QSC Aspiring Interview: Driftwood Choir on new album and ‘The River’

Driftwood Choir’s The River might have hit you in the feels in a recent episode of Grey's Anatomy, and if you’re reading this, you must want to learn more about the duo, who call themselves a choir, despite the music being produced entirely by Ed Prosek and Portair, whose paths crossed in Berlin after travelling from the US and Australia, respectively.

During their first proper session, the musicians cooked up Constantinople, which amassed over half a million streams. Inspired by this newly unearthed working relationship, they kept going. Now, the pair is forging a path together, emerging with their debut album. 

In this interview, Prosek delves into the inspiration behind the album, reveals the song he is most proud of writing, and explains why The River exemplifies exactly what he imagined Driftwood Choir would be.

Hi Ed! Are we speaking to you in Berlin right now?

Currently, I'm out west in the Black Forest. I'm working on my own album. I have a studio out here, but I live in Berlin, and I have a studio in Berlin as well. I was born and raised in Northern California, and I've been on a lifelong journey of self-discovery, and that took me, for some reason that I can't quite explain, to Germany, and now even deeper into Western Germany.

I lived in Brighton for four years beforehand and had a wonderful time there, but it is really difficult to get an artist visa in the UK, and in Germany, they were passing them out like candy!

While I was in the UK, I signed a publishing deal with BMG Germany, and so I came on tour to Berlin for the very first time, and just fell in love with it. 

It felt like such a natural fit. I already had a team there. I already had infrastructure. I had a lot of friends who had already moved there from the UK. So I jumped over the big pond first, and then the small pond second.

What stands out to you in terms of your early memories of music?

My mum's an opera composer, so music was in the family, and I started on classical music, really young. The story that she always tells is that I always loved Star Wars, even though I watched it very early. I got obsessed with it. 

One of the principal violinists from the San Francisco Symphony came over to the house, and I was sitting on the washing machine humming, and she was like, ‘That's the right key,’ and my mum instantly said, ‘Okay, we'll put him in music lessons.’ 

So the rest of my life was decided! I picked up the trumpet at eight and then started writing songs – that are incredibly cringe – at around 10, and the rest is history.

Did you ever record these early songs?

I had various recording devices and laptops that I recorded everything on back then, and I didn't hold on to these things, but my best friend was really obsessed with the idea of having the largest iTunes library catalogue of anybody in our school. 

So he took every stupid song and cringe recording I ever made and he kept it. I lost all of these things, but he hung on to every little idea that I ever recorded. He sent them to me in a folder not too long ago. Thank God he did that, because I would have lost all of these toe-curling, cringe ideas that I wrote as a 10-year-old.

On CD or cassette?

CD. That reminds me, I just recently got a record player again. Can we talk about the fact that you also have to listen to the songs you don’t like? It’s like eating your vegetables. There's something wonderful about it, because then you're forced not to judge them so hard.

Does that factor into the music you make now…

No, because every song I make is great!

… in terms of no skips, and listening to an album in a certain order as a body of work, rather than the single model labels seem to prefer these days?

Yeah, it's funny with Spotify, because it's like a social media platform where you have all of your history laid out for anybody to go look at in whatever chaotic order.

Especially now, it's so convoluted: you release one song at a time, and then another one, and then another one. It's so full of thoughts and ideas from different perspectives. If you listen through my catalogue, I hope you see growth and development, and also phases.

Growth and development doesn't come in a straight line. It comes in plateaus, and then falling back down, and then figuring out something else new, and then falling back down again. 

I think that is a wonderful journey. I don't listen to my own catalogue very much, because I'm always working on something new, and that's always the thing I'm most excited about. I'm always excited about these things until shortly after they're out, and then I'm always on to the next thing.

Tell us about meeting Drew (aka Portair). How did you meet and then decide to make music together?

It’s funny. We lived very mirrored lives, although from completely different directions, you could say, because he's from Australia and I'm from Northern California. He moved to California, but I didn't meet him there. 

We have a million friends in common. We're signed to the same label. We make very similar music, although his is a little more on the ambient side, minus a little more of the classical-infused stuff – I don't even know what to describe myself as.

We are different shades of more or less the same coin, and we met very unromantically. Our label said, ‘Hey, Drew's coming to town in Berlin. You guys should get together and write a song.’ 

So I had him over to the studio, which, spoiler alert, is now our studio that we share together, and we wrote Constantinople together, which is the first song we released before Driftwood Choir was conceptualised and before we realised that we were going to do this as a group.

We got together, and we wrote this song. It was an idea that I'd had kicking around that I failed to complete several times. With me, I'll write a musical idea. In this case, it was the musical idea of Constantinople. 

If I like it and if it has a lot of potential, sometimes I just can't get it to work. And it was great. I'll do it four or five times, and then it'll always be disappointing somehow in the end. 

And then Drew came by. We sat down, we worked out the whole thing in three hours, and did most of the production. It was such an easy experience. We both looked at each other and said, ‘Wow, we have to do this again.’ 

We immediately set up the infrastructure for the song to be released, and then we got together again a couple of weeks later, and wrote about a bad dream from an old life. It went from one to the other, to the other, to the other. 

