For 21 year old Jonathan Boulet, fame has come through well deserved luck. After all, he had been planning on slipping his CD to Sydney’s Modular Records… but they somehow beat him to the punch.
‘It was pretty weird,’ Boulet said of the experience. ‘My and my friends used to joke about taking the CD and sticking it under Modular’s door.
‘We’d sort of joke about it and be like ‘Oh, that’d be so crazy, it’d be amazing!’ And one day one of them calls me and I’m like ‘What? This is ridiculous!’ It was just… it was weird.’
Boulet’s sound is heartfelt bedroom pop, one part acoustic and unmistakably Australian in sound. Lead single A Community Service Announcement has wowed audiences and even Triple J have picked his self-titled debut LP as Feature Album of the Week.
Boulet, however, remains modest of his success.
‘It’s just a bunch of recordings that I’d done over a couple of years and I just sort of put them together and thought I could probably just put an album out. I’d give it to my friends, put it on MySpace and pretty much I thought that would be it.
‘It’s just stuff that I was doing; I’d put it out and that’s all it would be, a creative outlet. But eventually Modular found it and took it from there.’
So is Boulet part of a Sydney scene? As far as he’s concerned, yes.
‘I’ve seen a lot of creative bands that are just sort of emerging and it’s really good. It’s like the whole scene is starting to build and gain momentum. I think in the next couple of years it’s going to start picking up and it’s only going to get better.
‘The music is just going to get stronger and it’s going to hold its own and I think it’s going to be really healthy and people will recognise that Australia does have game; it does bring something to the music table.’
Jonathan Boulet appears at Fly By Night on March 6.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
