Around seven years ago, South African musician Jean-Philip Grobler, more commonly known as St. Lucia, moved to New York to become a jingle composer.
It was there, while writing with different instruments and processes than he was used to, that he learnt one of the most freeing lessons in songwriting that he could have imagined.
“While I was doing that job, I was forced to write in all these different genres, and forced to write music that I would never have just written by myself,” says Grobler. “When I quit, I started realising that I just needed to stop pretending to be someone else and look back into my past and what influences I had. The influences I was trying to bury the most were the slightly uncool guilty pleasure stuff, like Phil Collins and Earth, Wind & Fire.”
Instead of resisting the urge to echo these influences, Grobler embraced their ideas wholeheartedly, and thus St. Lucia was created – a fusion of addictive pop and the occasional exploratory, experimental side. After the success of his first album When The Night in 2013, it’s difficult to imagine his fun, danceable sound without these elements now.
But part of the reason Grobler was able to reach this conclusion was a habit he maintains to this day. He’s constantly writing – from recording simple melody or beat ideas to voice memos on his phone as he’s walking down the street, right through to mixing songs in the studio. And though he produces pop music with old-school influences, he’s always fighting to unleash the ideas that are more progressive and non-traditional – something he is particularly proud of in his new album, Matter.
“I think the biggest challenge is just doing something that is catchy but doesn’t feel contrived, because I think a lot of pop music can feel contrived – you can just so obviously hear that it was written by a group of people in a room. And there were definitely a couple of songs off this album that were done that way, but I took a lot of time and a lot of care to make sure that there was enough of my own stamp on the song.”
While When The Night was the result of careful writing and recording in Grobler’s New York studio, Matter presented new challenges from a compositional perspective, as he needed to get inventive while on the road touring.
“Basically what I had to do was create a really good demoing situation on my laptop, so most of these songs were initially written in the tour van or in the tour bus. It was interesting actually, because those limitations kind of created a special energy on this album that didn’t really exist on the last one – not in a bad way!”
It isn’t hard to hear what he means by this energy – listening to the album, you can feel the mood range from elation to frustration. Grobler mentions that “existential angst” makes an appearance on the album as a result of getting older and living far away from home. But it’s not all serious – ‘Game 4 U’ started off in the studio as a joke song about falling in love with a computer, until it made the cut for the album with new lyrics.
There’s an impressive number of writing collaborations on the record too, ranging from dance anthems like ‘Dancing On Glass’, co-written with Sugarcult’s Tim Pagnotta, to the more aggressive rhythm of ‘Physical’, a collaboration with writing team Captain Cuts. But even with this album completed, things aren’t slowing down for St. Lucia. With a tour on the way, and some exciting partnerships lined up – including with Alex Metric (who remixed ‘September’ from When The Night) and Norwegian producer Lindstrøm – he also mentions that doing more production work is something that really interests him, after his recent work on American indie-pop band Haerts’ debut album.
Interestingly, when Grobler originally named the St. Lucia project after the South African vacation town of the same name, it was for the “exotic, hazy, summery” feeling it evoked. But it’s been about 13 years since he’s lived in that country, and he’s now well and truly settled in New York with his wife Patti Beranek, who plays keyboards for Grobler’s band.
“[Patti] always says that the only place in the whole world other than Taiwan where she doesn’t feel like a foreigner or an outsider is New York. In South Africa we still have this racial tension and there’s still a lot of separation and segregation between the races, and all over the world you still have that. In New York you still have that, but it’s more like all these people from different cultures are pushed together and that’s the way it is, and no-one thinks twice about it.”
So as he continues to write and produce music – and as often comes with growing older and living far away from home – Grobler says the location and style associated with his music has changed.
“I definitely feel like there’s less of a tropical feeling to it now. There’s definitely still an escapist element to it – it’s very lofty, big, adventurous music that’s almost like a sci-fi film. I feel like it is interesting, because there’s a lot more desert imagery in promotional shots, so there’s a lot more cacti. For me it definitely has a bit more of an American ’70s/’80s West Coast feeling.”
