What’s your idea of perfect happiness?

What are you plugging right now?

It’s my first solo EP, and I’m pretty happy with how it came out. There are five tracks. I wrote the single Sweet Lily White the day before it was recorded. The way I write songs is to just play the acoustic guitar and open my mouth and see what comes out. If I remember it later, I do more work on it. countryside . . . quite far out’ – just popped out. It’s a bit of a joke, you know, with the double entendre, but it’s really the sad song of the EP. Actually, they’re all lamentations of some sort – expressions of frustration and longing, perhaps – but I like to retain some sort of mystery and ambiguity in there. These songs could mean nothing to one person and a great deal to someone else, depending on their experience. ‘‘I wouldn’t say I was super happy right now. I don’t have a place to live. I’m sleeping on my brother’s couch. I have no job, apart from the occasional gig. I’m an anxious person, and am bipolar. Making music is a hard, difficult challenge, but people seem to like what I do and that helps me feel better. I’ve got a lot of ongoing personal struggles with mental health issues and so on, and the state of the world plays into that. When I was little, I had no idea that by the time I was 20, there’d be a mass-shooting every day in America. I never thought there’d be people being gunned down at rock concerts in France. That stuff depresses the s... out of me. If people listen between the lines of the songs, it’s actually the blues. When I play here by myself, just me and an acoustic guitar, they’re blues songs. – Grant Smithies