Steve Parkin
You may have seen him playing as part of the Bob Evans Band, touring in support of Eskimo Joe or perhaps more recently as part of the acoustic supergroup, The Basement Birds, but Perth singer/songwriter Steve Parkin has been crafting shiny pop songs for well over a decade.
His former band, Autopilot, released an EP called Pure Gold Baby in 1999, which garnered a four-star review in Rolling Stone and prompted another Perth act, Eskimo Joe, to try something more Beatles-esque on their 2001 debut album, Girl.
It is a gathering of friends and musicians with great mutual respect for one another. The Beatles-meets-Supergrass flavour that characterised Autopilot (and Parkin’s previous release with the Foreign Films, 2004’s Sandytown) again comes to the fore, but in a manner befitting the production nous of Eskimo Joe and the maturation of Park as a writer.
“I’m not as worried about finding the perfect pop song,” says Parkin, so I wanted to make it the shiniest, brightest, pop record I had left in me to make.”
As a collaborator on Eskimo Joe’s last album (Parkin co-wrote Inshalla’s powerful title track) and a key member in the instigation of the Basement Birds, Parkin has excelled in recent times in creative partnerships. Collaboration finds Parkin at his most creatively confident and happiest.
“I really like being in a band,” Parkin says. “This album is my album as in I’ve written the songs, but it is a co-written album. It was like being in a band and there were a couple of songs where it literally was Joel (Quartermain), Kav (Temperley), Stu (MacLeod) and me nutting the songs out. I do tend to respond really well to that. I do tend to procrastinate a lot when left to my own devices… it took me a year to think of an album title (laughs).”
Steve points out that Mighty Bright Light does feel like a band album, it’s not your typical singer/songwriter thing. Prepare to get hook on a feeling…
“The lyrics have come very much at the last minute, I didn’t fuss over the lyrics too much, because I really wanted it to be more of a feel album, where I wasn’t really trying to say anything in particular,” he explains.
“The classic pop songs have that kind of ambiguity in the lyrics, where it’s more the melody or the hook that takes over. It was really about trying to recreate ELO’s Living Thing and Keep On Loving You by REO Speedwagon. I’ve been moving from the ’60s to the ’70s (laughs).”
Due to touring, the album was done over a long period of time, but Steve says it was an easy process. In heading towards the Mighty Bright Light, he knew what the outcome would be.
Mighty Big Light represents a consolidation of Steve Parkin’s experience thus far and the new roads ahead. He’ll see you out there…
“There’s songs on there that are the best I’ve ever recorded, or written,” he says. “I was definitely conscious of really wanting to distil everything I have learnt in 12 years or whatever it is on the local WA pop scene and get it down as a document - a really good guitar pop record.”