Blue Velvet Are Here to Remind Us That It's All Gravy, Baby
Sydney indie-pop outfit Blue Velvet are entering a new chapter of their musical ventures, full of life, love and optimism with their new single, “It’s All Gravy”; an unashamedly joyful anthem sporting the lax lyrical nostalgia of 90s punk rock, paired with undeniably 80s sonics. Featuring a groovy synth riff and lead singer Samuel Bauermeister’s trademark sunny vocals, “It’s All Gravy” (at face value) encourages letting go of life’s mundane problems. Trapped at work on a Sunday morning? “It’s not that complicated.” Hungover before an important appointment? “It's all gravy baby.”
We were lucky enough to chat to Blue Velvet about the new track.
What is the inspiration behind the new single?
When we were writing everything out we all kind of agreed that we wanted to take a different direction in terms of our lyrics and the sort of themes we usually go for. We’ve always been insanely captivated by those insane conspiracy theorists that are all over the internet. It’s always been a concept that we’ve found hilarious where people are so adamant in terms of having these insane political beliefs where everything is out to kill you. I guess we kind of just wanted to poke fun at those people and celebrating the weird kind of world that they surround themselves in. We dissected every sort of main conspiracy theory there was and really wanted to feel like the song was this vicarious trip through their heads and what goes on in there.
We really enjoyed your previous single “Soggy Cereal”, with its crunchy sing along chorus and free energy. Your next single is called “It’s All Gravy”… Is the food motif intentional or a side effect of being generally hungry blokes?
It was the biggest coincidence! It only really came to our attention once we got the mastered file for our song and one of our friends pointed it out. It made me question everything in terms of whether I’m always thinking about food subliminally and I don’t even realise it or if there’s this weird other voice that’s in my food telling me to make all these calls when it comes to adding food references into our lyrics. Either way it’s made me hungry.
Is this food theme going to carry into all of your new music? Maybe a menu as an album?
I feel like now that we’ve gone this far down the rabbit hole of food references that we’re forced to write an entire concept album around wet foods. Also opens up the floor for a sequel to that album around dry foods. It practically writes itself!
Your new music has a very different sound to the sound the band started with. Is that reflective of changes in your personal lives, music tastes, or both?
Definitely both! Without a doubt we’ve all sort of changed as people and as a result of that, I feel like the music we write has sort of evolved with us. Back when we started the band, we wanted to write super fast Punk songs as it was a pretty good reflection with where we were as people at the time. Since then we’ve all mellowed out and it’s pretty funny to see that reflect in the music we’re writing at the moment. I feel like that’s the really awesome thing about writing songs as it acts as some sort of weird time capsule that you can always revisit and blast you with a wave of nostalgia.
You are one of the winners of the NIDA Unearthed competition, in which you have created a music video for “It’s All Gravy” with students from NIDA to be aired on RAGE, is this your first big music video shoot? Without revealing too much, what angle did you choose to take for the video?
It was! We’ve never been a part of something that large in scale and it was insane to watch it all come to life while a team of twenty people are each playing out a really important role. Watching it all come to life from the pre-production planning all the way to seeing the final edit was a crazy experience that I don’t think we’ll ever forget. The whole creative team really understood who Blue Velvet were as a band and what the song was all about without us even explaining a thing, they really felt like an extension of the band. They knew all about conspiracy theorists, alien abductions and crazy stuff like that which they all bought to the table when it came to the video itself. Definitely happy to confirm that the video is the best visual representation of what was going on in our heads when we wrote the song.
Why the band name Blue Velvet? Is it inspired by the 80’s film, the song or something else?
We’re all massive David Lynch fans so when the idea came up of naming the band that, we all unanimously agreed that we had to do it. I feel like we’re constantly talking about and referencing that it’s become totally engrained in our heads front to back.
