Artist Spotlight: Meet Seven Shades Of Nothing
How does “When The Lights Go Down” reflect your musical journey and growth as an artist?
The first half of my life I worked in film as a director, editor and visual effects artist. My first feature back in 1999 was a post-apocalyptic story. For a million reasons and excuses it was far from good. It always tugged at me that it never reached the vision I had in mind. In many ways “When The Lights Go Down” feels like a spiritual successor, especially through the music video. Technology and my own skills have finally caught up with the vision I had back then.
But the song didn’t consciously begin that way. I wrote the chorus of the song back in 2011. At the time I was completely disillusioned by the film industry. Too many egos and narcissists, too much politics and the joy of creativity was all but dead. One night, at a particular low point, I drove to my favourite place to just be alone with my thoughts while looking out over the sea. There were no desires at this point of pursuing music, but I’d always written poems as a way of dealing with my emotions. Get them out of my body and onto paper.
A few years earlier, the first time I quit the film industry, I went on an epic road trip, living in the car and travelling up the east coast of Australia from Melbourne to Cape York. I went for a week, came back three months later. I spent a lot of time out in the desert and every night I’d look up in awe at the night sky. How bright and clear it was.
Sitting beside the sea, surrounded in lights, staring across the bay to the city, I missed those majestic and unpolluted skies. I missed the freedom. I missed that feeling of being alive when you’re in an environment where no one is coming to save you if you screw up. The noise of the world was overwhelming. And in that moment I wanted it all to go away. I just wanted to see the stars again. I wished for the apocalypse I’d loved in movies and books. I wrote what I felt, “When the lights go down, would it be so bad?”
Of course the world didn’t end, and eventually those feelings passed and those lyrics got tucked away in a folder with everything else I’d written and forgotten about.
Fast forward some twelve years and after having a number of vocal training lessons to help with another project I was working on, I got this spark of an idea. Maybe... Just maybe... I could record an album. It was a silly idea. A remnant of a crazy dream from my late teens. But the idea grew and having always lived with a healthy dose of a delusional mindset, I made the decision that I was going to do it. After all, I’d already achieved another crazy dream of making a movie. How hard could it be... right?
I bought a nice keyboard, my instrument of choice, purchased the software, and set up a studio. And for a good couple of months, I was just tinkering, figuring it all out, playing with ideas and experimenting. I wrote maybe fifty bits of music in that time, most of which went straight to the trash pile. But I learned and evolved. And then I wrote this one piece of music and thought, that’s actually pretty good. But up until this point I had no lyrics, I had secretly been putting it off. It had been years since I’d written anything and, honestly, I didn’t know if I had anything to say.
I panicked.
A mass of thoughts descended on me. What am I doing? This is ridiculous... I’m too old for this... I can’t write songs... I’ve wasted all this time and money... What was I thinking?
But true to form of how I’ve achieved everything I’ve ever done in life, I ignored all of them and pushed on.
The blank page was so overwhelming, so I decided to dig out those old folders and go through everything I’d ever written to see if there was something I could work with. It was then that I uncovered those lyrics I’d written all those years before. It sparked something in me. Something I’d been feeling for a number of years. That I didn’t like where the world was going. How old values for decent living seemed to be getting pushed aside. That corruption was at an all time high. How even our food isn’t really food any more and the air was filled with toxicity. I wrote it all down and before long had the completed lyrics.
I pressed record and stepped up to the microphone. And sang. It wasn’t good. So I did another take. Then another and another. Each time, doing it differently, finding my way, uncovering my voice. And eventually, I had a song.
Like every other step, it took time to mix the track into its final form. I was learning all the techniques and skillsets I needed to make this work. I threw way too much at it at first and then pulled it right back, sculpted the sound and performance to what I wanted. “When The Lights Go Down” was the first track I completed, and from that point on, everything became easier. I played it back for the first time with a tiny smile curling my lips. Maybe... just maybe... I could pull this off.
What impact do you hope “When The Lights Go Down” will have on your audience?
