Steve Kopandy’s “Rock n Roll Life”

June 10, 2008 · Print This Article

Interview by The Kings Fool

As a journalist and a musician, I have always perceived the music created by those around me in my local community as being the biggest influences in my life, career and art. I am lucky enough to call a lot of these musicians my friends, and I tell people all of the time that I consider Newcastle to be the birthplace of the world’s most creatively talented people. It has something to do with the energy here, that only a Novocastrian can understand, let alone comprehend.

Steve Kopandy’s music has had a reoccurring role within the region’s cultural tapestry for the last decade, and as I sit hear listening to his catalog of work and thinking about the last ten years, I start to fathom the role and impact that Steve has had on the local conscience, and myself personally. They are thoughts that are pleasing to the mind and fill me with pride. Thoughts that are comforting and dreamlike in there assurance.

Steve has seen a lot of the world and has continuously bought back the sounds that have colored his journeys. Kopandy’s music has always enjoyed high rotation on local community radio, thus influencing those in the community that are tapped into the local scene.

Steve Kopandy is a songwriter where mere musicians can’t compete. His music doesn’t just capture life, it “IS”; a living, breathing entity, that touches, feels, hears, sees, smells and tastes the human experience. His songs are like a photograph; memories etched in sonic vibration that pour from the speakers, filling the ears and overflowing the senses.

Kopandy’s music has that rare quality of being able to perfectly capture a spectrum of emotion that touches memories so intimate that it taps into the souls of those who take the time to simply listen and be absorbed in his connection to the infinite conscienceness. Possessing a unique honey sweet voice, thick, smooth and rich in texture, Kopandy’s dulcet tones manage to simultaneously meld the moments where ones heart melts… and breaks.

Drawing a haunting sense of knowing and realisation from the beautiful emotional recesses of the mind, Steve’s music is one that is delivered with a softly spoken passion, like a lover whispering sweet nothings into your ear, as you slip on the headphones and go to that part of your mind that is truly your own.

You dance inside of Kopandy’s music, as well as dancing to it. You become one with its vibration, tapping in astrally and meditating in the moment. A form of astral musicality that gives one total recall, materialising memories, making the intangible tangible. His music captures parts of the matrix of life that, individually, we have all experienced at one time, because we are all one.

Music allows musicians to “get it all out”; to attain a certain cathartic sense of external internality. Musicians strive to make music that is not only the soundtrack of their own lives but the soundtrack of the lives of those men and woman that experience it. Kopandy’s music is such that you can imagine yourself walking down the road with your thumb out, singing, moving on, and looking forward to life, giving you a minds-eye view of your life as a movie, with someone else doing the music.

Steve Kopandy’s music is somewhat of a cultural mirror, reflecting the music that he has immersed himself in; the “physical” culture created by the musicians that surround him. Kopandy’s humble beginnings commenced in Newcastle, Australia, where, at the tender age of 16, he began playing with friends Ben Hutton, Ian Hutton and Matt Slavin. They introduced themselves to the world as Real Food in 1998, before rebranding and conceptualising into Paperadio in 2002. After some mild success with their self-titled debut E.P they packed their bags in 2003 and headed to London to try and crack the big time. They released another E.P together before Steve the group in London in 2005 to pursue his solo career, which he had started in 2002 with his debut E.P Silver Things, and followed up with another E.P in 2004 called Scripted.

2007 saw his long awaited debut album released. Entitled Based On, it was part one of a double album with part two, A True Dream, coming out in the Australian spring. A truly cultured troubadour, this multi-instrumentalist Novocastrian is back in his hometown to recharge the batteries, and add the final touches to the music that has chronicled his life thus far.

I invited him around to my place for a jam and a casual chat about where he is at now in his career.

“Oohhh, where am I in my career? Back in Newcastle. Back to where it all started really. Umm, It’s a big question”, he rhetorically comments, professing, “I could go on for hours about that. Umm, 28, being doing it a long time now. Been through a hell of a lot of ups and downs, and ahh”, he tsks and pauses to collect his thoughts, contemplating his answer, before cautiously yet confidently expressing the realisation of exactly where music has lead him to. He speaks enthusiastically. His tone, whilst not laborious, is expressive of his sense of exhaustion.