It was so easy that eventually we came up with this idea that this was something that I wanted to do more often. We were both of that same mindset. It brings something out of me that I can't do on my own, even though we have very overlapping skills, stories and interests. The album is testament to that.

Where did the name Driftwood Choir come from?

There's a very literal explanation for it, which is that Drew went from Australia to Los Angeles, to Berlin, and I went from San Francisco to England to Berlin. We have both floated all over the world, somewhat aimlessly. 

So there's this drifting aspect to it that it's very obvious in our lives. The choir aspect is – I mean, it's funny for a band with two people to call themselves a choir – but the arrangements of the choruses are always these big vocal arrangements where we have multiple versions of ourselves doing multiple different harmonies, and that creates this big, warm, choir in almost every single chorus of the whole album. It was just a literal description of who we are and what we're doing.

Your self-titled album is about change. When did this theme emerge, and what inspired this concept?

During this album, and I don't want to speak for Drew, but both of us had some major life changes. Regardless of the specifics of that, what happens when you have momentous positive or negative events in your life is that you start to look at the things around you, the place you're in, and the people around you, differently. 

You start to look at your whole existence a little bit differently, and you start to prioritise whatever it is that you feel would make your situation better.

For me, and I think Drew as well, that answer came from after living in a city for so long. I need to be doing things with my hands, in the time when music itself is so digital, and the production of music is so digital. 

When I'm done in my studio, and I'm very thankful to write music for a living, I want to be able to go outside and touch grass. One big shift for me was starting to remove the aspects of that city life that I don't particularly like anymore, and spend more time in the country.

And to that end, that's why I'm out in the west working on my album, because that's where I can find this balance. We're out in the country in a wonderful farmhouse here, and it's a joy to be able to finish my work and then go out and work on the land. It's a change that a lot of millennials think about as we brush past 30. 

It's time for change. We feel it. We're getting older. We're getting more, hopefully, comfortable with ourselves and comfortable with our surroundings.

If you're not comfortable with your surroundings, it's time to do something about it. For both Drew and me, being around nature and coming out of the city and touching some kind of natural world to bring you back to your centre, is important, and it's a theme that we talk about a lot in the album.

The single Way Back Home is an anthem discussing personal struggles that resonate with you both. How did this song come together, and what were you both thinking about when you wrote this?

This song is a poignant example of: I'll find my way back home. Where is that? We are two people who have lived all over the world. It's one of those unanswered questions in your mind all the time, and if you have moved around a lot, you'll immediately sympathise with that. 

But if you haven't, maybe it's a little more vague. But when you go to different countries and different continents, you feel invited, and people are warm and welcoming, but you don't necessarily have that stable feeling of, ‘I belong here.’ 

And if you move around a lot, I concluded that you just have to choose. One day, you have to find something you like. You have to find people you like, and then you have to choose to exist somewhere. Finding your way back home, in this sense, is talking about finding that comfort and belonging that you had in your childhood.

What is the song on the album that you are most proud of?

My favourite song on the album is The River. It exemplifies exactly what I imagined Driftwood Choir would be. It's this organic, energetic song, and then the chorus comes, and it's this repeating pattern where the chords move up one whole tone at a time, and it builds on itself.

Then we have these distinct melodies that start to emerge on top of the main melody of the chorus, and it becomes this swirling mass at the end that never quite goes overboard. It stops just short of going overboard. 

I think that is the quintessential sound that I love about Driftwood Choir, and that I love about making songs with Drew: creating those delicate arrangements that build through each element. You build them on top of each other until they make something humongous.

The River is my favourite song now, and sonically, I'm so proud of the way that the song Blue Light Escape turned out. Thematically, I think it's also wonderful. Blue Light Escape is the pacifier of your phone that we all seem addicted to and again, trying to find your way back to something that you remember from a life before all of that, before smartphones. There was a time – we were all there, and yet somehow it's unimaginable at this point to be without the pacifier.

What are Driftwood Choir’s future music plans?

We’re going to do this again. We were talking the other day as the album came out. It's a momentous occasion, and it's super exciting and wonderful. We have cool stuff coming up, but it was sad to a certain degree, because we worked so hard on this, and then it was done. 

The album was out. There was not much left to be done. So there is going to be more Driftwood Choir music. In the meantime, Drew and I are currently working on solo albums for our distinct projects.

In terms of expressing yourself through music and connecting with people with your songwriting, what does the phrase Play out Loud mean to you?

The thing that comes to mind is that there's this internal monologue that you have when you're writing a song alone. This voice almost isn’t yours. I think perhaps everybody has it, perhaps not, but a lot of people have described it this way.

Sometimes when you're writing a song, it just comes from somewhere, and it comes in 20 minutes or less, and it's just magical. You're like a vessel, and all you have to do is shut your brain off and get out of the way.

When I hear Play Out Loud, it's taking the internal thoughts that are somewhere inside of you, the antenna you have for those ideas, and turning yourself almost into an amplifier. 

You take those ideas that are swimming somewhere in the universe, not to make it seem too grandiose – I mean, we're talking about pop songs here – but these melodies do come to your mind, and you don't know why you wake up in the morning and you're humming a tune. 

That the tune is an idea, and taking that from an idea in your mind that has no sonic reality, and turning it into one, is the most magical experience on Earth, and something that I try to do as often as humanly possible.

Listen to the full interview below: