Introducing: The Room Upstairs

Ewan Shepherd started crafting songs in his bedroom at 14, but there was one small problem—he didn’t know how to play any instruments. Enlisting the help of his dad and brother, he recorded a DIY skiffle EP with hand-taps for drums and a robot voice-filter for a microphone. It wasn’t exactly Abbey Road, but those early demos led to Flaming Lucy, The Room Upstairs’ debut EP, which became a school hit. Enter classmate Joe Conway, who heard the EP, connected it to his grandparents' record collection, and brought his guitar skills into the mix. Fast-forward nine years, three albums, and countless songs later, and the duo is still making music about life's existential crises, love, and even running out of milk.

1. You started writing songs at 14 without knowing how to play any instruments. How did that challenge shape your approach to music, especially in those early bedroom recording sessions?

Ewan: I think – in hindsight – that not knowing anything was really liberating. The only remotely musical thing I had done was learn the bass pattern for ‘For Your Love’ by The Yardbirds, which as anyone familiar with it will know, is not a hard pattern to learn. But I also couldn’t really sing either, so I was really pretty hopeless at every single aspect of making a song. And I was aware of that, and a little shy about it – I certainly wasn’t broadcasting that this was a thing I was exploring. It was challenging, because I wanted to record Paul McCartney’s ‘Ram’, which is a good reference point in

sensibility, but a terrible one in skillset.

I think all the stuff I didn’t know forced me to focus on the stuff that was in my control, and to think about what was at my disposal. I knew I could write lyrics and melodies; I knew I could communicate my ideas and arrangements clearly; and I knew I was fortunate enough to have some musically talented family and friends around me who could A. help me learn, and B. do the things that I couldn’t. Lastly, the challenge of knowing literally nothing and having pretty much zero practical skill at it sort of encouraged me to not be precious about it. I didn’t take those early recording sessions

very seriously at all, because the bar I had set for myself was so low. I just knew that I had to do it to get somewhere with it, even if at that point, I couldn’t do it. And to just flash forward to today: I think this album we’ve just put out – ‘Adventures in Light Therapy’ - is so good because it isn’t taking itself too seriously, and hopefully it just feels like two

people enjoying making something at the scale that they are doing. The best creative projects I’ve done – in and out of music – are the ones where I am aware of where I’m at, and I’m not running away with myself, and thinking back to those early sessions always helps put me in that frame of mind.

2. Your debut EP, ‘Flaming Lucy,’ became a hit in school. What was it like transitioning from those homemade demos to recording full albums? Did your process change over time?

Ewan: Like I said, I wasn’t broadcasting that I was making music; but gradually, friends started to hear the demos, and one way or another, far more talented people than I got involved, just in time for us to record the tracks clean. I don’t know if I started piping up after that, or if our friends just started talking about it more, but I remember being surprised that people were listening to it, and really grateful that people were taking time to compliment it.

I think the process changed more or less as soon as people heard ‘Flaming Lucy’. We wanted to try more technological tricks. I saved up pocket money and birthday money to record the first EP, and we had enough to get it done in about six hours, so it all had to be more or less exactly as it was demoed. But now there were more of us, and it was a proper outfit, we could all go in, and maybe try some stuff you couldn’t do on an old version of GarageBand with no plug-ins. I remember we tried adding organs, vibraphones, string and brass sections – but they were all keyboard plug-ins, so the

parts we had written on the keyboard were not necessarily how, say, a vibraphone, would actually be played, because it might not be able to reach the same range.

All that meant, by the first album, we had sort of undergone a level of training – we knew how to make our limitations our strengths, and how to utilise our time, which was important and finite. From ‘High on Human Emotion’ onwards, our process more or less stuck – very tight demoing with a real awareness of what was at our disposal, and the atmosphere it could create. Since covid, we’ve recorded remotely – we don’t go into the studio anymore, which is a shame, but it tests those lessons more than ever – it keeps us on our feet in that sense, and to me, that’s part of our charm.

3. Joe Conway compared your music to his grandparents record collection. How do you balance the influence of classic artists like Simon & Garfunkel and The Beatles while keeping 'The Room Upstairs' sound fresh and contemporary?

Ewan: I think it’s just in keeping it true to us. We have a lot of different influences from a lot of different time periods, and I feel like if we’re clear with what we’re trying to communicate as a piece of music and a piece of writing, we can use all of those different influences in unison, to champion the wider tone we’re trying to strike. When we first started, and we were trying all these different keyboard plug-ins, that was very much to try and make the songs sound as if they were made and released in the mid-1960s. I think those tracks are the ones that feel the furthest away from us, and that didn’t have as much to say lyrically.

