Seaforth are a fast up-coming Australian duo based in Nashville, Tennessee. Here, we interview Tom Jordan and Mitch Thompson about their recent success, returning to the road, their forthcoming releases and their recent collaboration with Mitchell Tenpenny.
Hi guys, how are you?The last year has been a bit better than last year for you guys!
Yes, it’s been a slight increase in happiness.
How’s it been been out on tour and finally being able to play these songs that have blown up during the pandemic?
It’s been great honestly, I mean it’s funny because for a second you forget how that felt but then to get out and do it again, at first it was like, ‘Oh, do we still have this gear and getting back into the swing of things and playing all these shows,’ it really reminded us why we do this.
Did you guys manage to see each other a lot during the last year?
Yeah, we actually live together, so a little too much.
It was good for us. For a while it was weird and then we ended up just finding some creativity and writing a bunch of new music and stuff, which was cool.
You’ve known each other since you were three, so how did you go from being childhood friends to becoming Seaforth? Can you talk about that journey?
Yeah, I mean it’s wild. We essentially met in preschool, so we have lot of fun memories from being three years old, obviously (laughs). We essentially grew up in the same area and everything. We had the same friends and we were obviously friends growing up and everything, but then it wasn’t until later in our teenage years that we started playing music together randomly at events and different things. Eventually as we got older, we started writing songs together and literally from the first song that we wrote – we’ve been friends our whole life and I think at that point, it was like, ‘Oh, damn this feels really special’. I think being friends our whole life really helps our musical connection and stuff – I feel like we had a lot in common and from literally the first time we wrote we felt like this is what we should be doing.
I know Tom, you spent some time in LA and then then you guys ended up in Nashville a few years ago, was there ever a time that you kind of wanted to go down the pop route or was it always country?
Tom: Yeah, I lived in LA for a while and I think Mitch, in that period, we were both trying to find ourselves musically. I’d always loved country music and I’d grown up with my parents always playing Johnny Cash and even Hank Williams Jr. and all different artists around the house and stuff, but it was never something that clicked for me. It’s funny discovering the first record of Keith Urban’s was a big moment for us, because obviously he’s Australian and seeing what he was doing in Nashville. From there, we just kept diving down the rabbit hole, but once we discovered it and once we really found that lane, it was just very obvious – that’s what I think we had been trying to find the whole time.
It’s an exciting time to be an international artist in Nashville right now, because I feel like Nashville is more receptive and the genre has changed so much. It’s kind of broadening and becoming a really exciting melting pot of different voices.
Yes it is. There’s just so much talent here now. I mean this has always been the music capital of the world, essentially, but it’s constantly diversifying and there are a lot of artists that are starting to kind of incorporate different elements into country music, because everything has to evolve. Us being international, we have our own version of country music, our own stories, our own reference points growing up. It wouldn’t feel genuine if we were singing about cowboy boots and stuff.
Well ‘Breakups’ is a universal reference point. Obviously we can’t not talk about that track – it’s completely blown up as a track over the past year and was written with two incredibly talented people. Can you talk about creating that track – was it written during the pandemic?
We wrote that around two years ago, it was the year before the pandemic hit. As you said, we wrote it with two incredibly talented people. We’d worked with them both before, we became really good friends with them and that day was just like any other day. I think we started an idea and Liz Rose was like, ‘Is this it? Are we on something good here?’ We scrapped it and started something that became ‘Breakups’. At that period of time, Tom was going through some relationship stuff that I think all our co-writers knew about. So, we talked about what’s going on with our love life, essentially. Then we wrote that story in the song and it kind of became a slight therapy session, I guess. We wrote the song, but we didn’t really realise the gravity of it until afterwards. We write so many songs during the week and we wrote that song and it wasn’t till like the week afterwards, listening to it that we were like, ‘wow, this is really special’. It came from such a real place and it took on so many lives over the years since we wrote it. Obviously, Tom had gone through that breakup, moving and leaving Australia, and moving to the US, then to us actually releasing it, it’s taken on so many lives. It’s a really special song, it was almost a dark horse, I guess you could say. After we put that down and recorded it, we knew that it was a really special song and just seeing the way that people have connected to it since has been really special for us.
Tom, I know that you produced the track too which is quite rare, often people write a track and pass it on and it becomes something different. That must be quite special to have your own hand and be able to produce it yourself.
Tom: Yeah, definitely. I mean, for us, we’ve always been perfectionists, which is a good thing and a bad thing at times, because it can be very time-consuming and overwhelming when you’re trying to do everything. I love writing and performing as an outlet for my creativity, but I just love creating. That was actually the first song that I produced for us and it’s cool, because it’s the most ‘you’ that it can be, instead of having other people involved and stuff, which is always great. We’ve been lucky to work with some incredible collaborators, but it’s cool to kind of just do it yourself.
It’s the most authentic version of your voice.
Mitch: Exactly. During quarantine, I actually had COVID when I sang the vocal. It was great. It’s definitely a timestamp on where we were at that time.
Obviously you’ve also collaborated very recently with Mitchell Tenpenny. I feel like you guys are both part of this wave of really fresh voices in Nashville, so how did you come to collaborate with him and how did that sort of song evolve?
Mitchell signed to the same label as us and obviously Nashville is kind of a small community once you’re in it and you’ve made the rounds. I think we we actually met Mitchell backstage at a Luke Bryan concert and we hit it off. We were writing with some of his co-writes and did a couple shows with him early on acoustically. Then we ended up booking a writing session with him. We were just going to see how it went and we wrote ‘Anything She Says’ that day. We ended up sending the song back and forth and trying to get the other one to cut it. He was like ‘you boys should cut it and release it’ and we actually sang the original demo. It got to a point where I think his team and everyone around was kind of like ‘this is a cool song, like you should do it’. He said ‘why don’t you feature on it with me, and we’ll put it out together’ and it ended up getting received a lot better than we all expected. He ended up naming the tour after the song and then taking us out with him. We got to perform that with him every night. That was our first song that went gold, we kicked a really serious goal with that song with him. I think it’s over 100 million streams or something like that in total. We love Mitch, so it was great to share it with him.
I think that’s just the cool thing about Nashville in general, people are always building each other up.
Definitely, it’s a family here, which Tom and I were so drawn to, it’s that family vibe where everyone’s trying to bring each other up.
You guys have been there for four years now, how do you think your sound has evolved in those years?
It’s just getting worse and worse really (laughs). I think it’s just a downhill slope riding by the day. No, it’s been a combination of both the town and just growing up and finding our niche. I think Nashville has a thing for sure and the way that people write songs here is very unique and the sounds that come out of Nashville are very unique. It obviously all depends on your surroundings. If we’d stayed in Australia, our sound would probably be different, but I think it’s all been very natural. We are at this point which feels the most authentic to us. We have this new music that we’re working on, we’ve really arrived at a place where we’re like ‘this is our sound and this is who we are,’ so we’re super excited to put out this new stuff and continue to evolve in a natural way and hopefully people will enjoy it.
I was going to ask, when can we expect new music?
We’re in an awkward spot because it’s coming to the end of the year and I would love to drop it right now, but then it’s about to be Christmas and we don’t want the music to get lost. I think it’s going to be looking like a top of next year situation, but most of it’s ready to go, I would love to just put it out today. It’s been so long since we’ve had music out, so we’re still going to get it out, but it’s looking like top of next year. If we can get a track out later this year, that’d be unreal.
Well it’s been lovely to talk with you both and hopefully get you back to the UK soon!
We cannot wait to get there, we’ve said since the beginning that we really want to focus on the UK as well. We can’t wait to get back.
