With two new singles to showcase, plus a debut full-length album just waiting to be released, Central Coast duo Winterbourne hit the road for their 'Much Better Tour' in April.
When the duo of Jordan Brady and James Draper released their new single 'Better' in late 2018, it was the first new material from Winterbourne in two years. “We hadn't released anything for two years when we released 'Better',” Jordan explains.
“So we knew that 'Better' was going to be a different sound to people because they hadn't heard anything we'd done in two years, so we thought it might be a difficult jump for people but it wasn't.
“Everyone took it onboard and said 'this sounds like Winterbourne', which it does. We don't think it's a big deviation for us, but it was definitely something we were worried about.”
Jordan and James followed up 'Better' earlier this year when they dropped another new single 'Take The Golden'.
“We felt like 'Take The Golden' was another little bit of a risk again because it's so much more of a different song, but again people have just jumped onboard,” Jordan says.
“We think the songs sounded like us because we wrote them and after all that, despite any production value or anything like that, people just wanted to like the song.”
The two years between releases for Winterbourne saw Jordan and James dedicate themselves to their songcraft, producing a batch of potential songs to be recorded for the debut full-length album.
“We got stuck into writing because we knew an album was next, so we wanted to make sure we were committed to making new material,” he says.
“We did a lot of writing sessions and experimented with some different stuff... also we recorded the album – the end of 2017 was all recording and then most of 2018 was dedicated to getting the album finished. So a lot of time was spent in the studio; we weren't sitting around doing nothing.”
In essence, Winterbourne took the time to invest in themselves and are now seeing the rewards of that time spent in development.
With their upcoming debut album, Jordan says the tracklist provides an overarching of all Winterbourne have achieved in their time together. “The songs on the record go back about three years ago; we didn't sit down and say 'let's write an album now'; we always had certain songs in mind for the record when we eventually did it,” he says.
“I think 'Better' was one of the older songs – we thought it sounded like a great album song and sounds like where we wanted to go with the record. With the record we wanted to make an album we could give to somebody and say 'this is what we sound like'; they could listen to it all the way through and know exactly who we are.
“So we combined everything we love about making music and didn't hold back from any ideas we really liked in the moment. Songwriting-wise, we wrote 50 songs over that couple years off and it came down to picking our top 10 or 15 to take into the studio. It really felt like trying to put together our best possible pieces of material.”
Winterbourne 2019 Tour Dates
Thu 4 Apr - The Aardvark (Fremantle)Fri 5 Apr - Jive (Adelaide)
Sat 6 Apr - Northcote Social Club (Melbourne)
Thu 11 Apr - The Foundry (Brisbane)
Sat 13 Apr - The Factory Theatre (Sydney)