I hope it makes people stop and feel. The music itself carries a weight, this heavy rhythm with a glitchy, industrial edge. It’s dark but it lifts at times. The guitars in the chorus feel like they should be fun but they’re not. They’re serious. Almost like happiness lost. They’re the sound of the world ending.
The lyrics come from a place of grief, but not grief for a person. It’s grief for the world we’ve lost. The one I grew up in. A world where community and family mattered, where we were connected to nature and to each other. That world’s been replaced by something colder and more toxic, where we film each other’s pain instead of stepping in to help, where we’re glued to devices instead of living. That spark of life we all carry, the wild, passionate, creative, free spirit... I don’t see it much anymore. That’s the soul of humanity I long to return.
If the song works the way I hope it does, it will act as a mirror. Make people look at themselves and ask, am I adding to a soulless world, or am I helping to bring humanity back?
I don’t think we can ever go back to the world I remember. It’s long gone. But we can take the good parts of it, the human values that matter, and bring them forward into the future. I hope younger listeners especially feel that. That they still have a choice to shape the world they inherit.
At the very least, I hope it inspires people to step outside, look up at the stars, and remember what it means to be human. To feel the grief for the world we’ve lost, and let it inspire them to create a better future.
What was your favourite moment in making the music video?
My favourite moment was at the very end, playing back the full edit for the first time. Seeing it all cut together and actually feeling the emotion of the story. There was relief too... after all the chaos and frustration, it worked. Especially the shots of me singing. We’d originally filmed those in the sand dunes alongside the story sections, but it didn’t work. There was no contrast, no separation between me and the narrative, and the whole thing felt muddy and confusing. So I reshot them in my garage in front of a green screen, then built the black background, atmosphere and lights digitally. Watching those shots in the final cut was a turning point. For the first time I thought, maybe I can actually pull off this crazy rock star dream thing.
Another highlight came earlier in the process, and it’s such a small thing but it meant a lot. I took Jarrad, who played the main character, to a thrift shop to find his costume. I found this old jacket, and when he put it on it suddenly felt real. I’d carried this idea around in my head for nearly twenty years, originally wanting to make it as a short film. Seeing him standing there, looking almost exactly as I’d pictured, was indescribable.
I’ve always loved that moment where a dream stops being an idea and becomes flesh and bone. Every project I’ve ever worked on has this moment. I never know when it’s going to happen or what is going to trigger it. For this one, it was that jacket. I’m half tempted to frame it and hang it in the studio.
Of course, there was the other side too. Right at the start of the shoot I misstepped in the sand dunes and heard the ligaments in my foot crunch. Everyone heard it. The pain dropped me to the ground, but we had a full day ahead and I had to push through it. That kind of summed up the project. It had been a decade since I’d last done any serious filmmaking, and everything was frustration. Learning new cameras, new software, trying to achieve something ambitious with just a couple of people helping and almost no budget... I think I ended up spending around $200 all up. I even got my dad to come out of retirement for a day and build the desalination contraption we used.
Looking back, I think all that struggle seeped into the finished video in a way. I’d made a post-apocalyptic film early in my career that never lived up to what I wanted it to be. I’ve carried that disappointment for years. This music video was a chance to finally bring an old vision to life and make the film I’d wanted to make all along.
What were some key milestones in your early career that helped shape who you are as an artist?
There are a few moments that sit under everything I do. One of the earliest is a memory of my dad on stage with his bass guitar. I was still in a push chair at the time and even though it was loud enough to hurt my ears, I remember being amazed, energised. Seeing him up there in front of people planted something in me. It was the only time I saw him perform before life settled him into regular work, but that single image stuck.
Then there was a day walking home from primary school with a friend, belting out Michael Jackson’s Thriller like idiots. We probably sounded terrible but I remember it as the first time I felt a connection between my voice and something bigger, something like a higher spirit. It’s a tiny moment but it taught me how alive singing could make me feel.
