New Release – Headfirst by Eric Bay and Sean Buckley

Eric Bay is a singer/songwriter from England. Since 2010 he’s independently recorded and released several albums and several EPs.

“For the past few years I’ve been doing collaborations with artists of various genres from all over the world, and my latest one is with Sean Buckley. Sean is a UK based producer and composer of melodic-electronic music, who’s also been doing collaborations for several years.”

“Sean and I have never actually met in person – our collaboration was entirely remote, and we’ve only ever communicated by email!

How did the collaboration come about?

“I came across his music in February when I was looking for tracks by independent artists to add to a Spotify playlist I curate called ‘Awesome Indie/Non-Mainstream Music’.”

“I saw that Sean composed and produced his own music, and that he’d already done several collaborations with other artists. I got in touch to ask if he’d be interested in doing a track together and he happily agreed. A few years previously he had released a triple album called ‘Mintball’ of eclectic instrumental tracks, and he asked if there were any of them I’d like to try writing lyrics for. The track ‘Waterway’ immediately stood out to me as having great pop-song potential, so I restructured it slightly and started writing lyrics for it.”

Who wrote/recorded what?

“Sean wrote and recorded the original instrumental track, which consisted entirely of synthesised/keyboard parts. I then wrote the lyrics and the melody, and I recorded all the vocals and some additional percussion. The guitar in the chorus and outro was recorded by Joe Lonsdale of Joe Public Studios, who also mastered the track.”

“Sean did the initial mix of the instrumental track, and once I had incorporated my parts (vocals and guitar), I re-mixed the whole thing in Garageband on my laptop.”

Is this release different from your previous releases?

“I’ve dabbled in electro-pop before, but this will be the first track I’ve done where nearly all the instrumental parts are based on synthesised samples rather than recorded instruments. However, it shares a similarity with an early collaboration I did called ‘Winter Sun’ in the sense that that song was also originally an instrumental track that I added lyrics/vocals to and turned into a new song.”

Is there a story behind the cover artwork?

“Although it’s not obvious, the abstract artwork is actually a photo that was taken inside a waterslide! It’s a free-use photo I found on Flickr, and I chose it for several reasons – firstly as a nod to the title of the instrumental track the song is based on, ‘Waterway’, and also because when I started writing the lyrics my wife and I had recently taken our young boy to a swimming pool where he insisted on going on the big waterslide many times, which involved going up lots of stairs. This inspired the opening lines of chorus – “we can take this step by step if you wanna, or we can leap in headfirst”.”

‘Headfirst’ is out 4th August.