I chatted with Bryn Soden, lead singer of Adelaide band Sturt Avenue, where we talked about the band’s origins and the nostalgia-heavy nature of their music. We also discussed his songwriting process, how it varies from the spontaneous to the deliberate. For their latest single, “Passenger Side”, Bryn reflects on a drive with a friend, imagining himself as a passenger in the past, as well as the songwriting process for his project Sturt Avenue.
Let’s start with the band itself, Sturt Avenue. How did that all come about?
I spent most of my 20s just kind of writing, you know, silly little songs with my dad, bedroom demos or with my friends, but I didn’t really have any aspirations for band stuff, till we entered the SCALA songwriters 2019. We won a music award with a track that we had called “Lions” which was on our first album. As a part of that, they’re like, oh, make a band happen. So, I got my dad, who played on a lot of the bedroom demos, and my friends, Isaac and Bryce who I played with in Bromham sort of filled that out, and my sister was doing some backing vocals. We played around with different variations in the lineup based on availability, different sounds. We’ve played around now, rolling is like a four piece, still a bit more stripped back, bit more harmonica, bit less.
Where did the name Sturt Avenue come from?
The street we grew up on our old family home, Sturt Avenue. Okay, so the music, the songs, especially from the first album, is very nostalgia heavy, trying to tie it to something that had a lot of that nostalgia for me, the sort of time in your childhood where the problems don’t really exist. You just sort of roll with the day to day. We enjoy the little things.
What about the inspiration for your songwriting? Where does it come from? Like, do you sit down and say, today, I’m going to write a song? Or does it sort of come to you in a in a flash?
It varies; some of my favorite songs, I’ve just picked up a guitar and the song’s been there as soon as I started playing. Some of my favorite songs have come out of just months of fear, of just being like, there is, there is nothing in the well right now – where has this gone? Having a fragment of an idea, and taking forever, to morph that into a full song? I’ve just learned to sort of go with what’s happening at the moment. Sometimes, I’ll write like, five songs in a weekend. Sometimes I’ll write one song in eight months. Yeah, like, I know a lot of people talk about different methods of getting into songwriting habits, the more interesting solutions. But I feel like it’s sort of for me, draws a lot from where I’m at in my life. And I feel like the variations in ability to surface the song is usually tied to something that’s going on.
How do you decide a song is ready to release?
That’s, that’s a good question. “Passenger Side”, our newest song, I wrote it in 2021 and it started out as, like a bedroom demo. Kind of wanted to try something that was a bit more rigid in its structure. It started with, like, programs, drums and, yeah, it was going to be like almost a bit more “dancey” in a way. It got to a spot where it’s sort of more of the folksy there that we sort of usually work with. But yeah, there was, like a first demo of it that I was quite fond of. Just made this thing with these program drums and sort of shifting rhythms that I liked. And then dad had just come down one day, hanging out in the studio. He decided he wanted to lay down some mandoline. Just kind of noodly sounds that wasn’t really what I was picturing for the song, but now that’s like my favorite bit about it. And then we, sort of we circled back around, because I don’t think this version of the song was representative of what I want the band to be, but I liked the song itself. It works on the bone slack demo, and we kept the original mando tape as well. Okay, live drums, yeah, pretty much all the instrumentation from the ground up.
Because it’s quite a strange story. Old man dies in the passenger seat of a car with his with his son. Yeah, it’s funny. I was recounting the story for the first time to a friend, and they were like, I think you’ve invented a lot of that in your head. The incident that was like the piece that I ended up drawing the song out of; I was driving through the hills with a friend of mine going for a Sunday afternoon drive. We drove past an old classic car. There was a guy who looked maybe 50 in the driver’s seat. And then there’s just like, just like the guy that looked about how my grandpa had looked in the hospital. I think that had maybe been fresh in my head when, when I saw this. It was many layers of projection going on, possibly we drove past once before the sunset, when it’s just sort of sinking. The whole city was lit up in this golden light, and they both sort of looking out across the vista. And then we drove back the same way, probably, like 45 minutes later. And I mean, probably, probably the old guy was just asleep, but they were still parked up in the same spot. The younger guy had a steely look on his face, like, sort of going through something he’s trying to not to think too much about.
Just like I built that whole story out in my head, I think I was riding in the passenger side on that drive as well, just kind of dwelling for a while on, yeah, that’s sort of being in that space. It’s like a sort of comfort in being driven around by someone else.
So, it’s got a little bit of a metaphor for life, in a way, we’re all passengers in a in a car?
Yeah, that’s it. That’s definitely a good rate of it, I reckon. Yeah, yeah. So that video in my head, it’s just sort of the love and the friendships carried through from day to day.