“Starting to get a bit restless,” he continues. “Starting to want to do different things and create different types of music, and go to different places that I am less familiar with, cause I feel like I’ve done a hell of a lot this year so far. I’ve been in the UK where I did heaps of shows, met heaps of people, been networking, playing and writing. I’ve written about 30 songs this year so I feel a little bit tired so I think I’ve come back for a holiday”, he laughs wryly.

“Do you come home when you get restless? It seems to be a bit of a reoccurring theme,” I probe him.

“Well I keep coming back. I have family and friends here, and I like this place it’s a good place. And i don’t have a visa for the UK so I can’t legitimately earn money there anyway, so I have to come back every once and awhile to make some cash, because music doesn’t quite make the ends meet unfortunately.

“I’ve got my own solo career. My second album is so close to being finished its not funny. I’ve booked to go to Melbourne in two weeks to mix it, and when thats all out of my way it will be a huge weight off of my shoulders, because I’ve been working on that for ages, way too long. I just want it out. I’ve just done too much work on this thing”.

I concur that he just wants the concept out of his head, to which he adamantly replies, “I want those songs released. I want to stop making changes. I want them finalised. I want to stop deciding I do like something and then deciding I don’t like it. So its got to be put out,” he states sternly, as if drumming it in to his own subconscience, that it will be completed by the deadline he has given himself, whether ‘he likes it or not’!

“It will be a huge weight off of my shoulders”, he exhales. “So I’m kind of happy plugging away at that one. It’s only a couple of more weeks. It’s becoming a little bit hellish, but it will all be worth it,” he confidently assures both himself and I.

“Who are you releasing that through? How are you doing it,” I ask him.

“All myself. CD’s are dead. People talk about, “oh who is distributing these days?”, and some guy in LA is like “oh who is your distributor” and I’m like “what the fuck are you talking about? It doesn’t work that way anymore”. You don’t get a distribution deal with MGM and no budget for promo. Unless you’re touring and the shops in the towns you’re touring too are going to stock it you’re not going to sell jack shit. So I’m doing it all myself on the Internet, just trying to find my niche that way, its the way that the business is going these days, so it’s easy enough to do it myself,” he shares eagerly and adamantly.

“I’ve got a side-project called Hide & Spy, and that record is almost done. The album is called Words Count, and it will be released in early July. I’m going to Sydney this weekend to be present at the mixing of that one, and that one is much easier. I don’t kind of ’stress out’ about that one at all. I just kind of chill out and let that one be what it wants to be. So, that will kind of look after itself. The guy that is working on it, James Hariman, is a champ and he’ll make it sound really good. I really trust him with it, so thats a nice break from doing my own record”.

The calming influence that Hide & Spy have on Steve’s soul and current musical temperament is felt in the gravity of the tonality of these particular words, as they fall out of his mouth with a free flowing ease. It is evident that he grasps the concept of everything having its time and place. Without taking a breath, he moves onto the final piece of his musical trinity, and by far the most intriguing.

“I’m also demoing 20 songs for a musical,” he pulls from out of nowhere, as if everything else wasn’t impressive enough already. “For this guy in Arizona called Bill Rich, and ahh, he’s written a script and I’ve written the songs, and he’s looking after me and getting me to do the demo work, so there is a bit of money there which is great. Just a little bit”.

“A musical… Wow! How did that come about,” I bleat in wonderment, sending him off into storytelling mode, reliving the moment, describing his journey in the way that only a man who lived it himself could tell it?

“He found me on a songwriters directory on the Internet, cause he wrote the script and he just needed a songwriter to write the full score for it,” he offers humbly. He emailed me, I read his script and I liked it. So I contacted him over email, and it ended up that when I was in LA, he flew me out to Arizona to work for a few days, to get all of the songs written. So I wrote about 20 songs in two days,” he shares proudly. “It was nuts! It was really, really hard work! He basically said “that you’re coming out here to work! You’re not doing any touristy shit,” so he pretty much locked me in a room and I wrote for two days”.

