The Winding Way

About

The Teskey Brothers’ third album is named after the street that housed their childhood home, in which they built the studio that yielded their first two albums, 2017’s <i>Half Mile Harvest</i> and 2019’s <i>Run Home Slow</i>. The title is a loving tribute to their former house, while also representing some of the LP’s wider themes. “The winding way of life,” guitarist Sam Teskey tells Apple Music. “A bit of a journey, moving into the next stage.” Following the 2022 departure of bassist Brendon Love and drummer Liam Gough, Sam and his vocalist/guitarist brother Josh recruited touring bassist Fabian Shaw and drummer Evan Mannell (with cameos from Oscar Henfrey and Declan Kelly) and recorded <i>The Winding Way</i> in Sydney with producer Eric J Dubowsky (Chet Faker, Flume). Despite the changes in lineup and recording locale, the band’s rich, organic R&B/soul remains intact, embellished with expansive, lavish strings and elegant, sweeping horns. Here, Sam explains the meaning behind several key tracks from <i>The Winding Way</i>. <b>“I’m Leaving”</b> “It can be for anyone going through certain things in their life—leaving your lover, leaving somebody. But for us, this song really is [about] that journey out of that house. I was born in that house. Then we grew up and started building this studio in our teens. We birthed our first two albums in that studio; my first son was born in the same spot that I was born in the house. Josh had his two kids in that same place. So it’s a special place for us. When we were moving we were just like, ‘Well, this house needs a song.’ And that song is ‘I’m Leaving.’” <b>“Oceans of Emotions”</b> “It’s that stage of a relationship when you get to that point where you’re like, ‘Things don’t seem to be getting easier,’ but you’re falling deeper in love. I think everyone experiences this in a relationship. There’s a period there for a few years where everything’s pretty great. Then you get through some rough patches. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s all about growing. It’s a typical love song, but not the flowery sort of love song. It’s the part that really gets to the deeper love.” <b>“Take My Heart”</b> “When Josh was writing this one, I think his main inspiration was his kids. He had two quite close together. Having your first child is like, you’re really giving everything to that baby. It’s pretty phenomenal what happens to you. I think the idea of the lyric ‘So take my heart and cut it into two’ is [that] you’ve got another child that you have to give everything to, [so] how do you tear yourself in half and really give all of yourself to these two kids? That was a lot of the inspiration for writing that one.” <b>“London Bridge”</b> “On this album there are all these songs that cover different life stages. ‘Take My Heart’ being one, becoming a parent. ‘Oceans of Emotions’ is that moment before you become a parent potentially, and you’re just getting into that deeper part of the relationship. ‘London Bridge’ feels like it’s that time where you’ve put everything into it, you’ve done everything you can, but no matter how hard you try, it’s all falling apart. You just can’t fix this burning bridge. You can try throwing water on it, but it’s just going up in flames. So it’s for anyone who’s feeling that in a relationship.” <b>“This Will Be Our Year”</b> “It’s a song originally by The Zombies. This is such a great tune to dig up from the past and do our own thing with. But it just felt like it had a lot of relevance to now—it’s kind of about being positive, about moving forward like, this will be our year, the world’s gonna get its shit together. So that’s a bit of positivity on the album.” <b>“Blind Without You”</b> “It’s really a call and response to an artist or a creative person who’s always lost in a world of elsewhere, and trying to love someone like that. For us, it relates to our relationships and being away on tour and trying to chase this goal, this dream, chasing the music and all of our followers and things like that, then expecting everything to be fine back home.” <b>“Remember the Time”</b> “Just one of those classic relationship songs. It’s a nostalgic memory of ‘remember when things were great?’ Not wanting to forget that memory, but wanting to be everything you can in a relationship now. So it’s a special track. It had a few different lives, and it’s a lot more upbeat than we originally did it. I think it’s really working.”

via Apple Music