Good Morning: ‘I find it weird when people say that they’ve had sex to our music. That’s disgusting!’
With their folksy DIY tracks about the minutiae of love and life, Melbourne duo Good Morning is a band that might have stayed one of Australia’s best-kept secrets – were it not for a series of unexpected co-signs.
First there was Tyler, the Creator sharing an early single – the rueful, self-effacing Warned You – to his Instagram story. Then A$AP Rocky sampled one of their tracks in 2018 (“in a truly fucked development”, they called it at the time). Then Warned You went viral on TikTok at the start of the pandemic, soundtracking the angst and anxiety of lockdowns everywhere.
It’s been over a decade since high school friends Stefan Blair and Liam Parsons first started making music as Good Morning. Now they have a swathe of international fans and have moved from the home town that made them underground mainstays. Blair spent the last year in Los Angeles, while Parsons now lives in London – but working together still feels like home.
They only recently began playing with and producing for other artists separately. The experience has been “eye-opening”, says Blair: “I do, a lot of the time, feel more constricted [working with others]. Even just opening that world and realising how hard it can be makes it nice to come back home.”
When we meet, they’re back in Melbourne to promote their seventh album, the appropriately titled Good Morning Seven. Written, recorded and produced at a custom-built studio in Preston, it’s their longest and most ambitious record yet: samples and interpolations abound, from Liz Phair to random dollar-bin records; vocal harmonies, strings and wind instruments add depth and texture.
Unlike past records, the writing for this album resulted in more than 70 songs, 40 of which were recorded before they whittled down to the final 17. “We’re very comfortable with one another, so it’s a lot easier to try new things and experiment and not feel selfconscious,” Parsons says.
The album feels like something of a reset after a mammoth few years. In 2021, Good Morning signed with Polyvinyl, the prestigious indie tastemakers behind Alvvays and American Football. They’ve spent much of the past six months on the road, crisscrossing the US. On this visit to Melbourne, they’ve played just one home town show at a record store – their only Australian gig for the foreseeable future.
While it’s difficult for musicians in Australia to reach big audiences, a small artistic community does come with perks. “I don’t think that we would be touring overseas if we hadn’t received government grants – I chat to my friends in America and none of that exists,” Blair says. “But they have the plus side of a huge population and they can tour as a working-class job over there, which doesn’t really exist here.”
Parsons agrees. “We live overseas now but it’s not for band reasons – the community here, and being a bit isolated, is actually really helpful for creativity,” he says. “Everything in America is like a big competition, and I don’t think that would be beneficial – for me at least.”
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Melbourne continues to be an important part of Good Morning’s DNA – they both cite the local dolewave band Dick Diver as an influence. “I went for a run yesterday morning, and I was listening to Dick Diver and smelling the gum trees and crying and screaming along,” says Parsons. That band’s scrappy spirit lives on in Good Morning. “Not taking yourself too seriously, trying to keep some levity and lightness, and not really being focused on being cool or likable or popular – I think that’s a very Melburnian thing and it’s worked out well for us.”
It’s ideas like this that thread through Good Morning Seven, where many songs wonder about the future and what it means to live and sustain a creative life. It might be an existential crisis – or it might just be ageing.
“I’m constantly wondering what next – what happens after I’m not playing music any more?” says Blair, who turns 30 in May. “As I get older, I get more and more unemployable in every other facet of life. What the fuck will I do?”
“It’s a classic thing where your parents are like, ‘Make sure you have a backup plan’,” Parsons says. “I have no backup plan. I’m 30 and I have no employable skills. If this doesn’t work out I’m screwed.
“It’s like waiting for that shoe to drop, being like, ‘This is gonna turn to shit’. Every day that it doesn’t I’m like, ‘Cool, made it.’”
Good Morning’s songs to live by
Each month, we ask our Headline Act to share the songs that have accompanied them through love, life, lust and death.
The best year for music
Liam: 2009. You’ve got My Girls by Animal Collective, Two Weeks by Grizzly Bear, Stillness is the Move by Dirty Projectors, 1901 by Phoenix.
Stefan: That’s crazy good memory to remember all that. I’m gonna go ballpark early 2000s, whenever FutureSex/ LoveSounds was coming out; there were probably some pretty hot Nelly Furtado tracks coming out. I could not name you years of songs without looking it up though. 2006 would’ve been My Love, Promiscuous, Say It Right.
