Voice Memory

Swooning, exquisite harmonies sweep across various parts of the four songs that make up the second EP, Fall In Time, from Brisbane's Charlie Mayfair, a real step up in every respect from their more acoustic debut EP, Watch My Hands, of a couple of years ago.

“I have a bit of a fascination with singing and voices,” singer, songwriter and keyboards player Hannah Shepherd admits. “I kind of always have. Like, I grew up singing in choirs and always just loved singing in groups; I was always the person to spark up a big singalong with my friends and stuff. So I guess my choir background obviously made it easy for me to work out harmonies – I don't even really need to think about it; it's second nature to me. But having, you know, three voices like we do that I know so well, it was really amazing fitting them all together and blending them and that sort of thing.

“I just find it so amazing, what a voice can do...the thing about the record is that there's never a place on the record where there's – oh, there are a couple of places where there are four – but there's never more than that so that's kind of easy to reproduce live. We're pretty true to being a rock band that actually plays live sort of thing, so…”

Joining Shepherd in Charlie Mayfair are fellow keyboard player and vocalist Irena Lysiuk, guitarist David Christensen and drummer Will Weightman, though on the second track on the EP, Stone, you'll hear the voice of recently departed fifth member Dave Di Marco, who cowrote the song with Shepherd.

“It sounds like he fell overboard or something,” Shepherd laughs, “but yeah, Dave – he was kind of the other lead singer – he's not finished with music; he's gone to do his soully stuff, so I guess he was kind of heading in a bit of a different direction musically to the rest of us. It was a really sad time just seeing him play and us playing without him, but it was the right thing to do. He's such a prolific songwriter and we all just wanted him to be happy, and it seems like what he's doing now is going to make him happy, so we're all happy for him...we haven't replaced him. We just rearranged a couple of our songs and obviously our live set is going to be missing his voice.”

As to what was driving Shepherd as a songwriter when she was writing for the EP, “it's funny,” she suggests. “I don't think we intended it but all the songs are all sort of about pretty important people in a couple of our lives, so I guess there's a bit of almost a nostalgic vibe to the songs."

Charlie Mayfair will be playing the following shows:

Saturday 15 September - The Grace Darling, Melbourne VIC
Thursday 20 September - Queens Wharf Brewery, Newcastle NSW
Friday 21 September - Brighton Up Bar, Sydney NSW
Thursday 27 September - Alhambra Lounge, Brisbane QLD