Happy Friday everyone! Join us for a special and unique Sit In Session featuring Lui Hill, an eclectic and positive musician influenced by Hip Hop, Jazz, Funk, and Punk. Today, Lui Hill will perform his unreleased song “Sidewinder,” delivering vibrant beats that will make you want to dance into the weekend. Experience Lui’s feel-good and going-out vibes in this Sit In On Friday Session.
His style is eclectic and positive. His musical journey is surely not completet, however Lui Hill seems to have found himself inmidst of his diverse and passionate world. Today, he’s performing his not yet released song “Sidewinder” for us and offers some vibrant beats that will make you wanna dance into the weekend. Find out more about his autobiographical album and how music allows him to reflect on his life and share relatable stories. And dive into Lui’s songwriting process and how he crafts lyrics that evoke emotions and create vivid imagery.
Who or what inspired you to do music?
People and their stories. Human inconsistencies. Heartbreak, pain and joy.
Which genre or which artist had the biggest impact on your musical style?
I can’t put a finger on one genre or one artist as I am too eclectic in my listening habits. Well I am for sure deeply influenced by 70’s funk, guess this will be forever in my musical DNA in a way. My first record and my first concert I attended was by Johnny „Guitar“ Watson. Stop everything right now and listen to his music if you haven’t 🙂 What a legend!
Your autobiographical album “Lui Hill” is extremely personal – would you say your life offers you great perspectives to write about or does music help you to gain new perspectives on your life?
I wouldn’t say that music helps me to gain new perspectives per se but I do reflect myself through music a lot. I think like every songwriter I walk through my life and surroundings with open eyes and ears, with some-kind of radio receiver connected to my mind. If something refuses to leave my head I have to open that container, write about it, but in a digestible form, make it more tangible for me and later hopefully for others.
What does your songwriting process look like? How do you decide what you’d like to tell people with your lyrics?
I used to have the music ready before writing lyrics. Now I more and more write down phrases or bits of lyrics whenever they come to mind. This helps definitely to start musical ideas too. But in the end I see the voice as an instrument, equal to the others, it needs to fit to the mood and to translate a feeling, that’s the premise. With my last single “How Many Moons“ I wrote the lyrics almost completely before having any chord or beat for the song. This was a new experience for me for sure! I try to present more and more emotional scenarios or places and pictures with the words I’m singing. I actually don’t know what I like to tell people with my lyrics, I guess people have a clear vision what a certain song tells them once they fall in love with it. I don’t want to destroy this experience by telling my vision.
Your latest release “How Many Moons”, came out in January, so in the middle of the pandemic. How do you experience working at the moment and which role does that song play for you?
So “How Many Moons“ was written right after the first lockdown in April/May. This song reminds me how everything was new, exciting and frightening at the same time. It’s actually quite a happy place when I think back to that time. Working on music back then felt definitely more inspiring than now, my brain is lacking inspirational situations at the moment. Now I feel I have to travel in my mind to distant places and write a lot more fiction. I don’t know who said this but I must have heard it in Jamie Lidell’s podcast „hanging out with the audiophiles“ that helped me through the pandemic oftentimes. So someone said that if you wanna write about the most paradisiacal time and place, you need to sit in a dark room without a window. It’s an extreme view on creativity and would disagree with it. Well, but sometimes the times we’re living in right now feel a bit like this. The dark room without a window.
Which advice would you give young artists struggling to create during the pandemic?
Don’t take your work too seriously once it’s kind of tangible. Just go to the next one and judge it a few weeks later. Be quick and playful, don’t care about what perfect kick- or snare-sound should be used, or any other detailed stuff. I try to do a sketch every day even if it’s just for 30 minutes. Recording some kind of sketch before I start to work on songs that
are more in the finishing process. A lot of these sketches might be crap but some starting points are really good and they become songs later. I think it’s also refreshing to write about something very disconnected from yourself, maybe just as a practice, try a story written from the view of an animal, tree or stone. A story that still will arouse a fascination in the listeners head.
What are you most looking forward to after lockdown? Do you have any specific goal for the next few years?
I wanna see my friends in South Africa again, be at Primavera Sound in Barcelona, maybe stage dive into sweaty people. For sure I’d love to play shows in-front of real people again, no doubt about this. We have a little tour lined up in spring 2022 throughout Germany – I can’t wait.