The opening credits of my biopic Stefan: Promiscuous.
Liam: No, that wouldn’t be the opening credits! That would be the end. I don’t know if I can trust you being the music supervisor of my biopic.
The song I wish I didn’t write
Stefan: I’m gonna say any Good Morning song I wrote pre-Basketball Breakups. You can have any of them, I don’t care.
Liam: You don’t care? I mean, probably same! It’s hard because it pays our bills, but I really, really hate that song Warned You.
Stefan: Not a good song. Lock it in. Liam: Lock it in!
My go-to karaoke song
Liam: Maggie May by Rod Stewart. Stefan: Believe by Cher.
The song I can never listen to again Liam: Warned You.
Stefan: Lock it in!
Liam: It’d really be my own music. Stefan: I struggle with Hey Jude these days. I really struggle. I don’t think it’s a bad song. I’ve just heard it too many times. A bit rambly.
The classic song that should be stripped of its title
Stefan: Livin‘ on a Prayer. That song sucks!
Liam: My answer would’ve been Summer of ’69, but I heard Summer of ’69 the other day, and I feel like I’ve aged into Summer of ’69. Maybe I’m nostalgic. The older you get, the more you’re like, “Man, those summers really did used to last forever!”
The song I loved as a teenager Stefan: Alice by Dick Diver.
Liam: That’s the song I cried to yesterday! I was obsessed with All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem. I was annoying about it – about a song that you do not understand as a child. Kind of like Summer of ’69. I probably should’ve shut up about All My Friends. No one needed to hear it.
The best song to have sex to
Stefan: I’m gonna say maybe it’s not a song, maybe it’s a mix. Like an NTS mix. Minimal talking … I don’t wanna be choosing and focusing on music.
Liam: I’ve never really wanted to listen to music; I’ve always wanted to keep it separate … I find it weird when people say that they’ve had sex to our music. I’m like, that’s disgusting!
Stefan: Someone said that to me last week. I remember having a conversation with an old friend when we were talking about listening to records when you have sex, and he was saying he would get up and flip the record. I think that’s psychotic.
Answers have been edited and condensed for clarity
Good Morning’s album Good Morning Seven is out 22 March
she says. “I don’t see myself as somebody who should have existed in a different decade. I’m very much a 21stcentury girl and love living in this time, since there’s no better time to be a woman.”
Indeed, Laufey’s songwriting takes in every aspect of modern romance, from tales of spying a crush on the tube (From the Start) to the emotional perils of situationships (Promise), all couched in the warmth of her low-register, Ella Fitzgerald-referencing vocals.
“I also think there’s no better time to be a musician, because audiences have never been as open as they are today,” she adds. “We have an abundance of ways to listen to all types of music, and it’s no longer about genre, it’s about feeling and mood. At the end of the day, young people want to listen to young people, they don’t want to listen to older people preach to them.”
Born in Reykjavik to an Icelandic father and Chinese mother, Laufey and her identical twin sister, Júnía, grew up steeped in music. Her mother is a violinist for the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, while her maternal grandparents were professors of violin and piano. Inspired by the jazz records in her dad’s collection, as well as her mother’s love of the classical repertoire, Laufey was given her first violin at the age of two, before taking piano lessons at four and cello lessons at eight. “Initially, I needed to be pushed to do music,” she says. “But I’m grateful that my mother made me practise every day for an hour, because when I reached 13, it suddenly clicked.”
Joining a youth orchestra as she entered her teens, music soon became a social endeavour as much as an escape from the sense of difference Laufey otherwise experienced as one of the only people of colour in her community.
“I definitely felt like a foreigner, being one of the few Asians in Iceland, and having lived partially in the States from six to nine years old,” she says. “On top of that, I was a nerdy orchestra kid. I didn’t go home to play with friends, I went home to practise. Music became this project that I hoped would be my ticket to the big world of the States or the UK.”
By 15, she had performed as a cello soloist with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and entered Icelandic reality contest Ìsland Got Talent, reaching the televised final. “I was very strict with discipline in high school, I didn’t drink and I didn’t party,” she says. “I was fixed on achieving my goal of going to a university abroad and getting a full scholarship.”
