Interview: Big Vacation Chats About His New Single, ‘Anchor Point’

Eora/Sydney-based indie-pop artist Big Vacation (FKA Billy Fox) has unveiled his mesmerising debut single ‘Anchor Point‘ – produced/mixed by the artist himself and mastered by Matt Curtin (Flume, ODESZA, GoldenFeatures). An old friend and big fav here at AAA, we sat down with BV to find out more about the single, the name change and future plans.

Congratulations on the release of ‘Anchor Point’! What are the plans to celebrate the track being out?

Thanks. Always huge love for the AAA fam. It feels great, and maybe I’ll find a little slice of time to celebrate, but it feels like part of a bigger picture for this project. There’s a lot of music already written, but it’s a brand new project, so prior to this, I started to build ‘the world’ around it with a bit of a teaser track last year and some mini-productions of covers that influence this project which has been fun.

You can check that stuff out on my socials, but I really want everything I do with this project to be fun for me as the creator. Any artist out there making music in the modern landscape will tell you that ‘content creation’ can be a bit of a buzz kill when all we want to do is make music. So I wanted to redefine my relationship with making music and art with the Big Vacation project, and make art that I love doing (hence the name Big Vacation I suppose) which also happens to be ‘content’.

What was the inspiration behind the music video and what inspired you to create it?

I had a bit of a vision for what I wanted, and a lot of it was filmed on a surf trip up to Lennox Head around Christmas, then the rest here in Sydney. I sort of used the chronological nature of the surf trip (beginning, middle, end) to broadly structure the edit, then pieced everything around that. The super close-up shots of my mug were filmed lying on the beach near my place after just playing around with the camera and finding interesting shots., lighting and angles. Nothing was overly thought out.

For artists who are interested in creating their own DIY music videos, what are some tips you can share?

Use what you have at your disposal. I use my iPhone to film all my visuals, then edit on Premiere Pro. Hone in on your style, find that and lean into it. Analyse a bunch of references that you really like and note all of the things that you think you could emulate- colour, locations, types of shots etc. Do your research on pre-production tech stuff like frame rates, whether you want HD or 4K, so you have all your settings right for the production. You can’t change these once you have filmed.

Think about the purpose- what will it be used for? Which platforms?

Just go and do it- have fun. You can’t break art. Embrace the mistakes, be realistic (I’m no Ron Howard) and get weird.

How would you say ‘Big Vacation’ differs from ‘Billy Fox’?

Stylistically, Big Vacation is grittier and a bit more organic. Billy Fox is born from the soul electronic palettes and is a bit cleaner. That came through the visuals too. Whereas Big Vacation is crunchier and dirtier, from the indie alt pop world, drawing influences from punk, hip hop and grunge along the way. The workflow and creation are different too, in that I’m a mix engineer on these songs, touching base with other engineers I trust, as well as Matt Curtin, who masters these songs and is also a mix engineer. So, these songs have a completely different DNA on almost every level.

When starting ‘Big Vacation’, were there any challenges that you faced making that transition from ‘Billy Fox’ and how did you overcome them?

Not at all. The Billy Fox project is still here (maybe some releases in the pipeline ;)), so there was no transition at all, really. I was working on a bunch of songs for different projects over the last couple of years, and some just started sitting in their own space and were really cool, so Big Vacation came out of that. It wasn’t a conscious decision at all. It felt like a holiday from everything else I was doing, so I just went with it and saw it as a big, juicy vacation.

Do you have any live plans coming up?

I have certainly had some discussions with a few people about this, but there will be more on this when the time is right. Follow me on socials so I can let you all know every step of the way.