Charly Bliss unleashes a heavenly pop hit with Young Enough
Credit to Author: Shawn Conner| Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2019 18:00:11 +0000
Charly Bliss
When: Oct. 8 & 9
Where: Vogue Theatre
Tickets: $24.99 at eventbrite.ca
Charly Bliss’s Young Enough is already appearing on critics’ lists of the year’s best songs. It’s the title track of the Brooklyn indie-rock band’s second album, which follows 2017’s well-reviewed Guppy. We talked to singer Eva Hendricks about her rock ‘n’ roll parents, the song Young Enough, and Canadian bands.
Q: Tell us about the title track to the new album. It has an epic quality.
A: That song started with my brother Sam (Hendricks). He came to me and said, “I have an idea for a song that has one chord all the way through. I just know that it’s going to be the best song on the album.” At the time I was like, “That’s absolutely nothing to go on.” But then he played it for me and it didn’t really have a melody yet. Parts had melody, parts didn’t. But I thought, He’s totally right. It sounds like an epic, like a song that would come at the end of a movie. So we wrote the melodies together, which we hadn’t done before. We usually write separately and work on it after the fact. For the lyrics, Sam had a pretty specific idea in mind. He wanted it to feel accessible, so anyone listening to it would immediately know what I’m singing about. My lyrics are usually so personal and esoteric that it’s like, What the hell are you singing about? So I was striving for that. It ended up being a song about falling in and out of love and looking back on that.
Q: That was a pretty cocky statement about it being the best song. Had most of the record already been written at that point?
A: No. But Sam is pretty brilliant and meticulous about arrangements. And he’s super competitive. As brother and sister and the two main songwriters, our dynamic is competitive but in a really healthy way. I think we encourage each other. And I don’t think he meant, “Oh, it’s the best song, f—ing all of your songs.” It was more like, “I just have this amazing feeling about this song.” And he was right.
Q: Did it set the tone for the record?
A: Yeah. We built the album around that song.
Q: Apparently your parents are big music fans. What did that mean for you when you were growing up?
A: They were always listening to music. They love dancing. And my brother and I have a lot of happy memories of goofing around with our parents, listening to music. You would think that would’ve meant that we would have ended up in a band together sooner, but I think because they wanted it so badly, and they were so psyched to have two kids in a band together, we almost couldn’t give them the satisfaction. It took a long time.
Q: You met your guitarist, Spencer Fox, at a Tokyo Police Club show, and now you’re touring with Pup, both from Toronto. Do you guys have a thing for Canadian bands?
A: We do. There’s nobody better than Canadian bands. You’re the nicest people in the world.
Q: Your music is on the accessible pop side. Is your live show different when you play with a band like Pup, which is more punk?
A: Our live show is super-energetic. I think it works pretty well with Pup. What’s interesting is that, though Pup’s music is more on the punk side, their melodies are super catchy and poppy. So we have a lot of crossover with their fans ‘cos it’s a lot of the same stuff but told through different arrangements, and using a different palette. And we’re huge fans of each other, and that shines through.