Amelia Murray says she makes her best music in her bedroom. Photo/Greg Bowker.
Amelia Murray says she makes her best music in her bedroom. Photo/Greg Bowker.
She makes music in her bedroom, but the more popular she gets, the less time she spends in there. Chris Schulz meets Fazerdaze.
When Amelia Murray released her first EP, she hand-stitched 50 cardboard covers together, slipped the CDs inside, slapped a photo on the front and popped them in the post to fans.
Then things went a little ballistic.
"I did 50 with my friends the first night. They sold out. Then the next 50 sold out," she says, laughing at the memory.
"I thought I'd only have to make 50 and that would be it ... I couldn't handle the growth."
It was an all-consuming experience for Murray, who performs dreamy guitar pop under the name Fazerdaze.
She never believed her music would leave her bedroom and "get beyond my friend group".
But demand for her music grew to the point where she was forced to find a proper CD manufacturer, form a band and tour behind that 2014 EP, as she got bombarded by requests from a growing fan base.
Along the way, the shy singer-songwriter collected rave reviews - including one from NME.
That's a big deal for someone who spends most of her time on her own in her bedroom, perfecting her music in the most intimate way.
"I just have one mic, a sound card and a laptop, and that's pretty much how I do (everything). I play everything myself ... I'm not very good in the mornings, but I'm really good in the afternoons and at nights."
That's how her debut Fazerdaze EP came together, and it's how she completed work on the full-length follow-up Morningside, to be released tomorrow.
Amelia Murray, aka Fazerdaze, inside her home studio in Morningside, where work on her debut album was finished. Photo/Greg Bowker
Full of shoegazey grunge-pop, songs such as recent singles Lucky Girl and Little Uneasy sound like Bic Runga fronting The Pixies.
There's also plenty of meaning behind that album title, which doubles as the suburb Murray calls home.
"The album was recorded over so many different places, so many different flats," she says.
"It felt really right to call it Morningside because before that I was struggling to feel at home anywhere ... When I moved to Morningside, I finally had this grounding."
Morningside's songs have a bedroom feel. Lucky Girl comes with a ghostly fuzz, like it was recorded during a 2am frenzy, while Bedroom Talks includes an overlapping rush of lyrics, like they're bouncing off all four walls.
Murray says her music reaches "other people hanging out in their bedrooms".
"It's just me and the microphone and there's nothing between that. I like that I don't have to seek anyone's approval before I can create an entire song," she says about her recording methods.
"Being at home, I can trust myself. It works really well for me ... It's the only way I know how to do it."
She's tried making music the normal way - in a proper studio with a sound engineer and producer guiding her. It didn't work out.
"It was just a disaster. I couldn't get the results that I wanted. I didn't know how to explain what I was hearing in my head and articulate what I wanted."
The irony that Fazerdaze is becoming so popular that she no longer gets to spend much time in her Morningside bedroom - she recently departed with her band for a European tour - isn't lost on Murray.
But she's determined to keep that intimacy intact, no matter how big Fazerdaze gets.
"You know when you love something and you you'd do anything to keep doing it? That's how I feel about music," she says. "I just enjoy it so much ... I love it."
