1. You started making music during the COVID pandemic. What inspired you to begin creating music?
I realized that I would probably have a lot more free time, I was working now working from home, couldn’t leave the house. I’ve always had a guitar but never bothered to learn to play it properly.
So it seemed like a good opportunity to do something productive with the spare time I had.
2. Mustard is trying their best to understand the human condition. Could you share with us what a ‘midlife crisis’ is. How did this experience influence and inspire your album?
So, I was 32 when COVID struck I had a 2 year old and and 8month old. I felt like I may have been losing a bit of my self identity around that time also. Kids can sometimes do that to you.
So then I started learning to play music, write songs, mix it etc and got super hyper focused on it and my other half said “Maybe this is your midlife crisis?” and I thought that it would be funny to use that as the name of whatever it was I was doing at the time.The main idea of that record was just me learning, so before it came to be anything I was just like “I’m going to write some songs that represent the array of genres that I like and try and include much as possible, for myself’, which is why there is everything from ska punk, dub, rap, a bit of drum n bassy stuff. I never really planned on sharing it with the world but a few friends listened to Live Without You and Old Dog and said I needed to put it out there. It was another 6months before I had the confidence to put the really old versions on Soundcloud.
The title track was actually just this silly little thing I had wrote that had no lyrics and stuck the end on for fun. Then I was like oh this could be something so wrote the lyrics around with it.
3. What is your creative process?
Um, I don’t really know. I usually just sit at my computer and play about with my little midi keyboard and guitar and hear something that pricks my ears. For example the verse for Old Dog I wrote whilst just watching my kids when my other half was working during Covid. Then the chorus came to me when I was walking my dog Aizee who is 15 and said “Urgh you’re like this old dog I can’t put down’ and then the rest kind of wrote itself.
4. You are the Diddy Kong of Ska Punk International. How did you achieve this? Could you tell us more about Ska Punk International?
Chris is really bad at mario kart and lost a bet, which is why he is releasing the new record.
That’s a joke, but he is rubbish at Mario Kart and I easily beat him 😉
Chris is lovely, I started talking to him just before I started re-recording everything and he tweeted he wanted to put this comp. out to raise money for Cancer. We had lost a family member during Covid to cancer a few months before so I was like hey. I’ll do Material Girl, my mum loves that song. So I did it and sent it to him and said something like “I’m pretty sure I may have committed a crime against music, don’t feel like you have to use it. Then a few months later my phone starts blowing up and I’m like oh god have I done something?! Then I was getting tagged in all these posts it was crazy. So from that point we got to know each other a bit better, he was really supportive of what I was doing at the time. Then recently I sent him a cover of a song I’ve done for Songs 4 Moms 2 and he just said
“Holy Shit, have you got anything else you’ve been writing’ and I sent him a few other songs and he said “Holy shit” again and now we are here haha.
I didn’t really expect that to happen.
5. #SkaTwitter or #TwitterSka?
SkaTwitter – All day long.
6. Mustard loved your cover of Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss with Celine Piquette. Could you share more about how this cover happened?
Thank you so much, it’s still crazy people like my music.
I had a really old version I had done of it when I was recording using the internal laptop mic, it was really really old. I really liked it but never done anything with it as it was using the sample from the track.
I spent a while asking people if anyone knew who might want to be involved but to no avail. I then started listening to Checkered Past Podcast and Celine had a good sense of humour and thought she might be up for it.
I hadn’t really talked to Celine much online at this point, but was talking to Joey so asked him initially then I got to know Celine better. She absolutely nailed it and so glad she was involved. Love those guys.
7. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
Oh so many people. I got to know Andy B of Andy B and the World during lockdown. Lovely human and really supportive of what I have been trying to do and he is really locally to me and we have talked about doing a one off song together at some point.
Seriously people just need to ask and I’ll be down. I had to learn it all myself so getting to work with people who have been doing this much longer than me and seeing their creative process is all part of the learning experience for me.
8. Do you have any upcoming projects in the works?
New album, couple other things but way too early to say. Just follow me on Twitter and you’ll find out haha.
Music Shelf With Mustard 