Hello reader,
How are you today?
Welcome back, or welcome if this is your first visit to SWT. Please look around the site and stay awhile. Our search bar at the top of each page is both lovely and comprehensive.
I’m excited to share another fantastic London-based artist making great music: Family Stereo. It’s the moniker for 25-year-old singer-songwriter Blake Watt, the son of English pop duo Everything but the Girl’s Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt. Family Stereo will release their debut album The Thread on July 31 via England-based indie label Bella Union.
According to a press release, Blake Watt quickly earned acclaim early on with songs such as “Robot Boy” and “My Favourite Band”, which drew on folk-pop influences such as Elliott Smith, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Adrianne Lenker.
Watt started performing professionally as a drummer in his early teens but transitioned to playing guitar when he was 15. A couple of years later, he started writing songs and honed his craft at UK festivals including Kendal Calling and The Great Escape. He also played at London’s Moth Club with a reunited Everything but the Girl.
As Blake says, “I think my writing has been getting more pared-back as I’ve progressed. I find more and more that simple is better. I love telling a story in the simplest way or conveying a feeling in the simplest way, with not too many frills.”
The album offers reflections from Watt on his travels, specifically focusing on distance and connection.
“I hope people give it time because it is quite an understated record, but we poured a lot into it,” Watt tells SWT. “I mainly think of it as a springboard to the stuff I’m currently writing though. I’ve already written the second album, and we’ve almost finished recording it, and I feel much more confident in my songwriting having gone through the process once already.”
In SWT’s opinion, one of the standout tracks on the album is “Waiting on Nina”. With its warm, summery acoustic foundation, luminous lap steel accents, and Watt’s deeply emotive vocals, the track elevates traditional country-tinged folk-rock into a compelling, immersive listen.
The song offers a beautiful, cinematic meditation on birth, innocence, and the passage of time, and perfectly showcases Watt’s fast-maturing talent.
It was one of the final songs Watt wrote for the album. He wanted a song that was “quite pleasant to listen to, and that felt upbeat melodically, as a lot of the album is on the slower side and quite introspective sounding.”
“We threw it all together very quickly, and I think it shows. Nothing really feels overcooked or complicated for the sake of it,” says Watt.
Watt got the idea for the song’s chorus early on and built off the rest of the lyrics from there. He wanted to convey the feeling of “coming out of my shell and not wanting to be closed off from things. However, after his girlfriend told him that her cousin had a baby, he thought “the metaphor of birth was a nice connective thread”, so he “structured the verses around this idea.”
“This idea of not wanting to be closed off from life is definitely integral to this song, and it runs throughout the album too,” he says. “A lot of the lyrics are about the distance with my partner who I was in a long-distance relationship with, but also this idea of getting in touch with things in my own head and not feeling disconnected from the world.”
It’s a very thoughtful and relevant sentiment, and one of the reasons we gravitated towards the song. We hope you check out the song and the rest of the album when it’s released!
You can connect with and listen to Family Stereo at the following links:
Website: Familystereo.net
Facebook: Family Stereo on Facebook
Instagram: Instagram.com/family.stereo
TikTok: Tiktok.com/@familystereo
Bandcamp: Familystereo.bandcamp.com
Spotify: Family Stereo on Spotify
YouTube: Youtube.com/@family.stereo
Apple Music: Family Stereo on Apple Music
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
