‘You asked me how I’d describe the music I make’ says Spielmann, an imposing yet affable 30 something, whose burnt orange cap covers a slowly receding hairline. ‘Harry Styles for 6music Dads...Someone else called it Brandon Flowers at Phoenix Nights, which I’d take as well!’ ‘It’s pop music, but for people who don’t want to admit they like pop music…’ he says rattling his glass of Coke Zero like there should be a cocktail in it’s place ‘...for people who listen to “proper” music but really just want to singalong to a big chorus’. And he’s not wrong…Like Jack Antonoff producing The War On Drugs, or Phoenix if they’d grown up on heartland Americana, Spielmann’s take on modern pop, and how it aligns with alternative music, is studied, honed and purposeful, expansive yet intimate, with a tongue firmly planted in it’s cheek and stadium ready choruses that will stick in your head for days. Spielmann has been around the block, as a songwriter, producer, band member, DJ, promoter…and now, after a good decade and varying degrees of success, as a front person and songwriter in his own right on a project whose first releases have shown lofty aspirations, marrying synths, drum machines and arpeggiators with acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies, those chorus singalongs and storytelling that could be as much an unreliable narrator as they could be autobiographical. ’Some of it’s me, I’m in it somewhere…But I’m really not that interesting’. An excerpt from Spielmann on Spielmann.