“Scars” healed, apollonio Shares his New EP, time in between
During the pandemic, apollonio — the worst of the OCD behind him — wrote the songs of time in between… reflections of what he went through and what he sees, looking forward.
The focus track “Scars” is about new love between two people who’ve done their share of living and collected the emotional scars to show for it. It’s about the sexiness of experience and wisdom.
This five-track EP is deeply personal, an honest look into the psyche of the artist.
Listen to the time in between EP below and learn more about apollonio via his socials.
Care to introduce yourself to our readers?
I make trippy, cerebral, pop. Just dropped my first EP, Time In Between. I’m hard at work on EP #2.
I play drums and keyboards, but my main instrument is the accordion. I do most of my songwriting on the accordion and often record with it, too —but it’s usually so heavily processed it sounds like a synth … or, like, an owl on LSD.
Tell us a bit about your most recent release.
It’s a dive into a difficult time of my life … the decade or so preceding the pandemic. So the songs are about conjuring impressions and feelings from that time, describing experiences.
Then things got much better for me … and that’s reflected in the songs too. There’s hope!
I wrote the songs during the pandemic lockdown, which, for me — contrary to many others — was a really healing time. The solitude of lockdown came at just the right time for me.
Writing the songs was a solitary, cathartic process. Producing and recording them was a different story.
For that, my producer, Mark Andrade, got a couple of other musicians together — Gary Pereira and Stephen O’Brien — and we went up to a cabin north of Toronto in mid-February 2022. It was deep winter. There we were: the four of us, a wood stove, and our instruments packed into this cabin, making all this incredible sound. We recorded for three days. If you got cagey, you could go out into the snow, lie on the frozen lake and look at the sky. It was a trip.
Where do you tend to pull inspiration from when writing?
All over. Personal experience, or things I hear or read about out in the world. And books and movies. Some songs have concrete themes. Some are about states of mind and perceptions, so the lyrics are more abstract or impressionistic.
I work as a journalist and podcast producer and have a broad range of interests, so there’s plenty to draw from.
Do you have any upcoming shows you’d like to tell us about?
Not yet. But I’ll be setting up some gigs for this summer.
What’s your goal for 2023?
Drop EP #2 and play shows.