You hear it don’t you? R5‘s new EP, New Addictions is different — it’s better.
“It feels really good to have that producer title now,” Rocky tells us. “We’ve been writing and producing music for a long time, but everyone always told us that it wasn’t good enough or it doesn’t sound like other writers and producers are sending in for us to record.”
“It was always a battle with ‘we like these songs we’re making’, but others were basically saying no,” he shared.
But things started to turn around with “If”: “[That] was the first song we finished where we are the only writers and producers on that track. We wrote, we engineered it, we recorded all the vocals, we produced it — just Ross, me and Ellington Ratliff.”
He continued, “We actually popped a bottle of champagne after I sent it into the mixer to celebrate. It was a moment that we’ve been working for, for a long time. We finally arrived there and now that we’ve broken that boundary of others not letting us do it ourselves, we got past that stage and now we are accepted as writers/producers now and can continue to do that.
“I’m excited for the next stage of doing that more and growing as a writing team and seeing where that takes us.”
Getting that producer title didn’t come easy for the guys, and Rocky is the first to admit it.
“The biggest issue with our past songs that we wrote and pitched was that they didn’t sound good enough,” he says. “We’ve always been creative people and we’ve written good songs. The best songs were always the simple ones and when we were starting out as writers, that wasn’t the problem.”
“It was more that our songs didn’t sound anything like others that were being pitched to us from others. They really sounded like crap. They had better microphones…everything they had, it was better than the technology that we were using,” Rocky adds. “We were forced to teach ourselves how to do it all. We sent in a couple of songs to our label and they told us it wasn’t good. We were comparing our songs to the other songs that had been mixed and took it upon ourselves to just be better.
And he did — he re-learned basically everything he knew.
“I watched videos, I read more, I bought better plugins to make the songs sound better and now, they do,” Rocky says. “We put the time in…Ross records all his own vocals, he’s a great vocal producer now and it shows. We decided to do it ourselves and strive to make ourselves better and we got there.”
Ross added further, “We started trying to be self sufficient and have arrived at that spot.”
So now, it’s just about getting ever better.
“From here on out, it’s now about growth,” Ross says. “We’re only competing with ourselves and the question is just how can we continue write better songs and continue to push the envelope as far as our genre? We’re just really looking forward to creating more music.”
New Addictions is out NOW and you can get all the stories behind the songs — “If“, “Red Velvet“, “Lay Your Head Down“, “Trading Time” and their cover of INXS‘ “Need You Tonight” — on JJJ.
