Noah Dillon
On his new EP, love for Perth and Signature Dishes.
PINNIES: First of all, congrats on the EP release! What sort of music were you listening to during the writing and recording process?
NOAH: Thank you! I think I was smashing a lot of Phoebe Bridgers, a lot of Fontaines D.C. and I just found this new artist from America called Briston Maroney that I was really digging.
PINNIES: I love the title of the EP, “Don’t Change For The World (Like It’s Changing Me),” I think that’s such a nice piece of advice. Can you tell us a bit about that title choice.
NOAH: The title is a lyric from the last section of “Make You Cry” and that song is about trying to express to someone how the social influences you have when you’re growing up or in a relationship can change you for good or for bad and sometimes you need to take yourself out of the situation so you’re not changed by the world. It’s sort of a reminder to myself that bad things can happen but they don’t need to dictate who you are.
PINNIES: Last Friday you got to play your first headline show in quite a while. How did it feel walking out onto the stage for the first time in months and what was the energy of the crowd like?
NOAH: Oh it was crazy! It really feels like a puzzle piece that’s been missing in our formula as a band because playing live is such a big thing for us and the songs were written to be performed, so it was amazing.
PINNIES: Had you played the tracks from the EP live before?
NOAH: Nah this was the first time, which is crazy because we learned the songs to record them but it’s been about 10 months since then, so we had to sort of re-learn them and make them sound like the record again, which was really fun.
I think when you record, there’s no way of not getting sick of the songs. You’re listening to them and recording them over and over and over. But then being able to perform them live, you remember the reasons you wrote those songs and why you loved them in the first place. So yeah it was really nice.
PINNIES: All the outfits in the music video for “That’s Just How I Feel” are iconic, did you curate them yourself?
NOAH: Yeah! I designed them all myself and then Claudia Genovese made that massive dress. I actually directed that video myself, which was really fun and it was my first experience doing that. I love the visual side of things. We worked with a videographer called Daniel Hilderbrand and the poor guy just copped it from me. I’d just give him the most crazy ideas and he’d usually be like “there’s no way we can do that,” but he let me have fun with the costumes so that was good.
PINNIES: Do you have any hobbies you’ve been doing in lockdown? Or new interests you’ve discovered
NOAH: I’ve gotten really into running, which I sort of always have been. But I think through lockdown I just needed it so badly to get out of the house everyday. So yeah I’d say running and cooking which are kinda healthy so I think they'll probably serve me pretty well in my normal life and they’re probably things I should’ve been doing before lockdown.
PINNIES: What sort of cuisine are you cooking? Any signature dishes?
NOAH: My specialty is a fish curry and then I also do a shrimp saganaki.
PINNIES: I was looking through your inspo playlist for “Matthew McConaughey” and I saw you’ve got “Ghost” by RAT!hammock on there, which has one of my favourite outros of all time. Have you got a favourite outro that just floors you every time you hear it?
Noah: Yes. the Phoebe Bridgers song called “I Know the End” it’s like the last song on that album. That outro is just crazy good. I love it. It’s so so so so special.
PINNIES: What’s your favourite Matthew McConaughey movie?
NOAH: That’s hard... I’m gonna say the wolf of Wall Street cos that’s the first time I actually realised who he was. And that was the funniest thing to shoot in the music video we did where I was pretending to be him doing the chest pump thing.
PINNIES: I’m thinking of moving to Perth one day, what are the biggest perks of living there?
NOAH: Ayeee! Yeah I love Perth. Heaven is a place in Perth. It’s such a nice in-between of having everything you’d want in a big city but still having a small town vibe. Plus the beaches and nature are absolutely incredible and especially the music community, it’s so tight-knit. I think because it’s so separated from the rest of Australia the community atmosphere in Perth is unlike anywhere else in Australia because you literally have to fly 5 hours to get to another major city.
PINNIES: If you had to move anywhere else in the world where would you go?
NOAH: Part of me wants to say Seattle because I’ve been there and I love heaps of bands from Seattle, but then another part of me wants to say somewhere like Copenhagen.
PINNIES: Would you prefer a song with amazing lyrics and an average melody or an amazing melody but average lyrics?
NOAH: Amazing lyrics, average melody. 100%. I feel like lyrics that are really good undeniably speak to me and hit me so hard but a melody that’s really good may be catchy, but doesn’t have the same sentimentality that the lyrics would.
PINNIES: Interesting choice, are you into poetry?
NOAH: Yeah I really was when I was in school and then I sort of realised that I could do poetry and music together and that would be a song hahaha. Now I sort of fluctuate between reading lots of poetry and not reading much poetry but I think it’s an amazing art-form.
