PULP INTERVIEWS: RENNAN
By Haydn Hickson
You’ve dropped three singles this year - all very different. One takes influence from rock, one takes influence from ballads and another takes influence from R&B bops. Do you intentionally jump from genre to genre? What’s the reasoning behind this? Is there a country song on the way?
LOL. No country songs, I see Lil Nas X’s lane and I firmly respect his space in that regard. To be honest, I just have a really good relationship with my producer, DeliPres. My taste has mostly been song-writing focused hip-hop up until the last few years. Deli has a whole other palette and musical knowledge that he’s able to bring to the table creatively that has started to find its way into what we’ve been making. It’s guided by my gut feeling, but the benefit of collaboration is that your musical weak spots can be picked up by your collaborator. I never really pick a sound to lean into on a particular day, it’s mostly just something that myself and Deli vibe out over a few bevvies.
Who would you credit to be your biggest inspirations? What’s your dream collab?
I have a few major inspirations that I’d say are pretty formative. Demon Dayz by the Gorillaz and Graduation by Kanye West were the first albums I ever bought, so Damon Albarn and Kanye are definitely up there. In more recent years Mac Miller has been hugely influential to me and my creative process. After he passed I was reading an interview with John Mayer who said that Mac’s greatest gift was his ability to see an idea through to its completion. It didn’t matter if the track was going to be commercially viable or not, Mac got it done. That’s something I’ve been carrying with me that I don’t think I’ll ever let go of. That being said my dream collab is Kanye West because I’m not an idiot.
Let’s talk Parachute. It’s got such a rocky vibe, were you pumping through a lot of AC/DC when you wrote this? Did Numb/Encore inspire this? In your words, what’s this song about?
Hahahhahahahaa, man. I’ve never listened to an AC/DC album in my life. That’s a funny one because I actually wrote that song over a pretty paint by numbers bubble-gum trap beat. I brought that vibe to Deli but we weren’t really feeling what we had cooked up half-way through the session. I told him to scrap our half-days work and lay down a grungy bass-line over the vocals we had already recorded and we just built it from there.
Parachute is about unexpectedly falling into a healthy and nurturing relationship after undermining my own sense of trust through some less than healthy experiences. I’m still in that relationship, so I think I was on to something when I wrote that ;)
Now onto Stars. This song is so romantic, is it written about anyone in particular? How was this song born - was there a moment that you felt all these feels? Or was it a lengthy writing process?
Funnily enough, I was single when I wrote that first verse, and I consider it to be a nonlinear sci-fi? On a narrative level, it’s about a lonely person who makes a wish upon a shooting star for somebody to happily grow old with on their way to a party. They end up meeting the personification of this star at said party, grow old with it and happily slip off into the afterlife as the star goes back into the sky to do whatever stars are doing. The second meaning is one that the song grew into. It’s about having somebody be there and support you as you grow older and the optimism (STARS!) of youth starts to disappear.
And finally Crisis. Out of the three, this song seems to be the boppiest. What inspired this song? The vocalist on this song is so captivating too, how did this collaboration come about? Were you two in the studio together or was it all done apart?
Crisis literally refers to the crisis point of an anxiety attack that I find myself in way too frequently. I’m constantly calling people close to me and articulating why I think everyone hates me and why every opportunity I’ve managed to claim for myself is going to be taken away, and they’re constantly telling me I need to stop indulging the worst-case scenario, it’s pretty chill. Specifically, earlier this year I was working as a post-man, and I got sacked. I was feeling pretty useless about my direction in life, Parachute had kind of flopped compared to my expectations and I had very little money/motivation to fuel my music. I was in a bit of a crisis point, as ya do. My best friend had kindly put money down for a studio-session after giving me one of those movies like pep-talks about not quitting, and I wrote Crisis. It’s amusing on my indulgence of vices to numb anxiety, how that makes it worse, and the taxing nature of social media. You have to be really exposed to make it in music these days, and I’m a pretty private person online.
Ms. Thandi is somebody that I’d worked previously within 2017 for my song Honey. That song talked about my run-in with psychosis, and when I had written Crisis it kind of felt like an extension of that experience to a certain degree. I was shopping the OG demo around to friends and they suggested getting somebody on the chorus, my mind naturally went to Thandi. When she agreed to hop on the track I just asked if she wanted to also do a verse and she was down, she’s an extremely talented writer and she totally leaned into every piece of subject matter I touched upon. I feel like she offered the thematic resolution to the whole track, and I’m super grateful she was willing to go to a vulnerable place on my track.
What’s a huge career milestone you hope to achieve in 2020?
This is a really shallow thing to say, but hear me out. I’d really like to get played on Triple J. I was popping in 2016 off a song I released called I Can Tell, the second track I had ever released. It got mad plays on Soundcloud, a handful of Triple J spins and more. People close to me had told me that my music would never go anywhere, so for me to be getting that attention on my second song was a really life-changing thing for me. Unfortunately, I had only leased the rights to the instrumental, and some other Australian artist had bought them fully. They sent me a cease and desist letter and had to take everything down. I’ve never been able to reach that same level of reach since, so it’s a small milestone I’d love to reach by the end of the year.
Are we getting an album or an EP soon? Or should we keep expecting singles?
The three singles we’ve been talking about have been off my second EP, Shooting Arrows, which should be out shortly after Crisis. Next year I’ll probably just drop singles while myself and Deli work on a larger project.
When’s the next live show? What can we expect from it?
I’m playing the Bank Hotel December 21st in Newtown alongside Latifa Tee, Gavver and Pinz and Pelz. You can expect a super diverse set from me, the new EP touches into some psych-rock elements, more grunge and more pop structure so it’s going to be strange yet familiar.