The hard work paid off and in 2018, aged 19, she left home to attend Boston’s Berklee College of Music on a prestigious Presidential scholarship. There followed two years full of firsts: her first experience of living apart from Júnía, her first time studying jazz rather than classical music, and her first romances. “I gained independence for the first time, I was no longer part of a twin unit and I was just living as a woman,” she says with a smile. “I was like, let’s grow up and live a little, and all of a sudden I had all these experiences to write about.”
Filling up her songbook with new encounters in romance, rejection and longing, Laufey was ready to test her material with the public when Covid-19 hit. “We had nowhere to go and nowhere to play as musicians, so the internet was really the only place to present any kind of art,” she says. “I used lockdown to post videos of myself online singing new songs and I was shocked that it took off. We ended up growing a real audience of young people.”
In April 2020, she independently released Street By Street, a plaintive, folkinfluenced ballad about reclaiming a
I definitely felt like a foreigner, being one of the few Asians in Iceland
city from its memories of an ex. But it wasn’t until Laufey made a TikTok video singing her song Valentine the following year that she fully went viral. “It’s just a jazz song that I wrote on Valentine’s Day, kind of as a joke, but once I posted it, my phone started blowing up,” she says. “Now it’s become like a new standard. It’s fun that a song I wrote as a homage to the past can be understood as new music.”
Ultimately, this is the essence of Laufey’s musical appeal – repurposing old sounds to create a wistful nostalgia for an era that her teen fanbase have never known. While her debut album, Everything I Know About Love, was formed largely of those Berklee dorm room songs, her latest release, Bewitched,sees Laufey in more advanced musical territory, co-producing and even composing classical music for the first time – all the while remaining an independent artist without a major label contract.
“It’s more mature because I’ve grown as a person,” she says. “Not a single note is played on the songs without me being in the room, and it’s all musicians playing real instruments. We’re all just trying to bring classical and jazz music to new audiences.”
A highlight on the album is the moving jazz ballad Letter To My 13 Year Old Self, where Laufey sings softly about her teenage feelings of inadequacy. “When I was younger, I felt so odd. I felt like a circus freak, because I had this low voice and there were so few Asian singer-songwriters to look up to,” she says, her head bowed. “I wrote Letter To My 13 Year Old Self because I was reflecting on how I had these big dreams but I didn’t think they were possible. I didn’t feel cool enough or beautiful enough. I have a lot of younger fans now who have similar dreams and I want to encourage them too.”
Back at EartH in Hackney, more than 1,200 of those fans let out a deafening roar while Laufey plays everything from 40s jazz standard I Wish You Love to her own 21st-century standard Valentine at EartH. As she draws to a close, she sings Letter To My 13 Year Old Self and addresses the crowd. “I feel like I became the artist that I was missing when I was younger and it makes me really, really happy,” she says, her voice quavering. “Every night I look out into my crowd it feels like the community I always wanted but never had.” Her audience cheers and some wipe away tears from their cheeks, nodding to each other. It seems this show was worth the wait.
• Laufey plays the Roundhouse, London 13 March, and the Royal Albert Hall on 16 May. Bewitched is out now on AWAL Recordings
and have since graduated to what is very much the “live laugh love” of funk and soul music, with less edge than my toddler-proofed kitchen. Their decidedly un-pyroclastic 2023 album Volcano sound like a tepid mix of other artists with everything that made those artists good removed – it’s no-sodium Sault; not so much the Temptations as the Ooh No I Musn’ts. Or like someone asked that Adobe AI music software that dropped this week for “J Dilla for Tory barbecues”. Indeed, they’re so blah they should probably be put on an Arts Council protection list for artists most under threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence. They seem nice and one of them cried a bit at winning best group and I’m not so jaded to not go a bit gooey at that – but come on, Young Fathers are right there.
They’re playing their sleeper hit Back on 74 which does have a pretty, if rather inconsequential-feeling, chorus melody – and the strutting dancers lift the cruise-ship-at-teatime feel just a little. But this is one of the most forgettable performances I can remember at the Brits, which is to say it feels like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones barged past Guardian security and hit me with that Men In Black mind ray. The earth spins onward and leaves this behind.
Raye
There’s fairytale stardust across this performance, a coronation moment for a pop Cinderella who at one point was very much not invited to the ball, and left to toil in the depths of a major label for years. She extricated herself from that flatlining deal and became one of the UK’s most successful independent artists, a turnaround marked by her record-breaking seven nominations and six wins.
