POST-BURNOUT
PHOTO BY JACK JOHNS. COURTESY OF DSTNCT SPACE.
For the London-born musician Harry Lloyd, music was something which had an immediate impact on his life. “The earliest memory of [music] was dancing to…it was either Prince or James Brown, I think, and I was like three years old, and I just felt the rhythm and was like, ‘What is this?! This is so good!’ [Laughs],” he tells Post-Burnout. “I think I ended up, actually, trying to learn to moonwalk, and I had my first childhood accident, trying to moonwalk, I think, when I was, like, four or something. [Laughs].” He adds, “That was my first, early memories of music, is what it can do to the mind and to the body and to the heart, and how important it is for all of us; to allow us to see that everything always turns out OK.”
At age eight, Harry got into pop punk music, from listening to the likes of blink-182 and Sum 41, and began drumming and singing in a band soon after. The experience of creating music with a larger collective elevated his love for the medium even further. “I used to sing from behind the kit,” he says, “and I remember the excitement of that feeling of being in a band and you’re all connected in some way; this thing that you share and the reaction that people got from it, and how much joy it spread.”
At the same time, as a natural storyteller with an interest in other people’s tales, Harry also became interested in wordsmith raconteurs, like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. These interests in music and people’s stories were bubbling up at a similar time in his youth. He explains this with an anecdote from his childhood: “I like the idea that, in a song, hopefully, or through music, you can better understand where someone’s coming from – like, the angle that they look on life – and, therefore, you write from a perspective of…a compassionate one, I guess. ’Cause I remember this story where my dad… – when I was about seven or something – we were at this petrol station, and we were going through this petrol station, and we’d stop off, and he’d be like, ‘Oh, you can pick a chocolate bar or something.’
“So, I’d go in, and I’m quite high-energy – I can be almost ADHD – so, I’d be looking at all these colours and being like, ‘Whoa! So much choice! Like, which one should I go for? Like, how am I going to make the right decision?’ So, I’d be in there for, like, five to ten minutes, just being like, ‘Hmm, which one should I go for?’ So, my dad would be outside, just chilling and probably talking to someone and having a cigarette, and he was talking to this guy, and I came out, and the guy [had] quite beaten-up clothes, like, long, scraggly beard, and I asked my dad, ‘How do you know that guy, dad? And where did you meet him?’ He was like, ‘Oh, no, I don’t know him,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, why did you end up talking to him?’ and he said, ‘Because everyone’s got a story to tell,’ and I really feel that.”
Later in life, Harry became quite peripatetic and took great interest in travelling and learning about and from other cultures. With consistent travelling, Harry could find himself in places where English wasn’t widely spoken and where he could not speak the native language. In these situations, he used music as a universal tongue and icebreaker. “I spent some time in Cuba, and I remember I was just learning guitar and I could play the piano,” he says. “I was learning a few chords then, but I travelled everywhere with a guitar, just because you go to a place, and you turn up as a guy with a guitar, and they’re just like, ‘Come have some chicken! Some pollo! Please sit down!” And suddenly you’re jamming with some people, not really knowing how to play really well at that moment, and suddenly there’s an immediate icebreaker, where you just go, ‘We’re all from the same thing’ – and that’s what I believe; everything’s connected – and when you play music to someone, there’s some sort of immediate reminder of that feeling.”
Although Harry didn’t always possess this confidence to perform live. During his early experiences in bands, he would often struggle to make eye contact and shake hands with attendees. He began performing solo gigs to help combat this. “I started to do a bunch of open mics, you know, where you turn up at an open mic show or something, and play a couple of songs,” he says. “And I found myself getting on stage, and I would be able to play my songs and express my songs, but I couldn’t be myself when I spoke. So, I was like, ‘OK, that’s a different skill that I’m going to have to learn,’ and I remember giving myself a bunch of open mics – I wrote down a hundred open mics – and I went to every one of them, and it was after twenty-seven, I remember, where I was like, ‘Hey! I’m being myself! This is me! Like, I can actually tell a joke as myself, and I can say hello to people and not feel all strange and weird.’”
As Harry was growing as a musician, he had a major setback. In 2015, he was working as a ski instructor in the French Alps. “I loved doing that,” he says. “And it was great, and it was well-paid, and I got to learn languages with it, like French and Russian, and that was awesome, and it was like my university.” However, whilst working there, he suffered a severe back injury from a skiing accident, which left him in bed for almost a year and threatened to paralyse him. But rather than let it get him down, Harry utilised this time to focus on what it was that he wanted to do with his life. “I was really yearning to do something more of service, and really be able to spread more of a message of joy through something,” he says. “And I remember being in bed and just having all this time; so much time I had. Where most people are like, ‘Oh, I’m so busy’ or ‘I don’t have enough time to do the things I want to do,’ that’s all I had time to do; was just do the things I wanted to do, within the reach of what I could, in terms of mobilisation.”
Harry spent this time honing his skills on guitar and getting inspired as a songwriter by reading great poets’ works. He then formed the indie folk project Waiting For Smith. Waiting For Smith initially started as a band (in fact, the project’s name came from their original drummer never showing up to band practice), but nowadays it is mainly a solo project of Harry’s. The reason for the shift was not only to have more control over the direction of the music but also to free him up for collaborations. He explains, “I just thought, if I do it by myself then I can collaborate with people, along the way. And that’s something I really like, and I’ve always enjoyed doing that, through travelling. So, I think the big difference is just difference of opinion, and you’re less likely, I’m hoping, to fall out with yourself [Laughs] than you are with everyone else.”
Currently residing in Utrecht, Netherlands with his girlfriend, they took a holiday to South Africa to take some time off, and Harry accidentally ended up recording an album with a local choir while there, instead. Raised Up is the album, which is expected to be released next January, and is produced by the Grammy Award-winning producer Danton Supple, who is known for his work with the likes of Coldplay, U2, Elbow, and Kylie Minogue. The shimmering and uplifting songs that the album promises can be heard on its two singles which are already released, “White Light Of Love” and “Let Light In.”
Harry goes into greater detail on the album, as well as discussing how he got Danton’s attention, working with him, his thoughts on production, how different cultures influence his music, how Brexit affected his travelling, how he ended up making an album whilst on holiday, and more on today’s episode of POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… at 17:00 (IST). Catch it on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts.
Waiting For Smith will perform at the Camden Assembly, London, on Thursday the 19th of October. Tickets are available here. You can follow Waiting For Smith on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok.
Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.