Rain in Summer are a Scottish duo from Thurso, in the very north of Scotland. They produce fusions of light pop sounds with heavier, more rock influences. They are managed by Night Owl Music Promotions and previously appeared on Night Owl’s podcast. The band have collaborated on demos with fellow Thurso local, Robbie McNichol from band Forgetting the Future, and I wanted to know how they have moved on from this.
I had a chat with Liam Morrison and Ewan Deering who make up the duo. We discussed changes in musical tastes and their plans for a new album. We also spoke about the three demos they played in a recent Instagram post, which you can have a listen to in the link at the bottom of this article.
Were the demos played in your recent Instagram post written and recorded recently?
“They were really recent, in the past month or so.” Liam went on to say, “we do have stuff from the pandemic, we stopped writing for one or two years…I couldn’t get back into the swing of writing.” He also discussed what he called a “massive creative block but the new stuff [the demos] is us getting back into the swing of things, writing and recording.”
Did you find it difficult to get back into writing and recording after not doing it for so long?
Liam answered this one, “Yeah I think so, over the pandemic I changed quite a lot, my writing style and music taste had changed from when I was originally writing, so it was difficult to write in that different style.” He went on to describe the change as “a natural progression but it was still difficult.”
Did your experiences with lockdown and the pandemic push you to create new music?
“Because we couldn’t go outside, it was quite easy to get caught in your own head.” However, Liam progressed onto say that this was “good for writing because it gave you time to think, but not being able to go outside or do anything catches up with you…made it a bit more difficult to focus with so much going on at once.” He concluded by saying “so I think in that respect, it was quite difficult to get back into it.”
On the podcast you did with Night Owl Music Promotions, you mentioned your music influences being bands like Blink-182 and Green Day, have these changed?
Liam began this answer, “it’s mostly changed now. For me, I’ve definitely gone down more of a pop route, really into The 1975 right now.” Ewan continued by saying “for me, I’ve always been into way more obscure stuff. With me and Liam, our music tastes have never been the same.” Ewan went onto explain that “the contrast is good because it gives us two, sort of, different writing styles. Obviously with the drums and stuff that I write and then Liam with the melody and stuff that he writes, we put them all together and it creates a nice thing.”
When you were first starting out, did you find the contrasting styles more easy or difficult to work with?
“When we first started as a band, neither of us could really play our instruments that well. It helped in that respect because there wasn’t a music taste at that point because we were just kind of creating sounds, hoping for the best.”
“I think now as we’ve gotten better at our instruments and have developed proper music tastes, I don’t think it’s that much of an issue.” Liam continued, “through habit, I think we’ve found what works for us and our writing and we just stuck to that method. Regardless of our music tastes, our techniques have stayed the same.”
How does the process begin when you’ve been writing the demos or other songs?
Liam answered, “normally I will do all the songwriting and then give it to Ewan and we’ll add drums to it and expand on it together from there..it normally starts off with a vocal line or something with no melody, just purely words written down. Then, I’ll mess about on the guitar for a while and try and just slot that in somewhere.”
Is there anyone you’ve been listening to quite heavily while in the process of recording?
“Getting studio time is really difficult, so when we start to add things, nine times out of ten the band that we were listening to when we wrote it is different when it comes to recording. For example, for the last thing we wrote, an album called ‘Rejected’, I was listening quite heavily to ‘Nimrod’ by Green Day, so there’s quite a lot of twinges of ‘Nimrod’ in there. As it progressed, it moved away from the ‘Nimrod’ sound a little bit because the music taste changed, so it turned into its own thing eventually.”
Following what you said there, have the demos you played in the Instagram video changed from when you previously wrote them?
“I think they’ve changed quite a bit since then. The first one, ‘City Girls’, it has violins and stuff in the back ground with a sort of orchestral sound to it. ‘Her’, the second one, has got a bunch of chorus lead guitars. It’s nothing like we’ve ever written previously. It’s definitely a lot more poppy because right now I [Liam] have been listening heavily to ‘Being Funny in a Foreign Language’ by The 1975, so it’s all just coming from that.”
What do you plan to do with the demos and other songs?
Ewan began, “with the current songs we have, we’re following up on our last album, like Liam previously mentioned, that was called ‘Rejected’. It’s going to be called ‘Cigarettes’ which is going to have roughly 10 or 11 songs.” Liam chimed in, “I’m aiming for 13.”