Hauskey is excited to share his debut single, Slow. The track has already racked up heavy rotation in his home country, with the influential Triple J station showing it impressive support. Today the track’s journey spreads global via Slowplay + Republic/Polydor Records.
Slow is a song of endless possibilities. It’s a heady cocktail of Tame Impala, Kevin Abstract, Mac DeMarco. Charm personified but with a louche kick and drive. Groove-heavy, groove-laden. A song that whistles between your ears and lodges firmly in the cranium. A strong, colourful start for this young Aussie dreamer.
Andy AKA Hauskey writes, performs, and produces his records, and whilst this heralds his first audacious steps, Hauskey has led a colourful musical life that already reads like a low-budget arthouse film script. Our protagonist is right on the cusp; sink or swim?
Let’s rewind a bit. Back to Andy finding a John Coltrane record in his mum’s collection. Not The Beatles, not Bob Dylan, nor Rolling Stones or The Eagles, nor any of those other classic but cliché ‘discoveries’ we all found for ourselves during those formative, impressionable ‘so this is music’ years. Andy had more of a penchant for seminal US saxophonists, apparently. Naima, he recalls, was the song that raised a cluster of epiphanies, a veritable constellation of lightbulbs dazzling over his teenage head.
At thirteen he wrote his first songs. Looking back through a folder of lyrics he’d rediscovered from that era, he won’t share them. Words that tried too hard to be poetic. Poetry for the sake of it. Why use fifty words when you could use five just as effectively? “A great song is like a great movie” he muses, “you become so engrossed in it that you ‘become it’ and forget you’re even watching a movie. That’s what good music should do too.”
Andy studied at Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. It’s an incredibly competitive school to get into it. Selective. Like The BRIT School but without the stigma. Noteworthy alumni include Hugh Jackman and Frances O’Connor. It was an inspiring place to be around, but it was expensive to navigate day-to-day, and Andy’s funds ran perilously low. Where most of us would have gathered up a few particulars and turfed them on eBay, Andy started his own music school. This wasn’t simply teaching the rudimentary shapes of power chords for pocket change, this was a fully-functioning, fully staffed, multi-branch school with over 500 students. Bold move.
One track mind. Songs and more songs. Keep writing, keep improving, keep going. All decisions made were to weave himself into this position; arrowing sonically adventurous pop music into the hearts and minds of the musically curious, and then everybody else. That’s the plan.
