Scott O’Brien (Hooch, Smut Peddlers)
SPB: How is the approach to your solo work different than with Smut Peddlers?
O'Brien: My solo work, which has actually turned into a new collaborative band called Hooch, was a way to work on music I wrote that was somewhat stylistically different from Smut Peddlers. I’ve pretty consistently written music since I started playing guitar and a lot of it turned into Smut Peddlers songs in some form. But, there were a lot of ideas that didn’t fit the style of that band, so I held on to those ideas to be used at a later time.
The way Smut Peddlers usually worked was one of us brought an instrumental musical idea to practice and then the band worked it into a song in a collaborative process. Once the instrumental portion of the song was completed, John would write the lyrics/vocal melody and then we all would fine tune it if we had any ideas.
Recently, I began taking some of the ideas that didn’t fit with SP and working them into full songs. Before starting Hooch, I was writing and recording everything as solo work under my own name. But, now I take the mostly completed solo ideas to the new band and we work on the songs as a group. Which has been great because they come up with ideas for their parts that add a lot to the music.
With Hooch, it’s also been fun to take on the vocal and lyrical duties and perform the music live. When I approach a new song now, I am thinking of how a guitar part can fit with a vocal melody, whereas with SP, I usually was more concerned with coming up with a cool sounding part and not necessarily how it would work with vocals. I’ve also had to come up with guitar parts that I can play and sing over at the same time, which was not something I ever worried about in SP.
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