That didn’t stop the bullying. On a different occasion, I got told by a so-called friend that no one wanted to hear my voice. It pushed me quiet for years. The climb back from that was slow, but important. In my late teens and early twenties I fell into the film world, which shaped me in a different way. Editing and visual effects taught me storytelling, timing, and how sound lives inside image. Even though I worked mainly in editing and visual effects, I really loved sound design, how it carries the emotion. That was the seed that later made me think of music not just as songs but as scenes, atmospheres and worlds to live in.
There’s a harder chapter too. Before I took the step into film, I worked a monotonous 9-to-5 job that sucked the life out of me and drove me into deep depression. I drank and used various drugs to try to numb the ache. But it was taking out pen and paper and writing that alleviated my distress the most. Poems, stories, random thoughts, anything... It was the only thing that helped me get by.
Getting fired from that job after three years was one of the strangest gifts. I remember that night being so done with everything. I stopped drinking like an alcoholic after that. The writing kept coming though. For me, words are the valve. When I scribble them down, the noise in my head eases. That period of pain and anger taught me to turn survival into craft. It taught me how to be honest when I write.
While I was making that post-apocalyptic film in my twenties, I decided I wanted to try writing a song for the end credits. I was already using Pro Tools for sound design and mixing, so I messed around with it and worked on a track with a friend. It wasn’t polished but it was good enough to make it into the film. That was the first time I realised I could actually write a song, not just words on a page. Even though I buried the idea again once I got pulled back into the film world, that moment planted a seed that’s only now grown into what I’m doing with Seven Shades of Nothing.
One pivot that changed everything was taking singing lessons later in life. I took them to help improve my voice for a guided meditation business I was running. The first time my coach asked me to sing I froze in sheer terror. Somehow I never even thought I’d have to sing in front of him. I gave the worst performance of my life, trying desperately to hide in the softness of my trembling voice. I beat myself up for a week with the most horrific self-talk. I went back and told him to sit down and listen. I either push through this fear and sing or there’s no point continuing. I gave it all I had and let my voice out properly for the first time. Technically it wasn’t great but it felt like freedom. That breakthrough removed the blockade. After that I had the space to focus on and learn technique without fear getting in the way.
Those lessons, and the time spent learning software and instruments, slowly turned a buried dream into something real. Now here I am with songs out and an album ready to launch. Sometimes it takes me a while to confront my demons, but I never let them win, even when the odds are against me.
What’s the most profound emotional experience you’ve ever had while creating or performing music?
The most profound moment for me was for a song I haven’t released yet. It came after losing my dog, Saffy. She was family and for a long time it was just the two of us struggling through life together. She was the one who pulled me back from the edge when I was in a deep hole of depression and wanted to end it all. She was the reason I stayed, the reason I found enough light to keep going, to keep creating.
She had been struggling with illness for a long time but I stuck with her as she had me. But the time had come. Everyone who has had and loved a dog as family, knows when they are done. The day I’d been dreading arrived and I booked an appointment with the vet. I spent the whole day with her. We went for a mini road trip, she sat wrapped in a blanket in the back seat like she always loved, we had cheeseburgers and ice cream, and I even gave her chocolate because it felt like the right last indulgence. She looked at me like I’d been holding out on her all along. Later, I sat on the floor of the vet holding her until she passed.
Driving home without her felt like someone had torn my heart out. I went straight to the studio and as the tears flowed, so did the song. It was called “My Angel Left Me Tonight”. I sat at the keyboard and played out this unbearable sense of loss and grief. In that moment I didn’t want to go on without her. I didn’t know how. But I had to. To honour her. I had to find a way. That song is like playing with an open wound for all to see and hear.
Even now, performing it live is hard. I still struggle to get through the song without breaking. That vulnerability is the point though isn’t it? Creativity has always been the stitches that hold the pieces of me together. The song will come out soon and I hope it helps others find catharsis. Helping them to feel their loss without destroying themselves. I think that’s the core message in most of my music: we can survive the pain and turn it into something that heals and inspires.
