Oliver Hunt: “The main goal here is to do this for the immediate benefit of doing it”

There’s a lot of talent coming out of the north east, and one of its great talents is folk artist Oliver Hunt. He’s releasing his new single ‘Holding Out For You’ is out soon and he’s currently gearing up for a headline show at Newcastle’s The Lost Wanderer, time for a chat on his music and future plans!

Hi! Could you introduce yourself, your genre, and your musical influences?
“Hi! I’m Oliver Hunt, a songwriter from Durham, I currently live in Gateshead. My earliest musical influences would stem from my parents, my first concerts I remember attending were tributes for Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Elvis, Pink Floyd. I started to develop my taste and influence of songwriting when I discovered some of my Dad’s Neil Diamond albums, ‘Home Before Dark’, and ‘12 Songs’. This was also my first introduction to Rick Rubin. 

When I was 15 I made a conscious effort to expand my musical taste, having woken up to Bob Dylan’s ‘Positively Fourth Street’ on my fm radio alarm clock on a snowy day I asked for a compilation album for my birthday. I started collecting Q magazine in 2010, In the first magazine I got I received a free CD – ‘Born in the USA’, a collection of songs from up and coming Americana artists. This introduced me to Fleet Foxes, Phosphorescent, Band of Horses, and most importantly, The Avett Brothers. 

More recent inspirations can be traced back to these early inspirations, having been introduced to a lot of American folk music from The Avett Brothers. This led me to a love for Appalachian folk music, it led me to Townes Van Zandt, and it even led me to Dr. Dog.”

What inspired you to start making music and what inspires you to keep going?
“Similarly to the previous answer, The Avett Brothers inspired me into picking up a banjo. Watching them live inspired me to want to do something similar. The joy, the fun of it, the emotion, it all built up inside me… for 12 years until I actually got to perform music live for the first time! It was a long process, but I’m really pleased I am finally able to write songs, and have people listen to them. It’s even more gratifying having been thinking about it for so long, and now to finally do it, it is almost in service of my younger incapable self.”

What was the inspiration behind your new single? What was the writing process like?
“The inspiration came weirdly as I was trying to sleep. As I was drifting off I could hear a gentle piano playing a melody as I was picturing a black and white scene of cobblestones I think in Durham, where I grew up and lived long into adulthood. It’s happened before where I’ve heard a melody and have fallen asleep after, forgetting how it went by the morning. I was glad this time I was able to force myself awake to capture it! I made a voice note in my phone of the melody I heard as best as I could and then fell asleep.

I knew I liked the melody but I wasn’t sure what the song was going to be about so before listening back to the voice note I gave myself a few days to think up the inspiration. I was going to work and wanted to listen to it but forced myself not to as I wasn’t in a place to dedicate time to it. When I felt ready, and I had time, I listened and wrote out the first ideas that came to my head. 

I had written a song a month before about time, and I think that idea was still weighing on me a bit. I wrote out four verses, and played around with them a bit, decided how to structure it and built upon those initial ideas and thoughts. Often writing is like a puzzle, and you just need to find the right pieces to put in the right places, or at least convince yourself of that notion. Often I will write it in a jumble, and the fifth verse is the third verse for example, and once reviewing the song I have to move it in order for it to make narrative sense. The initial phase is often just spewing ideas onto a page and then reordering them to make sense. This often requires frequent rewrites just to get the ideas scrambling in my head written down and evidenced. For this song I made 5 rewrites until I had the finished layout on the 6th. 

The line ‘Holding Out For You’ came out as I was playing through, rehearsing the verses on my guitar, I didn’t have to think about it at all, other than ‘huh.. Why did I say that, does it work?’ and sure enough I think it works very appropriately with the rest of the song, and with what I was wanting the overall message to be. What I like about the song is that it represents a positive idea of what the future could be, but also holds an element of the unknown, nobody knows what’s going to happen, there’s always an element of uncertainty when addressing it. 

The song was mostly recorded in my flat in Gateshead, using my guitar, banjo and keyboard. A few other elements were recorded at my Grandma’s house. My auntie, Charlotte Sellers, superbly recorded the violin sections in 10 minutes, and I added my Grandma’s slightly out of tune piano in the background too. It all came together very nicely, from the initial idea of the melody to the experimentation during the recording process.”

Who would you like to work with and where would you like to perform in the next three years?
“It’s funny, I started writing songs and playing music with no specific intentions or desires other than to have confidence and take enjoyment out of doing it. Wherever it gets me I’m satisfied at just that, not to say I don’t have ambitions, playing for more people and growing my audience would be fantastic. But the main goal here is to do this for the immediate benefit of doing it and I don’t like to look too far ahead towards ‘what could be’. That said, I see Red Rocks Amphitheater as the pinnacle, definitely not in the next three years, but even attending a gig there would be a dream come true.

As for who I would like to work with, I think the answer in short is friends. I would love to be able to do this with people close to me, and I have a lot of friends much more talented than myself who I’d like to play music with.”

What tip would you give your younger self to make sure you don’t give up on your dreams?
“I would tell him to not worry about time, don’t worry about age. Just take in all the experiences and one day when the time is right you’ll start writing. To be fair, when I was younger I had a mature outlook and I almost dedicated my 20s to travel and romance, I didn’t want to waste those years focused on creating something and I think it’s lead to a more rounded approach to this now, where I am confident in my ability to write and more focused on what I’d like to achieve.”