Winnie Mcquinn - Sunfruits Interview
When and where were you born? What was your childhood like? When did you first begin to fall in love with music and art? Were these things that were relevant around your household growing up? Do you have any siblings?
For me (Winnie), I was born in Melbourne / Naarm in so-called Australia. I was lucky to grow up in a musical and arts focused household with both my parents being full time sound artists. This really influenced me in a way that only became stronger as I realised that I wanted to pursue music as a teenager. I started playing music with friends towards the end of primary school and into early highschool which became more serious during highschool where I started playing in bands around Melbourne. I think I started to be fully engulfed my music in mid high school where I really started to develop my own tastes and dive headfirst into music. This grew a lot once I started playing in bands and really started meeting people in the beautifully diverse and vibrant music community that exists in Melbourne / Naarm.
What would you and your friends do for fun growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years? When and where did you see your very first concert? When did you realize you wanted to spend your life pursuing music and all things creative?
I was a bit of a ratbag as an early teen so a lot of skateboarding (badly), visiting storm drains and just generally being a nuisance. I was also pretty into sports as a kid which was then replaced my music. I think my parents took me to some jazz gigs as a 6 month year old baby in NYC and I’m sure I was physically present at some of their own experimental sound shows but my first memories of a show I chose to go to was a stadium Rap concert featuring Eminem, Lil Wayne and Hilltop Hoods. It was around 2012 when I was 12. I realised I wanted to pursue music and all things creative during the end of high school when I was playing in a band and starting to wrap my head around creating and releasing music as well as touring it. I distinctly remember booking an east coast Australian tour whilst in a year 12 Philosophy class, didn’t get a great mark in that exam.
What initially inspired the band to form and when was this exactly? When and where did you guys first get together to jam and rehearse and what was that initial chemistry like between everyone?
Gene and I initially got together after first playing together in a previous band that disbanded and bonded over a love of psychedelic music. This album and previous singles were all written not in a live sense with the whole band, but rather in isolation with Gene and I sending each other demos until the songs were relatively finished. Through playing the songs live and touring, the band chemistry really grew strong and it became clear that it would be better to open it up to be a collaborative process. From this point we got together as a full band and spent 10 days down on the Great Ocean Road near Kennett River / Gadubanud Country recording the album with Theo Carbo. This experience was magical and brought us all closer together musically and as friends.
The band just released their most recent record “One Degree”. Tell me about writing and recording this record and what the overall approach and vision for the material was. Would you mind walking me through some of the backstory to some of the songs that are featured on the album?
The process for ‘One Degree’ was a pretty drawn out one. The demoing process for some of the songs started as early as 2019 between Winnie and Gene sending snippets of songs back and forth between themselves. Lyrically a lot of the songs are based around environmentalism and climate change as well as general societal anxiety and how that is felt on an individual level. This was really honed in during the recording period which was done between lockdowns in mid 2021. The overall vision for the record was to make an album that symbolized how we all felt in regards to climate, society and relationships with other people and how you can find solace in one another, despite the world falling apart around you. It was also an attempt at critiquing the current status quo upheld by governments and corporations around the world with their anarcho-capitalist mindset and general disregard for humanity. Musically we wanted to evolve on the psychedelic genre that we’d explored previously and move it into a more diverse, contemporary sphere. I think the mix of pop, glam, psych rock, folk and 70s ballads all were touchstones that revealed themselves as we went through the writing, recording and mixing process from 2019-2022.
I understand you guys are hitting the road towards the end of the summer for a Euro tour, that's exciting! Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
Yeah we’re so excited to head over to Europe for the first time! We just can’t wait to be able to bring our debut album to the people of the UK and EU and play the most amount of shows in a month we’ve ever done. It’s going to be huge!
