Watershed are laying new tracks

Watershed have spent the past two months touring South Africa. Some would call that a slog. They call it laying down new tracks.

“What we wanted to do with this tour was go out on the road and just go back to that thing that got us into the industry, why we do this. And it’s because we love singing, we love playing music, and we love touring,” explains the group’s frontman Craig Hinds.

They’re also using the opportunity to try out brand new songs on audiences before recording a new album later this year.

“I’ve found over the years, I’ll write a bunch of songs and go into the studio and record them immediately. In studio you’ll have an idea of how you want it to sound. Then you start touring the album and by playing them live the songs just evolve into such great things. And you think: ‘I wish I could re-record the song that way’.”

And the audiences are enjoying the process just as much as Hinds.

“It’s great when, at the end of a show when we’ve played seventy percent new songs that people have never heard before, it’s just happening. I think if you capture their imagination in your brief story before the song, explaining where it was written, what it’s about, the songwriting process, then people almost know the song even before you’ve started playing it.

“You paint the picture of the story so people are living the story when you play the song, and they feel like it’s theirs.”

The band’s latest single ‘Water’ is one such song that’s connected with fans.

“The essence of the song is to quench a thirst for normality. It’s about trying to find that equilibrium in life with the craziness going on around us,” says Hinds. “It’s like if you go for a jog and you’re running past a river and you’re hot and you’re tired and you want to dive in there and you want to drink the water. But you can’t because it’s polluted.

“You should be able to dive in, you want that normality, but you can’t.”

The track marks the band’s first release since the end of their record deal with EMI and Hinds is enjoying the independence – or at least most of it.

“You don’t realise how much the record company does from an admin point of view,” he chuckles. “With ‘Water’ I thought I’d use my personal relationships and go to radio stations with the song on a disc but then I discovered you can’t just do that, you need all these codes, and you’ve got to register with RiSA, the Recording Industry of South Africa. So there we were Googling RiSA, filling in forms, so there’s a lot that you’ve got to do.

“But the freedom is amazing – for example, we can take ‘Water’ and print singles and sell them as merch. You don’t have to share anything with the record company and you can just do it when you want to.”

That freedom will also allow Hinds to record a solo album that showcases his origins as a singer-songwriter.

“I want to go back to those early days of really acoustic stuff, because i think that’s where my passion really lies, in that singer-songwriter thing. Over the years I’ve built up great relationships in the US and UK with other songwriters so biannually I head over and I just write songs.

“So the solo thing is going to be an outlet for this body of work that’s been building over the years.”

That songwriting has also led him to write music for films like the animated ‘Jock Of The Bushveld’ and the forthcoming Brett Kebble biopic.

“I love that style of writing because you get caught up in your own head about your own stories and your own vibes but when somebody gives you a brief it’s quite fun to write for that brief,” he says.

But Watershed will always come first.

“My passion is the songwriting thing and it’s an ongoing thing,” explains Hinds. “When you keep the songs coming, the band can keep on touring.”

And for Hinds, that’s clearly not a slog.

• This article originally appeared on EntertainmentAfrica.com.