Ben Stewart Of Slowly Slowly Reveals His Favourite Tracks From Daisy Chain

Melbourne pop-punk band Slowly Slowly released their brilliant fourth album, Daisy Chain, today. 

It's a record that follows the band's incredible growth from their debut, 2016's Chamomile, and from their breakthrough, 2018's St. Leonards. 

Daisy Chain finds Slowly Slowly confident in bringing new brighter elements to their sound. The album is a charming collection of dichotomies, from songs that question religion or bleak in subject matter set to massively fun instrumentals. Dashboard Confessional's Chris Carrabba also features on the album highlight, Moving Trains, which comes after ten years in the making, further proving that the band's popularity among fans matches what fellow pioneering bands think of them.

The album was self-produced by vocalist Ben Stewart alongside UK heavyweight Jonathan Gilmore (Wolf Alice, The 1975, Nothing But Thieves) on mixing duties.

To celebrate the release of Daisy Chain, we caught up with Stewart to find out all about his favourite songs on the album.

Some of Slowly Slowly's Ben Stewart's Favourite Songs On Daisy Chain

God
"God is definitely one of my favourites on Daisy Chain. I'm a sucker for a "long story" song that lacks repetition. That song centres around my curious wandering through the little thought experiment of religion. It's not really falling either way with any of it, but I was forced to look at it for the first time in my life. I had an immediate family member turn quite abruptly to religion in a huge way over the past few years, coupled with the death of another close immediate family member. Religion's not something that had ever garnered any interest for me, but I think because of those events, my face was turned to look at it, and I had to confront that big question that everyone always has in their life. 

"I didn't want to make sweeping judgements about any of it, but I just had to think about that stuff for the first time. The concept that I started with was: 'Who's to say that this isn't heaven right now?'. And if that's the case, then there's been a lot of time squandered splitting hairs around who worships who or what's happening when maybe you're missing the point. There's no evidence to say that this isn't the afterlife. Within that little thought experiment, it made me think that if you believe in a religion: most of them subscribe to a lot of the same morals. And that got me thinking: if you have to do your part to get into the promised land, most religions say you have to be kind to others, etcetera. So, you're trying to be your best self so that you can get into the promised land, but if religion turns out to be a farce and you weren't gonna get there, and you were going to be worm food – wouldn't you do it anyway because you have such a short time here? Wouldn't you want to make the most of it and leave a good mark?

"That led to this little moment where I realised that everybody almost wants the same thing, no matter what they believe, whether you believe or you don't, whatever you believe in… it's just so convoluted by religion. And I just wanted to wander through that and poke some ironic fun here and there. God is very special to me for these reasons, and it has a very special place in my heart."

Medicine
"I also really like Medicine; I was completely down in the dumps when I wrote and recorded it. I recorded it in the spare room in my house; I did the guitar in one take and the vocals in another. It was just an actual time capsule. There was no painstaking process, there were two layers in the song, just the vocal and the guitar, and it just worked. I like the simplicity of Medicine, especially juxtaposed with the track God, which has 10,000 layers and so many different things going on."

Daisy Chain
"My other favourite would be the title track, Daisy Chain itself. It encapsulates the ethos of the entire record and holds the only "resolve" on the album. And it also holds the overarching theme of the album. 

The metaphor for Daisy Chain came to me like the final puzzle piece of the record. I was looking for something that sounded like a nursery rhyme or a very child-like kind of thing. It almost surmised my entire experience throughout this record, like how you read a story with some silly metaphor in kid's books, but it can say more than a PhD could. And for this, I had the imagery of falling into a volcano, but this daisy chain was tucked under my shoelace, stopping me from falling in and climbing back up it. 

It was the duality of having something seemingly so delicate that it could also be your biggest strength. I like playing with the concept of having to be careful sometimes with the strongest relationships in your life and not taking them for granted. And also: that seemingly robust things can actually be quite vulnerable. I think everybody has a daisy chain in their life as someone that represents those two things. Something that needs a lot of care but is the sole source of your strength. And the fact that it was circular just kind of played into the concept of a lot of loops in the album, and patterns of behaviour and self-awareness and things like that. The metaphor just fit, and as soon as it came out of my mouth, I was like: 'Okay. Yeah, that's the record. The record's called Daisy Chain.'" 

Daisy Chain is out now via UNFD.