Setting Sail For Greener Pastures With ASHLEY DOODKORTE From VOYAGER

Interview by Kris Peters
It seems like the name Voyager is on everyone's lips of late, and rightly so.
Fresh from coming a hugely respectable ninth at the latest Eurovision finals, plus a recently completed run of sold out Australian shows, Voyager are sonic proof that hard work and dedication invariably pay off.
Despite plying their trade now for over a decade, Voyager have only started to reap the benefits of their toils in the last couple of years, starting with a debut appearance at Eurovision Australia which really made the world take notice.
Despite their recent run of success the band remains humble and quintessentially Australian and have celebrated their own personal milestones with the release of their latest album Fearless in Love last week.
Drummer Ashley Doodkorte sat down with HEAVY earlier this week to discuss the album and other things.
"It's been fantastic," he enthused of the early response to the album. "It's had positive reviews and seems to be doing alright. A lot of people are getting it in their hot little hands."
Being Voyager's eighth album we ask Doodkorte to run us through the album musically and if there is anything slightly different from previous albums.
"Musically it's interesting," he measured, "because we feel like it's one of our more accessible albums but at the same time it feels like maybe our darkest and heaviest album that we've done. I'm not sure how we managed that (laughs). I don't know what alchemy we incorporated to make those two things work... but it seems to have gelled nicely. It was a very different writing process for us as well. Rather than just the five of us getting together in a rehearsal room and bashing things out until the songs take shape, we kind of sat down at Scott's house and worked on it instrument by instrument, bit by bit. We were all very cognisant of listening to each other's parts carefully and asking ourselves all the hard questions of what does the song really need? Does it need that blistering six minute solo? Does it need that bombastic drum fill in that part? We scrutinised every part and that's a little bit different for us but I feel like it's really paid off."
In the full interview Ash talks more about Fearless In Love, the 80s and 90s grit and glam feel behind it, creating a cinematic feel to music and how it's done, how the world around them influenced the album in the writing stage, how Voyager's music has progressed since they started, Eurovision and the realities of being in a global band competition, what's next for Voyager and more.

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