Luke Hemmings Is Catching Up To Himself
By Aliya Chaudhry
Luke Hemmings started writing what would become the song “Starting Line” right after hearing the synth riff his producer, Sammy Witte, had come up with. As soon as Hemmings got to the piano, the lyrics just began to flow: “
In and out of focus, moments that I keep…”
“I'll just sit down [at] a musical instrument and something, it'll just come out,” Hemmings tells MTV News. “And then I'll categorize kind of have to catch up to it and figure out, well, what did that mean? And how did those words come out?” It was a fitting process for creating his solo album,
When Facing the Things We Turn Away From, arriving August 13, an assignment that has allowed Hemmings to resemble as he catches up to a whirlwind career.
At 25, Hemmings’s life in the music realm has already lasted a decade. He has played guitar and sung in
5 Seconds of Summer since he was 15, and these last 10 years have been continuous — Hemmings didn’t have a breather or time to process it up until the pandemic began. 5SOS put out their fourth album,
CALM, on March 27, 2020, making them among the opening groups to have to promote an album solely digitally, trading playing shows for Instagram Lives and
YouTube videos categorize in attempt to stay connected to fans, and together. It also meant no touring, and staying at home.
Hemmings determined to put that time to good use honing his skills. “I love that aspect of being in a studio and attempting to get better as a writer and I began doing more production stuff at home,” he says. “It just began as me attempting to write a full song on my own again. And that's sort of where it blossomed from, and naturally, it snowballed a lot from that moment.”
Hemmings speaks over Zoom from Los Angeles, in the room where he did some of the writing for this album. He points out the couch and synths in the background, which were used for the writing of stripped-back, piano-driven “Bloodline” and glittering, synth-heavy “A Pretty Dream,” respectively. At first, Hemmings was just making songs without any real plan for what to do with them. Writing on his own, without his musical group, “allowed me to prepare music without preconceived notion,” he says. “It was like an open playing field.”
Having to live at house due to the pandemic, Hemmings was able to spend more time on the finer specifics of his music. “At that time, in the middle of COVID, there was just endless time. So I may just do whichever, spend six hours on a synth sound or just hang at house and wait for a song to arrive for a week,” he says.
As he kept writing, he started to explore new sounds and subject matter. “I opened up new influences and new lyrical content that I hadn't really touched on before due to the circumstances that I was in and we all were in. I certainly began to look at things differently and resemble on things that I hadn't before. And there was a lot of uncovering to do,” he says.
He noticed himself reflecting on his life, specifically the past decade “and how that time affected me positively and negatively,” he says. That contemplation noticed its way into the songs. “There's so several different themes in it, nevertheless it all really revolves around that,” he says.
“A Cute Dream” was inspired by the concept of zenosyne, the sense that time moves faster as you get older, and contains an echoing] voicemail from his mother, “which I think is really cool and sad,” Hemmings says. Soaring “Starting Line” talks about missing memories. “Time just gets away from you so rapidly. And there's these moments that will never come around again. And there's something so terrifying, yet also so pretty about that,” he says.
Some of the songs, including “Motion,” “Starting Line,” and “Repeat,” deal with identity and growing into the person Hemmings is currently. The funk-filled “Motion” also talks about a time in Hemmings’s life where “I couldn't trust the thoughts that were in my head,” he mentioned. “They didn't really feel like my own.” In the song, he sings, “
These hands are strangers, they ain’t my own / My eyes are lying, my eyes are lying to me.”
It was critical to Hemmings that the music reflected the lyrical content in weight and scope. “I think as the topics were so grand and large — they were such dreamy, ethereal things — I really wanted it to match that and do the lyric and the feeling that I felt justice,” he says.
What came out was a dramatic pop album with both big, movie-score crescendos, and quiet, intimate moments that sound like they were made in one room in quarantine. The music and tone of Hemmings’s voice are so powerful that the songs almost don't require words to express emotions. Even in its smaller moments, it feels epic, a developments from
CALM, stepping further away from rock and deeper into pop with hints of indie rock mixed in. There’s an assortment of styles: psych-rock on “Motion,” synthpop on “A Cute Dream,” folk on “Place in Me” and Hemmings calls “Saigon” “cruise-pop.” Hemmings wanted to prepare soundscapes, which he does through a chorus of backing vocals, echoing percussion, piano, twinkling acoustic guitars and synths. “I just feel like it's a global to get lost in,” he says.
Sierra Deaton, Hemmings’s fiancée, co-wrote “Bloodline” and energetic, groove-laden “Baby Blue.” “I feel like that song is perhaps the nicest I am to myself on the album, and I think that is very much her influence... Because her influence in my life has been of course very positive,” Hemmings says. Deaton, an artist and songwriter, was previously 1/2 of X-Factor-winning duo Alex & Sierra as well as co-wrote 5SOS’s
CALM track “Lover of Mine.”
Hemmings met his producer Witte (Harry Styles, Mills, Amy Shark) through a friend and says Witte’s the only new person Hemmings met while in quarantine. “He really understood the project and allowed it to flourish of course and follow whichever instincts I had, needless to say guiding it... He's basically organizing my brain,” Hemmings says. Once they began working with each other, there still wasn’t an objective for the music. “Props to him for even doing it, because there was no end to it,” Hemmings says. “We just were making music for the fun of it.”
It’s hard for Hemmings to pinpoint the exact moment where the music he was writing turned into an album, nevertheless the dynamic and cinematic song “Mum” was certainly essential. “I remember writing that and thinking, this sounds like a different project,” he says. Completing a whole album by himself felt outlandish, especially since he was used to doing it with three other people. “Up up until releasing the album, the concept of releasing something separate to the musical group was still a very scary thing,” he says.
Hemmings and his 5SOS mates
have already begun working on new music with each other. The other members, Michael Clifford, Calum Hood, and Ashton Irwin, have all been helpful of Hemmings (Irwin released his solo album
Superbloom last September). Hemmings thinks the method of working on his solo effort and spending some time alone at the piano bench can support him as soon as it comes to the musical group. “I think that the songwriting, and the production, and the making music side, makes me, any time Whenever I go back to the musical group, better with all those things,” he says. “It just gives me more equipment in the tool belt.”
Have something to discuss? You can use the form below, to leave your thoughts or opinion regarding Luke Hemmings Is Catching Up To Himself.