Keep On Carrying On

"I’ve never been one for updating my Facebook, so that people know what I’m doing,” says Treays, on the line at midnight London time.

“I didn’t really have news, I wasn’t playing any shows, so I just stopped telling people what I was doing... I’ve never been a person who’s on the internet a lot anyway. It’s not the way I live my life, so it was easy for me… I just turned off my phone, basically.”

Treays was plenty busy though, amassing 180 finished songs in the lead-up to his third album, Carry On The Grudge. Though by his own admission, “That doesn’t mean they’re all good. A lot of people are like ‘wow!’ but a lot of them are shit.

“This has always been the case with every album I’ve done, I’ve written a lot of material. I’m hoping to be like Tupac when I die, I want albums coming out for years and years...”

The 12 songs that made it onto the album were written and recorded while Treays was out of the spotlight, some older than others. “Don’t You Find was written relatively soon after Kings & Queens, but a lot of people have been saying, ‘Oh, it’s such a departure from where you were’ and all this. I wrote that about three weeks after Kings & Queens came out. I’m always jumping around from different genres anyways. By the time it hits the public’s ears, I’m onto something new.”

"I’m hoping to be like Tupac when I die, I want albums coming out for years and years..."

Long-time fans will notice Treays’ divergence into stronger singing territory on the new record, a surprising move from the man who penned wordy hits like If You Got The Money and Sticks ‘N’ Stones. “I suppose there’s a lot less words in this record, so it lends itself more to singing rather than a talking thing. I was purposely looking to take words out a bit and say more with concise sentences and phrases.

“If you look at a lot of young musicians who started off doing music at a young age, a lot of us use narratives because it’s a good way to get out what you’re saying. It keeps you in a box of having to write for certain storylines. And that’s really great but I’m a bit bored of it... It wasn’t really the type of music I wanted to make anymore, at least not at that moment. I never say never, but the story type of songwriting didn’t feel as poignant to me while doing this record.”

Treays took the music of Townes Van Zandt and Ryan Adams as inspiration. “I think it was good for me because it put me into a mode of thinking about things in a traditional light, which was something I’d never done before. Trying to work inside those restraints was fucking annoying to be honest, because it made me realise I wasn’t quite as good a songwriter as I thought! I had to go back to square one, and learn what I was doing. I think it was worth it.”