It’s been a wholesome ride for Capetonian singer/songwriter Matthew Mole since the release of his debut album, 2013’s The Home We Built—a reminder that home isn’t just a place. While he was simply writing a lot of these songs for fun, Mole drew on influences from Icelandic artist Jónsi, whose insistence on recording music around the house, as opposed to in conventional studios, was especially inspirational. At the time, Mole was into bands doing unorthodox things to produce conventional pop music results. Throw in some foot stomps, wall bangs and accordion sounds and you get a gist of what inspired this authentically talented guy straight out of high school. The two major themes running through The Home We Built are upliftment and love. This is the type of record you want your teenage kids to hear when they’re dealing with insecurities and fears about where their lives are headed. Here, Matthew Mole talks us through some key tracks from his most formative musical chapter. “Chapel” “This track’s got a long, cinematic intro that builds into what the sound of the album's going to be. It isn’t related to a church song of any kind, but when I was a kid, there was a church across the road from my house that had a piano in a chapel room and they let me go there and play it for fun. That was where I learned how to play the instrument. I don't really know how to play the piano properly, but that was where I learned enough to be able to write songs and play them live. The lyrics talk about facing life. I had just left school and went on to study music production, and that was where I found music was something I could pursue. Don't be scared, just go live your life, figure it out and enjoy the process.” “Autumn” “This is heavily inspired by Jónsi. I called it ‘Autumn’ because it's talking about change and the seasons of life. I don't think too much about naming songs, but I liked the representation of Autumn and the falling of leaves. It’s going to sound cheesy, but the end of one season is always the start of another. I wrote that one on my sister’s guitar that she never played, and all the strings were broken. Often I would write songs that I thought were terrible. But with ‘Autumn’, I thought 'This is kind of nice. I quite like it,' which was a new feeling for me.” “Take Yours, I’ll Take Mine” “This is the first song I’d written on a banjo. I was 18 at the time, and remember playing around with this in my bedroom, trying to play it quietly while my parents had dinner guests. Banjos are surprisingly loud though. I would bang a leather shoe with a hard sole against the wall to simulate a foot stomping sound. We did this in a more elegant fashion in a studio when recording the album. I found a chord shape for four chords that sounded kind of cool. Then I just sang some melodies the same way I still write songs to this day, playing along and humming some random gibberish. With this, I wanted a chorus where people could stomp their feet and jump around and the lyrics were hopefully catchy enough for them to sing along. That worked out well. This song was all about me needing to find some sort of direction and my place in this world.” “The Wedding Song” “I wrote this after I went to a wedding of some friends. It was the first wedding I attended where I actually paid attention and wasn’t just dragged along by family. It inspired me to write a song about the union between two people, or two things which marry well together in life, so that it was applicable to anyone. Ever since it came out, so many people have used it, including a famous rugby player, for their first wedding dance. That’s quite cool. It actually blows my mind. I don't know, I didn't ever think that kind of thing would ever happen.” “It’s Simple, Child” “This song was about a time in my life when friends were giving stuff a lot of thought and making calculated decisions with their lives but I didn’t know how to process things like that. I had just finished school, it was cool and I had lots of friends, but I don’t want to go and study something where I had to do more homework. I just wanted to go do something I loved. That was my simplified thought process. 'Okay, music, I love music. What can I do?' So I went into music production. This song was about me trying not to overcomplicate those life decisions as I bridged the gap between childhood and adulthood. I suppose the message was something along the lines of, 'Don’t put pressure on yourself. Work out what you need to work out in your own way and at your own pace.’ When I wrote this I wasn’t really expecting anybody to hear it. I wrote all of these songs for myself. I’m really grateful that they came together so organically without the initial pressure to release an album.” “Same Parts, Same Heart” “This was a late addition to the album and written for someone who’s now my wife, but at the time I just wrote it for her because she was this girl I met. I moved up to Joburg when we started recording over a period of four or five months, and during that time, or just before that time, I had met this girl and I was like, 'Wow, she's awesome.’ I was figuring out how to write songs at the time. I was like, 'I'm going to write a song about her,' and I did, and it ended up being quite a serious song for someone that I'd only known for three months. So I showed her and she freaked out. She was like, 'What the heck?' She thought I was saying I wanted to get married and have children, and when you listen to the lyrics, it's like, 'Wow, that's really what it sounds like I'm saying.' It ended up working out and now we've been married for eight years.” “Whale” “Whale is a song I wrote about trying not to run away from your problems because they'll always find you again. It’s one of the many I recorded at home and wrote when I was 18 or 19. I’d just gotten a cheap, brand new banjo. We ended up re-recording it which was a cool process because like a few others recorded a year or two earlier, this was already on the internet. It was cool to sit down and listen to it again and be like, 'how can we make this better or more interesting?’ That was fun.” “As If You Were Never Wrong” “This was never a radio song and I never played it live. It's the weirdest song title ever. It’s a song about love and how people often don’t feel like they deserve the love they get. I enjoyed this one from a sonic perspective because you can quite literally hear me fumbling my way through it with a banjo I’m still figuring out and it’s quite stripped-down. I also played a drum part which creates a kind of messy, chaotic ending. It was a lot of fun to put together and super straightforward until about the last eight bars.”