BEC STEVENS – Why Don’t You Just

Description

…a document of the complexity of growth

Bec Stevens is an old soul. Not in the dust-and-mothballs fashion, but in that tugging, goosebump-raising way – something wholly familiar yet captivating and un-pinpointable. Her voice is a trigger, prompting reflections of your own life while she brazenly steps us through her own. All of it’s there in its worn grooves, its pitched valleys. Line-by-line, verse-by-verse…

While 2016’s debut EP More Scared Than Me dived headfirst into Bec Stevens young adult life, the follow up Why Don’t You Just EP is her first with Hobbledehoy (which in many ways feels like a spiritual home; both are sonically slightly left-of-centre and relocated from interstate to now be settled in Adelaide). Why Don’t You Just is a document of the complexity of growth: navigating challenges with sensitivity and learning not to flee from your troubles but to face them down.

Written over an intense period of difficulty in Stevens life, the recording process to follow would bring it’s own challenges – technically and personally outside of the studio. Only to be furthered compounded by band line-up changes. But out of the darkness emerged an authentic documentation of personal and emotional growth. The individual songs that could be mistaken as one-dimensional catch-cries, now weaved together as a series of stories they suddenly turn into an inter-connected, delicate expression of regret and prevail.

In spite of its deeply personal nature, Stevens wouldn’t say this record is her own diary chapter. It’s an universalised diary – for anyone. It’s not any one specific demon in focus, it’s the host of them that characterise contemporary anxieties. She’s moving on, sure, but the fire is not burning out.

1. Ten Minute Drive
2. Time It Takes
3. They Don’t Build Cars Like This Anymore
4. Stitches
5. Girl
6. Fuck This Up

Released February 15, 2019
12″/CD/ Digital
HOB 050

first press: 500 Blue w/ Pink Splatter (5 test presses)