What happens when accomplished singer-songwriters and best friends dodie, Orla Gartland, Greta Isaac, and Martin Luke Brown are all faced with boredom? The short answer is, fate directed the four musicians to get into the studio together, and they all formed the most superb supergroup of all time: FIZZ.
The quartet recently released their debut album The Secret To Life, and I got to sit in on a virtual press conference to hear FIZZ spill the tea on how the project came together!
THE BEGINNING
The members of FIZZ had been friends for ten years, but decided to link up roughly two years ago. A trip to the Middle Farm Studios in the town of England was somewhat of an experiment for the members. They wanted to see how their chemistry would flow in the studio, and see what would come out of it.
Greta said, “We basically wrote the album across two weeks – one week in December 2021, and another week in July 2022. I think the intention was to see what happens. We didn’t have a name then, our managers didn’t know the band existed really, and the intention really was just to play and see what it was like to write together.”
MAKING AN ALBUM
It might be a little hard to believe that FIZZ created an entire album in just two weeks, but that really did happen. At the studio, producer Pete Miles was bursting with excited about the four artists being in one room together, and he had a vision that they’d come together to form a band. Pete worked his magic in the studio, and FIZZ just couldn’t help but feel excited – which drove them to create a whole lot of music in just a little time.
According to Martin, “We were just giddy. Super duper giddy for that first week. We were running around and playing the drums, plugging in guitars, and it was really noisy chaos. A lot of the big songs on the album came from that first week.”
After six months, FIZZ regrouped and returned to the studio to work on the second half of the album. Martin shared, “We think of the album and the sound as a time capsule, because we pretty much did the whole thing in those two weeks. Whatever we do next, we’ll probably have a similar approach. Whatever happens, happens… we just make the time to allow for it to happen.”
JUST DO IT!
Since The Secret To Life was a spontaneous project, a lot of the planning and polishing that might usually take place in the studio was non-existent for the group. Orla said, “Because we wrote and recorded it at the same time, there’s no separate demoing and recording process. I think often, what you’re hearing on the final version of the song is the first (or second, or third) vocal ever put down for that song. There’s kind of a really magic naïve-ity in that. There’s no overthinking, because there was no time to overthink. You can hear in so many of the songs us all singing different notes to each other, because we’re not even really sure what the note is… but it doesn’t really matter! Let’s just go!”
It was all about the vibes of one another’s company. Greta mentioned, “I think we’re so used to this way of writing and producing music, which is… you write with someone different every day, you go into a new studio every day, you write with a stranger, you try and get a song in five hours and move on to the next one the next day, and you don’t get time to tweak anything. It’s just very fast-paced, and it can be soul-crushing sometimes! I think with the way Pete produces, which is very old school (a lot of recording to tape, and capturing the atmosphere more than anything) I think that was something I hadn’t done since I was a teen. It felt like a retreat, but it felt like coming back to actually making music in the way we always loved doing.”
Dodie said, “We didn’t want to put so much weight on writing this album. We didn’t want to figure out what we were trying to say. It’s so interesting what comes out when you let go of those pressures.”
The Secret To Life is pure sonic fun, and keeping this context in mind makes listening to the album even more enjoyable. It’s the story of four friends chasing good vibes, and you, the listener, are invited to frolic in the sun with FIZZ as your ears embark on this magical journey. Listen to The Secret To Life below!
a big thank you to °1824 for hosting FIZZ’s virtual press conference ♡