“Wow”, i mutter impressed, equally as dumbstruck as i was starstruck, brimming with pride because I had “grown up” on the Newcastle scene with Steve. I have seen every incarnation of his musical career (at least in Newcastle) to date, observing his growth as an accomplished artist, and once again, he has shown us what is possible with music, if you just open yourself up to the possibilities.

(It was hard work) “But it was good, it was good”, he assure me. “When I got back to Australia, I couldn’t remember these songs. I had put it all down in my phone and on paper, so I had all the melodies recorded and all the lyrics written, but i had completely forgotten them, because I had written them so quickly. I got back and I started playing them back and I’m like, “oh shit I remember this one”, and some of them I really like. Some songs, just sometimes, I’ll spend a month reworking a song till I think its perfect, and then it wont be as good as a song that I wrote in half an hour”, he concludes puzzled yet not looking a gift horse in the mouth..

“Wow! How did you build your energy for that, because its so exhausting, and as you said it’s like a blank memory after it. So you’re not really there are you?”

“No”, he agrees, nodding as i continue.

“It’s a muse like experience. You were definitely tapping into something, but you still need the energy reserves to hold that connection for as long as you possibly can. So how did you prepare?”

“Oh gosh, well I rested up a couple of days before. I decided to rest up for two days in L.A, because I knew it would be hard work. So when I got there I pretty much had no distractions. Had a good nights sleep the night beforehand, and just got into it I suppose”.

“So what is it all about?”

“It’s an Irish American musical, called The House of Flaherty. It’s about this guy who is an ex-Broadway star, who has pretty much come of age. He is an old guy now and he’s got a grand kid, and you know, lots of family stuff goes on. A lot of shit goes down, people come back from his past. Things transpire in his life and his family life. It all kind of works around this guy’s life story. There are a lot of flash backs to his Broadway days. You know, it’s pretty much shaped around this central character”.

“Wow! Interesting! So you have pretty much written half a script. Are you just writing the music or as you said you have melodies there, were the lyrics prepared, So how did it work?”

“Well he wrote the story line and then I looked at it. He had ideas for what he wanted. So the script was pretty much done, and he said “there has to be songs here, here and here, and this is what they are about, and the style I want them in,” and basically I went about filling in the gaps, as per his spec. I didn’t really have that much creative control. Well, I mean I had creative control; I wrote the songs from the start”.

“So there were parameters?”

“Well it was easy, instead of me sitting down and writing a song and asking myself, “what do I write a song about?” He was like, “well this song is about this. It’s this character. This is this character’s background and this is the style I want it in”. So I didn’t have to do any soul searching. It was, Okay… Alright… BANG!!! Write… It was so much easier,” he assures me. “It was a really fun exercise. So I didn’t have to think too much”.

This certainly is an interesting approach to songwriting. I mention to Steve that when I personally write songs, I will start playing and then ask myself, “what is this song about?” It’s like music has a story within its being, and a song’s lyrics tell that story. When you are writing music you channel (often a desired) emotion and feeling and relate your experiences to the colour and texture of the interpretation you are tapped into, which can only ever be your own.

Art is the etherical world’s manifestation of our conversations with conscienceness, our interpretations of the Akashic records, the infinite storehouse of memory held in the collective subconscience. Where all that is known and unknown is accessible to those who channel it. There are as many different languages spoken as there are artforms, and with this metaphor we can see how music can be broken down into dialects, and ultimately, how an individuals character is colored by their own unique accent. Conscienceness is the one constant that is always present, and the depth of creation that an artist plunders, reflects the depth of conversation undertaken with conscienceness.

So the almost third person approach undertaken by Kopandy had me contemplating which way the dots were connected.

“It was very different for me,” he elaborates. “But I tell you what, I loved it. I think it made me a better writer because I didn’t realise I could write like that. I suppose if I was writing for commercial purposes then that is the way I would have to write. You gotta write to spec,” he postulates. “It was really fun I had no trouble with it. It was great!”

