Q&A with Stephen Gormley of Moon Looks On

Describe your sound.
We’re a rootsy, folky kind of pop band. It’s a lot of open-tuned guitars and electric guitars, with violins, pianos, bass and drums. I love to write, so there’s heavy lyrical content.

What are your influences?
People and literature. I grew up on every kind of music from The Mamas And The Papas, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks, to bluegrass, folk and trad. I love old school jazz as well, 1920s stuff. People and music really inspire me, and life, and what you go through, the ups and downs. I tell stories a lot about my own life.

What’s your songwriting process like?
A song for me usually gets written in about an hour, but then I spend a bit of time refining it. It could be a day, it could be a week. Usually the stuff that comes out the quickest is the purest from the heart. It’s like stream of consciousness. I usually start with melodies on the guitar – I do a lot of fingerpicking in open tunings.

You just released a new single…
The reception’s been really good so far. The morning it came out, it got picked up by the New Music Friday UK playlist. I had like 690 listeners on Spotify, and now I’ve got 7,000. It’s been getting a lot of radio play.

What was the inspiration for ‘Friends Keep Dropping’?
The song is about your journey through life. Everybody has friends and finds friends, and sometimes you lose friends. The same with loved ones. It’s an inevitable part of life that these things happen to people. I suppose the song is just about recognising that.

Are you working on more music?
On the musical journey for this record, I ended up working with a producer called Niall McMonagle, who is based in Windmill Lane Studios. He’s one of the heads of the studio there – we just developed a great relationship. Since then, I’ve pretty much recorded an album with Niall. We’ll have another single out in two months, and then we’ll have an album some time in the summer.