Genevieve Maynard: Guitar Solo.

The Genevieve Maynard Trio play the Griffith Uni Gold Coast Campus Thursday afternoon, the National Hotel in Toowoomba Thursday evening, the Brunswick Street Mall Saturday afternoon, the Sands Tavern Maroochydore Saturday evening and Ric’s Café Sunday.

It’s early in the morning and Genevieve Maynard is trying her hardest to keep drummer Brian Cachia away from her breakfast as well as deal with interview questions. Perhaps better known as the guitarist in Stella One Eleven, Genevieve is touring to release her somewhat overdue solo EP.

“I never intended to be in Stella,” she explains. “I was just supposed to produce the first album, and when we tried to re-create the sound of the album live we needed another guitarist, so I kind of fell into doing it before I knew how much I liked it. I’d already started doing my solo stuff, so I had to put it on the back burner for a while.”

“I had a backlog of about 35 or 40 songs, so none of the tracks on the EP are under about three years old. I’m kind of working my way through them. There’s a lot of new stuff I’m working on, but I wanted to get the old ones done.”

Do you feel like you have to finish up with the older material before you can move on with something new?

“Partly, but I think they’re good songs too. I wouldn’t do it unless I thought they were good songs. I knew it was going to be an EP with an album later on, and it’s hard to pick what to use because you’ve only got four or five songs on there. I chose the ones that I’d spent a lot of time working on already. I knew what I wanted to do with these songs.”

Do your songs evolve and change as you work?

“Well I’ve got a studio, so as soon as I write something I do a demo straight away, and they do evolve as I work on them. Usually things just start with acoustic guitar, but they can end up with a whole lot of sequencing and backing vocals and the works.”

The tracks on the solo EP seem to run all stops between simple guitar driven tracks and others that are put together with a lot of electronics. How do you know yourself when you’re happy with a track?

“Some tracks just kind of stay in acoustic land, but something like Fifteen Letters I wrote entirely on the sequencer, and there’s not acoustic instruments other than drums and vocals. I think I started working on that about four years ago. I just put together a groove and built the song from there. It was the first time I’d worked that way. It started as an experiment and ended up as a song, so I was pretty happy with that.”

“Songs come in so many ways. Some things you can spend months or years trying to get done, and other things are finished as soon as you play them through the first time.”

Do you get a different sense of satisfaction playing your own material that working in a band?

“I great dun in Stella and I really enjoy it, but this is totally different from Stella. I couldn’t say what I enjoy more. I love them both. This just happened in Stella downtime, but I would have made time for it anyway.”