Young Astronaut originated in the suburbs of the New Forest as brothers Chris and Pete Boakes in 2007. The brothers took their time to experiment with the harmonious and considered blend of music that is the foundation of the bands delicate tonality. The resulting sound is an emotionally charged blending of English night folk, indie and post-grunge that can be found on they debut album Fawn.
01. How did the band get together?
Chris: Well Pete and I are brothers and we’ve both been playing the guitar since we were young. We were both into different genres of music when we were kids but as we matured our music tastes aligned and we started to write music together on our acoustics. We’d always been writing with the aim of creating an album and after a few years we had a lot of songs so we added the other members to expand our sound.
02. Where did your name come from?
Pete: The name wasn’t much of a big deal for us. We didn’t want it to have any negative connotations and we wanted it to fit our style of music. After a month or so of brainstorming we decided on Young Astronaut.
03. Who were your major influences and inspirations and who do you despise?
Chris: I’ve always been a huge fan of the band Say Anything. Before we started writing this record I was absolutely blown away by their debut album ‘…is a real boy’, Max Bemis is an incredible lyricist and he made me really appreciate the importance and power of good lyrics. There are a whole host of other artists which were a huge source of inspiration for me too: Simon & Garfunkel, The Shins, mewithoutYou, Wintersleep to name a few. Despise? I’m not sure I really despise anyone, although I’m not a big chart music fan so if you sat me in a room and played me the top 40 I could probably give you a few names.
Pete: The albums ‘Simple Math’ by Manchester Orchestra and ‘The 59′ Sound’ by The Gaslight Anthem have been very influential and have demonstrated to me how to write an album rather than a collection of singles. I’ve always listened to solo guitarists – originally shredders like Joe Satriani but more recently I love what Andy Mckee and Newton Faulkner have been doing with just an acoustic. I took a lot of inspiration from compilations that Chris has put together throughout the years and have grown to share some of the same influences that he’s mentioned.
04. What drove you to make music together?
Chris: Pete comes from a mainly guitar standpoint and I come from more of a melodic, vocal standpoint and we found that we could both bring something different to the table when we were writing songs. It was working well so we just continued writing.
05. What can someone who has never seen you live before expect from your live shows then & possibly even now?
Chris: The faster paced songs have a lot of energy to them (like ‘Hey Little Ghost’ and ‘Dust’), and the quieter, slower paced one’s, particularly ‘Sugar Is Sweeter Than Gold’, are a lot more emotional live I think, so it’s actually quite a varied set.
Pete: Since the album was written on two acoustics, this is the backbone of our sound and our shows tend to stem from there. We build upon it with drums, bass and keys live.
06. Who writes your songs? What types of themes and subjects do you deal with?
Pete: Chris and I co-write all our songs. Often they’ll come from a simple idea which we’ll mess around with, usually over a period of months, we’ll then probably change our minds, change them again and eventually we’ll have a melody and an acoustic foundation. After this we’ll play it with our super talented drummer Niko and he’ll add the percussive dimension.
Chris: I write all the lyrics in a process that takes a long time. I think lyrics are really important and I like to make sure I’ve really considered what it is I’m trying to say and have expressed it properly. The themes and subjects are always very personal so I tend to start from a completely raw point and shade things over with metaphors. You can see this on songs like ‘The Artist & The Villain’ where I wrote a huge lyrical part at the end.
07. How did your music evolve since you first began playing together?
Pete: I think since we started we’ve both improved both as musicians and songwriters so we have a lot more to offer.
08. What has been your biggest challenge as a band? Were you able to overcome this? If so, how?
Chris: We’re quite a new band so we haven’t had any huge challenges. However, during the writing process both Pete and I were at different universities so we had a distance issue which made the writing process a lot slower.
09. Do you play covers? If you could pick any song, which would you like to cover most and why?
Pete: Nope we don’t really do covers. We prefer to spend the time writing new material because we’ve always got a lot of ideas flying around. If we were to do a cover though I think it would be a song that didn’t already exist in our genre that we thought we could bring something new to.
Chris: Pulled Apart By Horses on acoustic.
10. Where did you envisage the band being in five years time?
Chris: We’d like to have a couple more albums under our belt, a strong fan base and to have progressed and experimented with our sound.
11. Who would you most like to record with?
Chris: Tim O Heir because he made my favourite album. But this is probably a good place to mention Geoff Swan here as he produced our last album and was just an incredible person to work with, we couldn’t have asked for a better producer.
12. What should we be expecting from the band in the near future?
Pete: As many shows as we can play.
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