Interview with Harry J. Hart: ‘I tend to let the song write itself and then find meaning in it’

Gold Coast, Australia-based singer-songwriter Harry J. Hart will release his debut EP before the summer, promising us some ‘sick riffs’ and cool layers of synths.

Harry – who added the J to differentiate himself from Colin Firth’s character, Harry Hart, in the film Kingsman –   started playing guitar at 14 and was a Queensland Music Awards finalist at 16. He started off singing in choirs and played the violin, trumpet and ukulele at school.

His upcoming debut EP will feature five tracks: ‘Who We Are’ which he describes as ‘a bit of a banger’, ‘No Goodbye’, ‘Come Back Down’, which he says ‘is a bit Tool-like’, ‘Make It Easy’ and one last as of yet unnamed track.

”Come Back Down’ has full strings and horns on it, ‘Who We Are’ is synthy and the last one has the same instrument on it as at the start of ‘Strawberry Fields’,’ he said. Neither of us can remember what it’s called but Harry starts googling it. ‘A mellotron!,’ he said. ‘We’ve got all sorts of synths emulating strings.’ (Used in the 60’s and 70’s, a Mellotron was essentially a non-digital sampler that could provide the sound of violins, cellos, choirs, horns, and many other sounds by using strips of magnetic tape, a pinch roller, tape head, pressure pad and a rewind mechanism for each note on the three-octave keyboard.)

He describes his upcoming EP as being ‘closer to Nothing About Thieves’: ‘Silverchair is my favourite band, they’ve influenced me, too. He (Daniel Johns, frontman) was just 15 when they started, it’s angry, grungy rock. He got into musical theatre, so there are orchestras behind their songs and really sick guitar riffs! My favourite album of theirs is Diorama (2002), their best song on it is ‘The Greatest View’.

‘I wanted to write songs with chords and ended up writing the most un-John Mayer thing I’ve ever written!’

He released his debut single, ‘It Calls Out’, in 2017: ‘I wrote that song in grade 11 when all I listened to was John Mayer,’ he laughed. ‘I had his Live in LA album on repeat back then. I wanted to write songs with chords and ended up writing the most un-John Mayer thing I’ve ever written! I tend to let the song write itself and then find meaning in it.’

The track hit number one in The Netherlands’ Cool Top 20 chart. Interestingly, for such a big song, ‘It Calls Out’ started out with just three main chords – E, CMaj7 and Asus4 – before Harry added a pre bridge and bridge using the chords of G, D and C. However, his producer, Joel Myles, felt the first version needed something more: ‘I showed it to him, I thought it was sick and he told me it didn’t go anywhere!,’ he said. ‘We felt it needed a bridge and kept thinking, where should we take it? It wasn’t a chromatic run down and I said, well, what if we say no to rules and have a chromatic run down in the bridge? And that’s what we did.’

The song is about getting caught up in your own headspace and draws on Harry’s experiences at art school: ‘You find a lot of interesting people there, there were just 80 people across two grades. You see everyone every second of the day, you become one tight knit family, you see what they’re going through. It’s about the black dog of depression calling out to you.’

His second single, ‘Why Do We Love’, was written during a three day trip via his Music Industry College in 2018: ‘The chairman of the board owned a farm in Sarabah and we all got a three day songwriting trip there, it was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had.’ The track has a much heavier feel than his debut and he says it was because he’d recently got into Royal Blood: ‘They changed everything for me, their riffs are sick,!’ he laughed.

‘The first album that really struck me was Maroon 5’s Songs About Jane’

Harry does session work on the guitar, bass, vocals and drums and also teaches. Growing up, his dad worked for audio company Bose, so they always had fantastic speakers at home. ‘The first album that really struck me was Maroon 5’s Songs About Jane (2002). We open our set with ‘Harder to Breathe’, we thought it could be good to open with a cover that people know.’

Music clearly runs in the family. Harry’s grandmother was a classical flamenco player: ‘I have her guitar,’ he said. ‘It’s a 1973 Maton Sapphire Deluxe, one of just 300. It’s a sunburst hollow body and it’s fully hollow, rather than semi-hollow, it’s awesome!’ It turns out that on the day we chat, it’s her wedding anniversary. She and Harry also share a December birthday and he jokes that they take it turns to celebrate their birthdays, depending on whether one of them has a milestone birthday. And while she doesn’t play much any more, he has some ingenious ways of getting her to play: ‘So one of her warm-up songs is ‘Greensleeves’ so once at her house I played it as horribly as I could (he’s really laughing by this point) and she grabs the guitar and plays it and tells me THAT’S how it’s done!’

Queensland has a vibrant music scene and Harry is a fan of artists such as René Le Feuvre, who was voted one of Australia’s Top 40 songwriters, as well as indie pop band Eliza & The Delusionals and Brisbane’s blues rock trio, Stray Dog Saviours, of whom he says: ‘They’re really cool, like if Royal Blood were angrier and filthier! They have a real wall of sound.’ His favourite band of all time, though is Silverchair, the now disbanded Newcastle, New South Wales, rock band. He’s also a huge fan of LA rock-band, Tool, American singer and guitarist, Marcus King, and Perth-based prog rock band, Karnivool as well as alt rock band, Birds of Tokyo, who both share the same frontman, Ian Kenny.

‘I walk into the green room and there’s a big heap of people who are all session names’

Luckily, gigs are starting back up in Queensland, albeit it at half capacity, in order to abide by social distancing rules and Harry did two gigs last Sunday for Valentine’s Day. ‘At one gig, I played Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and I walk into the green room and there’s a big heap of people who are all session names and obviously I’m not anything close to them but it was so inspirational. Ian Perez from Wolfmother was on keys!’

If he could tour with anyone, he picks Nothing but Thieves: ‘They would be cool to tour with because the main goal is to play rock but to hit a mainstream audience. Or The Amazons. When I was 17 (he’s now 19), I saw them do a show in this tiny pub, I snuck in. There weren’t even 200 people there but we started watching them and thought they were very cool.’

In January 2020, he flew to LA to do a weeklong workshop to train under Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine), Nuno Bettencourt (Extreme) and Bibi McGill (Beyoncé & Pink), among others. ‘My little sis was at gymnastics and I was there, just on my phone, and I saw that Tom Morello said that he was doing this workshop,’ he said. ‘I was trying to price it out, thinking it would be around $5k but it was $2k. The NAMM (the National Association of Music Merchants’ trade show) that I wanted to go to was just after.’

He has some endearing stories about not recognizing famous musicians at trade fairs: ‘At NAMM, I got talking gear to this guy for about 20 minutes, I walk away and see his face on a poster – I just spent 20 minutes talking to Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains!’ 

He did a similar thing at the 2017 Byron Guitar Festival: ‘I was talking to a guy for about 20 minutes and during the chat I said I loved his twirly moustache. We were chatting about guitars and I asked him if he played and he said he used to play in a band that did a few gigs. He was really nice, so low key. Just after that, my mum calls me and says do I know that INXS guitarist Kirk Pengilly is there? I asked her what he looked like and she said he had a twirly moustache, so I checked and it was him! He was so modest, he never mentioned INXS!’