Nowadays, my process is to write something that is doing what my favourite artists from yesteryear did, but applied to the world we live in today, as I see it. And when we work on the musical side of things, I don’t think we put much thought into how it comes out at all – we just think about what will help set the tone, and create a little world around those words. I also think, when they rear their head, we embrace those older influences. I always aim for our stuff to have a quality that sort of has one foot in the past; like maybe you found it on an old cassette tape or in a record store bargain box. Because I feel that we find the past very comforting, and warm, but then… Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bookends’ was released 24 hours before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The opening track is about a young man committing suicide. The pair were classmates of Andrew Goodman, who was abducted and murdered by the Klu Klux Klan in 1964. It is an album with something to say about the very threating and often scary times they were living in. I think when we look back on something, we find ourselves more equipped to talk about it subjectively and with

honesty. So, it helps me creatively to approach the things I talk about lyrically if I sort of pretend I’m writing a relic, weirdly. I also like to think it brings a comforting sentimentality to the tracks for the people listening to them.

4. After nine years and four albums, how has your creative partnership with Joe evolved? Are there any particular moments or songs where you feel like you’ve truly hit your stride as collaborators?

Ewan: I think we both know what we’re doing a lot more than we used to, and I think we’ve each become essential elements to what ‘The Room Upstairs’ sounds like. I also think, we live in different places now, so when we get together to record something or to just play together, there’s an energy that is worth taking advantage of – I think you can hear it on ‘Adventures in Light Therapy’. But I also think it has evolved more through adaptation than anything else – we’ve been shaped by the new challenges we’ve had to face. And, I think part of where we’re at now, having released an album that we’re very proud of, is sort of creating new hurdles to try and jump – new challenges to keep us growing; keep us evolving. There are a lot of songs that I feel really bring out the best of us as collaborators: ‘Bicentennial’; ‘Coffee and Ice Cream’; ‘Bedhead Music’; ‘Nothing’s Beautiful’; ‘Tomorrow Land’; and on the new record, ‘Fruit’, ‘The Bunny Hour’ and ‘Arrangement’. I remember the first time we heard ‘Bicentennial’ as a finished track, we were both so proud and excited – we couldn’t quite believe we had created a track that sounded like that. It all felt like one piece, like if you took a component out, it just wouldn’t be the same song – it wouldn’t conjure up the same emotional response. I think that’s

how we know that we’re both really in it. All of that said, I do think the songs where one of us takes the lead quite substantially really define our unique characteristics in this collaboration: there’s an instrumental on ‘Babe’s Kingdom’

that Joe wrote and recorded called ‘Afterglow’ that is completely his slice of The R.U. pie – it’s a gorgeous, technical and atmospheric guitar piece, with a quite meditative quality. That track could only be done by Joe, because of how he plays and the headspace he gets into to do it. Likewise, there’s a track on the new album called ‘Shades of Separation’ that I recorded while Joe was away – there’s quite a simple, DIY charm to the instrumentation on that, and a boppy melody that goes against the lyrics in a way that I think is very me.

5. Your lyrics often deal with existential themes, life’s crises, and even everyday frustrations like running out of milk. How do you find inspiration in such a wide range of experiences, and how does love fit into that narrative?

Ewan: I’m usually inspired by all that just because it’s how I feel, and it’s what I ask myself, and what – deep down inside – I doubt, or don’t. I try to reflect on who I am and how I behave, and how I respond to the world and the everyday things we all find ourselves doing – things that I usually find quite fascinating, or quite funny. It’s taken me a long time to be able to articulate all that, but writing songs helped me do it; like making little diary entries.

I try not to take any of it too seriously, and I try to be honest. The inspiration is the feeling, and the song is what happens when I find a way to sum it up – in a phrase, or a rhyme, or a story. And love fits in because I’m very blessed to have received so much of it in my life, and I hope I reciprocate it whenever I can.

Love is the most complex feeling any of us can feel, I think. We try to define it in a strict term because we kind of really like a structure and a pattern of things, but there are so many different kinds of love, and so many ways to love, and a whole lot of ways people love wrong, or use love with devilish intentions. But what I have learnt about love - in my experiences of it - is that it has the potential to really define a person, and shape who they are – and it can constantly be there, like an antidote, or a flashlight, or a fungi. And it can also make life better, and the world better, or maybe

even just one person’s day better. So love fits into the narrative because I think it is always worth it, and I think that – with all the problems in the world, it’s hard to tell an honest story that wraps up neatly with a bow on top; but if there’s love at the end of it, then that just might be enough.