She first performs Ice Cream Man on piano: a song about how she was sexually assaulted during a recording session, and it’s the kind of raw and candid songwriting she didn’t seem to get to make in her unhappy spell with Polydor Records. Then it’s into an orchestral version of Prada, her mega-banger that earned her one of two song of the year nominations, and then a 1920s lindyhop intro to Escapism – her other song of the year nomination – before switching up again into a sumptuous big band arrangement.
For me, it’s the crispness of the rap drum programming of the original that gives the song its urgency, and makes its tale of nihilist bacchanalia work, given that it’s something you might actually listen to in a bout of nihilist bacchanalia. I don’t think she needs the heavily telegraphed classiness of the orchestral version – this uniquely tortured song doesn’t need or suit it – and perhaps there was too much packed into this megamix performance. But there’s no doubting Raye’s conviction, star quality and ability to carry her pain to the back of the biggest arenas.
Chase & Status and Becky Hill
Becky Hill won the dance category the last two years and was Olivia-Colman-at-the-Oscars levels of endearing when picking up each: someone who palpably loves dance music culture and isn’t too cool to pretend she doesn’t. It’s right there in her singing voice, too – gloriously histrionic and keen of feeling – and she’s now become the patron saint of nights out in clubs where you make questionable life choices. Legend has it that if write “motive” on a Be At One mirror in lipstick and chant her name three times she jumps out with a Jägerbomb. Chase & Status’s stock meanwhile is higher than ever: having stayed with a drum’n’bass scene that had waned out of the charts in recent years, they were ready to capitalise when it inevitably came back around, with their outrageously huge track Baddadan.
They open with a snatch of Baddadan delivered by Irah, and then into the Hill-helmed Disconnect, whose headily rising melody has the requisite wobbly-eyed dancefloor headrush. They switch back again to Baddadan, if only for a brief spell, and back to Disconnect – it’s not easy to conjure the feel of switching between two decks in a nightclub at the cavernous O2 Arena, but all concerned make a good stab at it, and Hill is in typically brilliant voice.
This was a shot in the arm for a slightly deflated Brits.
Rema
Long championed by the diaspora here, the rest of the UK has eventually come around to the charms of African pop, with massive chart hits for Burna Boy, Libianca and Tyla in recent years – and the biggest of all has been Calm Down by Nigerian vocalist Rema, which is the kind of perfect earworm that doesn’t just go round your head all day but then also decides to buy a timeshare in your subconscious.
Like Raye he gets a souped-up fullband arrangement but this one actually suits the song much better; the tempo has been slightly upped to keep the energy high, and perhaps to free up some more space for host Maya Jama chatting about getting wrecked, as is her wont. But there’s still space for the song to simmer down to a tender standstill, then explode into a bombastic coda. Rema has a gorgeous open book of a voice, and he negotiates the song’s little curlicues with ease, making this one of the night’s best performances. He’s wearing the kind of fur hat that would see you right through a Yukon winter, and as a broadsheet journalist and father it behoves me to say “he must be bloody boiling in that”.
Kylie Minogue
Having not had a hit of any substance since 2010, in recent years Kylie made genre forays into country and disco along with a Christmas album, and it looked like she was pootling off into cosy Radio 2 land. But she swerved decisively back to pop with Padam Padam: malevolently sexy and powered by firmly up-to-date programming, it sent a wriggle of pleasure through summer 2023, although people saying “Padam?” as a question got old after about five minutes.
There’s a whisper of Spinning Around as a portentous fanfare builds like the score to a particularly depressing Christopher Nolan film – but then we’re into Padam Padam, with Kylie appearing atop a lofty plinth, that bit of staging long beloved by X Factor, Eurovision and more. She channels the same endearing everywoman energy she had on stage at that epic Glasto performance, clearly enjoying herself and – unlike Robbie Williams unforgivably didn’t do in this slot a few years ago – just gives us hit after hit. Can’t Get You Out of My Head begets a bit of Slow and then Love at First Sight – which squeezes even more dancefloor euphoria than Calvin & Ellie and Chase & Status managed. She keeps the dopamine pumping by finishing with All the Lovers, jumping around for the drop like a kid who’s double-dropped fistfuls of Haribo. It’s a wonderfully unguarded and joyous ending, matching Raye’s jubiliation at her historic wins.