Steve proceeds to play me a song called The Rock & Roll Life from his soon to be released second album A True Dream, a song “about rock & roll, city folk and shitty coffee”. It’s a song that resonates with myself personally and gives hope to those of us that choose this path in life.

“I totally get that pushing on no matter what, chasing that dream and not stopping, because the dream is living it, and as long as you’re living it, you ARE living that dream,” I pose to him.

“Yeah as long as you work out what it is that you’re here to do, then if you’re doing it, then you’re in the right place. I don’t like going with the flow. I’m very different to most of my friends my age, most of them are married some of them have kids, they either have mortgages or are in a position where they need full time jobs, and I’m like “well you know what I’ll do that if it comes to that, but at the moment, I am supposed to play music,” which is what i want to do!”

I can certainly relate to that brother.

The black and white embers fall quietly onto metacarpals of passion and pain, fitting perfectly in line with the rhythmic beat of a muscle transfused with emotion rather than simply the cardiovascular system.

Steve opens up his soul and album, Based On, with salty tears screaming softly, “Paris in the Winter”, just quietly enough to awaken our generation. He claims he would, “Trade up all [his] summers” for Paris in its icy state. I receive the bow, and pull up and out into nostalgia sought up through his visions. I am embraced in a tangible comfort through his remarkable journey that even the opening track prepares one for.

Steve released Based On in late February, and it couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time. With the dwindling refuge of albums collapsing, destroying our personal tunnels of escape, his voice and hands extend to our own, and ask us to sit down for euphoric conversation and perhaps a glass of the sweetest of red wine.
With the incorporation pf piano, guitar, and synth/string arrangements, one is pulled as if by a midnight universal wind into the period and pleasure of harmonic insight.

With most of the album written and performed by Steve himself, it comes as quite the surprise he is not a Wainwright, nor has he shared dinner with Ryan Adams. Such measures do not necessarily add much to an already established songwriter, but Steve seems ahead of aforementioned artists’ game, simply in one album. He has, however, worked with producer Andy Bradfield of Rufus Wainwright and Manic Street Preachers affiliation.

This is radically indicated on the new album, as his voice illuminates both the simplicity of a piano, and beneath the icy terrain of full instrumental compositions. Steve works with several different musicians and producers including David Carr, Jordan Brown as well as a gathering of other friends And musicians to coalesce the album into one that defies many modern albums around the world, complete with the hum of a chorus dancing in ones head as they notice the morning upon the less irritating walks to work.

This kamikaze mission into the depths of singer/songwriters spreads a sweet adhesive among the synth-pop indications diffused from the eclectic nature of the seventies and eighties mainframe tech.

Steve and his group of players send pure shivers down the spine as each track proposes a question almost any listener may ponder in their own life. Track by track we are pulled into our worlds of confusion, love, loss, and nostalgic memories cast and lost like an abandoned ship sailing across metaphors painted and played in the darker water and deeper depths.

Track five,” Corona and Lime,” is one of particular interest, as it delves into the concepts of short-lived content. As Steve whispers his interaction with a “Mexican Girl,” we are pulled into the dichotomous concept of relaxation, citing the night into a kiss and a dreamscape. It crosses race and location directly into the innate principles of human attraction in its’ raw form.

As Steve plays out his evening, we are confronted with the harsh reality that this idea he has presented us with all too often dissipates into the night to be held only in our memories. The love is lost to the cortex, and the hemispheres of the mind fight emotion versus logic, until one chooses to decide on the harsh reality, painful yet hopeful heart-ache, or the emotionally creative release to re-live the moment again and again.

Such a romantic track represents a constant emotion throughout the album, being under-produced, thematically, and embodying lyrically true descriptions of “unresolved issues and thoughts” (SK). Based On is a very raw record, in that it is relatable to us as questions to what we as humans are put on trial for. Our constant questions about ourselves and the world around us seem to be of this raw descent, rather than textbook explanations of how the plastic is made to encase the album that has brought about aforementioned relatable mind frames.