What’s your preference? Do you like the songwriting part of music more or performing?
I have different preferences depending on the project. I found it with Sturt Avenue it’d very much the songwriting is the passion. The lyrics and growing the chords and lyrics I’ve put together into something bigger with my friends in the studio. That’s where my passion lies for that project. I’m sort of not so, not hustling so hard for putting the gigs together or whatever, although we do have one coming up soon.
I have more fun in the other project. So, we’ve got another big folk band Bromham, where I’m sort of just standing in the background playing mandolin, and that’s kind of fun. I definitely enjoy standing in front of the mic and, you know, getting to belt out the songs I’ve put together, I think the most fun I had live, just sort of jumping around doing supporting stuff and just marveling at my friends.
How do you find releasing music? Is that a difficult process in the sense of getting music out there?
We’ve had a bit more luck in recent years in the streaming space, just sort of reaching out and finding the right sort of playlists that are looking for the sort of music. And that usually leads to people around the world finding our stuff. Like our last release about four months ago, “How much it costs?” which is a bit more sort of gentle indie folk. We’d written it for a van life documentary that my sister made, that one sort of that seems to find this audience we got like six or 7000 streams. We had much slower numbers in the past. Seems to be a steady improvement. Yeah, absolutely, it’s like there’s so much good music coming out every day.
You just need to, like, have something that hits in some way, like someone finds the right sort of snippet of video and sticks your song on it just by chance. And yeah, there’s like, those bands, Pigeon Pit. They’re like a folk punk band in the States. Isaac, our bass player found them on Bandcamp and sent them to me. I think we were like, in the first 30 listeners or something. And we listened to them for years. But as they just had this tiny audience playing like DIY shows themselves. And then they had something blow up on Tik Tok, and one day, just opened their Spotify page, and suddenly, the songs that we listening to that had like, you know, 30 people at most who heard, multiplied by millions.
I guess in my mind, if you can get pleasure out of it, and the people that listening are enjoying it, then it’s something. And then if it does get picked up, it’s pretty much the icing on the cake.
You can, like, hustle for the numbers and try and stay on the trends that are big; I think what we do is just make the stuff we want to make, and work on the schedule that works for our lives. And then making the song is the joy for me. I like knowing that people hear it and stuff, but yeah, that’s, it’s just sort of like, you know, releasing it into the world together, like a full stop to me, certainly is making that song.
So, you said you had one album out already, is that right?
Yeah, we’ve got a couple. We had one came out in 2021 and then we put out one last year as a bunch of songs that I’d written after a breakup in 2021 the first track down was basically trying to get out the way so that I could record and release the second album. There’s probably another album’s worth on my hard drive now. Okay, no, not quite as centered around a single idea. So, I’m not sure I think I might do just a bunch of singles for a while.
Is it easier to just keep releasing singles and then here’s the album, or if, if an album itself is something?
I personally I really like an album as a body of work. I really love listening to the kind of music that tells a bigger, extended story. The climate, especially for smaller bands in general, the concept of an album is disappearing a bit. People are focusing on giving attention to individual songs. And you can see our streaming stats for our albums. I usually put some of my favorite tracks at the end of the album. I’m always a huge fan of closers or the penultimate track that sums up the whole energy. You look at streaming numbers and the first few tracks have the attention. The singles also have most of the attention. One of my favorite tracks from our last album, “Wrong Side of the Weekend” – at one point we had nearly 10,000 streams from some of those tracks. But that one’s like, got maybe 200.
There’s an Adelaide band called Wake in Fright who did an album this year called Touch Hands, Pack Sting. The work they did with that was they basically tracked the whole album live, and all of the song were recorded over one weekend. I think, wow, that works. They’ve just done so such a good job of making that feel like a single body of work that exists in the same space. It was trapped in a church in Belair. And I feel like they used a lot of, like, the natural reverb of the space in the midst the space itself almost ended up being an instrument. Yeah, I feel that people are still doing stuff like that. It’s exciting for me.
I personally feel that in this world of manufactured music, manufactured everything, that there’s a swing back to the more organic feel.
With the Sturt Avenue stuff, I do sort of often end up composing, add on recording, like arranging a lot of the parts around what’s there and just sort of figuring out the ideas in the space. But I’ve been thinking that the next set of recordings that I do. I want to, want to just work with a more organic approach. Do something like Wake in Fright and just sit down in a space with musicians and each one sort of owns their own corner of the tracks. Work together to grow the piece more. I feel like you can hear the synergy, this kind of feels more like more than the sum of its parts, and some of them, obviously someone spent, like, a long time sitting in like the door, just tweaking.
