Snowy Nasdaq Can Let a Shit Song Be a Shit Song

As his alter ego Snowy Nasdaq, Liam Halliwell can’t stop making music. But a new album? Please that’s so 2013. Instead the Melbourne based musician is releasing a new song every month in 2014. Sure it kind of sounds like your cousin Randy when he went through his guitar stage, but Snowy has vowed to delete each song when the month is up and replace it with a fresh one. At least you don’t have to worry about over playing and killing your favourite song, he’ll happily do that for you.

NOISEY: I was reading on your website about this 12 month project that you’ve got, how did that come about?

Liam Halliwell: A friend of mine Alec runs a Melbourne based label, called Why Don’t You Believe Me Records and he just approached me one day a said, “Why don’t you do a single every month for the next 12 months?” It was January at the time and he new that I was sitting on a bunch of new stuff. I thought that’s great because I’m someone who definitely needs something to keep me motivated and keep moving along. The idea of doing an album seemed incredibly daunting, but the idea of doing one song every month and focus on that solely, just appeals to me.

Does chipping away at these little projects feel more achievable than getting caught up in this massive one?

I’m a perfectionist but I’m really easily distracted. That’s pretty contradictory. If I know I’m going to see something small through to the end, then I can just yeah, obsess over that and then get it out of my system completely. Once it’s there—it’s gone from me. We delete it after a month, each track replaces the last one.

Why the expiry date?

I mean on the Internet there’s always going to be a huge abundance of music and now there’s just a single focus for someone who hasn’t heard my music before. You might just go on and hear the one song and think, “Oh great, I’ll just wait for next month’s one to come along”. I end up hating things as well.

With the 12 month project are you stockpiling songs or leaving them to the last minute?

I’m sitting on lots of bits and pieces. I don’t really have a game plan for one song. I’ll just record a drum track when I have access to an electric drum kit or something like that. Or I might just record an idea on my phone and then piece them all together. The last track I recorded in heaps of different places: while I’ve been travelling, while I was home in NSW for Christmas, and on public transport and stuff. Just using whatever I’ve got. They’re motivated in spontaneous ways instead of reaching for some grand idea. So I’m sitting on lots of little bits, but I’m not sitting on any songs. And I never really am sitting on songs per se.

Do you think you’ll ever have a complete breakdown and get to the point where it’s the night before you’re meant to have a new song and you’re just smashing stuff out?

Yeah, hopefully! I’ll probably end up with who knows—

The greatest thing you’ve ever done.

Yeah or the shittest! But at least it’ll be unexpected.

Well it’d be authentic to the project and the timeframe I guess.

Absolutely, if something’s crap then so be it. That’s the document of that month, for whatever reason it turned out being shit.

The structure of your songs are quite erratic; is that something you’re purposefully aware of—to keep people questioning the structure as it goes? Or is that how you’re style has developed?

In terms of what I like listening to, I like the idea of listening to a song where you’re sort of prepared for anything to happen. I like listening to music in that frame of mind where you’re not listening in anticipation like, “this is where the chorus goes”. When I listen to music I want to be surprised. I try to just do something I’d like to listen to. Especially because I’ve heard the songs thousands of times, I want to listen back to it and you know find somethings structurally where I go, “fuck yeah, I’m glad I did that”. But then at the end of the day, really the songs that I’ve released are deep down, they’re really classic pop structures. I have lots of respect for pop structure, and the whole history of that. But to sort of distract that, that is going on underneath, I guess that’s the idea. To make that old thing sound kind of fresh. So if that works, that’s cool.

Snowy Nasdaq will be playing this month’s Noisey Presents show in Melbourne. Don’t forget to RSVP.