This album works in cycles, the same as our universe, world and lives. Sunrise to sunset parallel the memories created from said amount of time. This album does not only last within nine tracks, but rather continues into the listener, and promises the next album to answer all proposals in a way that even I am anxious to know why with some people, I just can’t let go.

Steve Kopandy might very well be the current artist to wake up the music community and the world to a brighter red and deeper blue. Sometimes music can be a personal revolution, and sometimes a friend and an article and a show and another friend can feel the same thing. Only one way to find out, and Steve Kopandy is at the top of the list to watch for. After all, I may be one person, but this album and the anticipation of the next restores faith that stories were the basis of music, and can continue such a legend if we only pay attention with a well deserved standing ovation.

Your voice raises and falls in a rhythmic motion most easily felt as the song of the breast in the grasp of your lover, you awake first and see her face painted in morning window frames, and you frame and regress amongst damned souls when aforementioned memory strikes her match and denies you the matter and argument of the same.

An acoustic guitar is barely enough to cascade in audible response to the smoke and murmur of a space too small for strings to sing what your heart beat into the wooden floors of remark and retort. I sigh and smile into the pleasure of your protest, and between the icings of convenience and the sound of the late Elliot Smith remains hardly the blood transfusion strong enough to keep our ears alive.

In a notion where honesty seeps off of calloused fingers into a burgundy pattern on the floors of a dying breed, I slide between the moment and am reminded of better times ahead, the incorporation of melody to memory to strings to the chords of a vocal descent offer a surprising ideology which very well might be hung on my wall when I return home.

As you strengthen and grow into a label and nitch, I can only assume it to be exactly what the souls of adornment need. We pause in anticipation and can only hope you follow the promise your performance suggests.

In recommended presence I lean back in my chair and gleam at the idea that within those decorated walls and calls, you have answered with just what slights like me need.

28 July 2006. Review of Scripted EP by Keith Hannalek

Steve Kopandy introduces his rock-pop genius with Scripted, a four song EP. This CD is a superb introduction that everyone should hear. While Kopandy has many influences, actually a long list is on his My Space site, he manages to create some clever pop rock and come out sounding like himself and original. Do not be surprised if you find yourself saying-“This guy sounds like someone I have heard before” but not be able to put your finger on it.

This happens to me frequently while listening to new music, particularly indie artists that have a ton of influences like Kopandy. This is a credit to his abilities as a singer/songwriter/musician. Being a triple threat is very common but what I find most uncommon is someone with those abilities that can actually impress me, a song crafter that creates a tune that lingers in my mind and soul long after I have heard it. Bravo Steve! You have that distinctive ability.

While I only heard 4 songs, which was a disappoint because I wanted more, I found myself convinced that this man has what it takes to make his way to the top of the pops if someone would give him the opportunity to walk through that elusive door. Scripted is a platform for an artist on the rise to give you a taste of what is to come. The one song that really grabbed me the most was the closer “My Sisters Wedding Song.” It is a shimmering pop diamond with passages like-“There must be a million fish in the sea but you are the only one fore me, there must be a million stars in the sky, which one was made for you and I?” This is a beautiful string of words by a true wordsmith.

I look forward to much more than an introduction the next time around from this promising artist. Down under there is something happening and his name is Steve Kopandy.

22 Feb 2005. Review of Scripted EP by Mark Grassick – Irish Freelance Music Journalist

1 Feb 2006. Live review by 'Songwriters Live' Director and good friend, Keith Armitage

As the Director of Songwriters Live, one of the biggest showcase nights for original music in Sydney and Newcastle, I have seen over 500 artists perform in the 5 years I have been in operation. Every now and then an artist comes along that stops the crowd in their tracks and makes them hang off every word sung and Steve Kopandy is one of those artists. He is passionate, enigmatic and above all, a great songwriter. His songs are melodic, well crafted and to the point. His voice is sweet, clear, very emotive and he has a strong presence which is paramount in order to deliver his music. I definitely rate him as one of our top performers and have him earmarked for a big future in the music industry.