be able to play it in pop. You could probably play “Be Quiet and Drive’ in a pop-punk fashion. You could probably play some of the Blink songs in a heavy, Deftones fashion. Blink definitely brought a whole new dimension to the game. It was like you could make unashamed pop music but have slamming drums and guitars.
“It's funny, because you've got to remember that when those albums came out there was still a lot of hard lines you couldn’t cross between genres. Me being a Deftones fan and a Blink fan was kind of weird, but I feel now that all of that shit has gone. I grew up in a time where you were this fan or you're that fan, but I didn't give a shit about scenes. I just cared about the music. And now Bring Me The Horizon can do a collab with Ed Sheeran which is awesome. If that happened 20 years ago, we’d think ‘What the fuck is that?’ I think Blink broke a lot of rules in that way.”
“God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys
“The reason I picked The Beach Boys is because harmony is one of my favourite things in music. I remember my brother gave me Pet Sounds for Christmas when I was about 12, and he said, ‘Study this album, because I know you like harmony and this is where it all began.’ The harmony, the Laurel Canyon stuff, really takes you to the next level. I think that Beach Boys wrote the book on contemporary harmony, the arrangements Brian Wilson came up with were so ahead of their time, and again, you listen to that song, it's the production. Obviously, it was recorded so long ago that it definitely sounds dated, but as a song it’s very contemporary, it's very, very ahead of its time, and I love that.
“When you listen to that song, it makes you happy, and it's melancholic. It's very sombre, and ‘God only knows where I'd be without you’, has a yearning, it's sad. It’s saying 'No, I need you' and it's that whole idea of light in the darkness that gets me in the same way."
It really is such a loaded sentiment.
"It's like on the face of it, 'Got only knows', but it's 'No, seriously, God Only Knows what I'd be without you' – it's such a weighty statement. And then when they have those cascading vocals at the end, it's absolutely brilliant, it's one of the greatest songs ever written.”
When did you first get struck by harmony on that level?
“I think probably with Jackson Browne. “I'm Alive” has brilliant harmonies. And another thing with harmony is that as the pop punk thing exploded I remember Good Charlotte coming out and there was a lot of harmony there. I was never a massive Good Charlotte fan but when I heard Pet Sounds for the first time and then you listen to Crosby, Stills & Nash, Fleet Foxes and that Laurel Canyon influenced stuff. That's why I love the country-pop stuff, it has some great harmonies when they’re done well.
“There is something about harmony that really gets me and whenever I write music, that's always a big part of it, because with harmony you can tell a very different story. Harmony can change a melody quite drastically, depending on what harmonies are chosen, and it can change the way you feel about melody, because if you add one harmony, it may feel sadder than another. It is a hugely impactful way to tell the story of the melody and it's great."
Hope Is A Drug is out now via Komorebi
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