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What happens when you combine the busking heart of Melbourne with a global soul sound? That’d be Big Words then.
Big Words is the combined talent of Will Scullin and Kieren Lee who lay claim to “Drake-like charisma drenched in Beach Boys harmonies”.
They’re a pair who approach music from different directions but their eventual meeting point is what makes them so special. For Kieran, it began with busking, performing live in front of throngs of people from the age of 12 onwards.
“It’s like being in the ocean… you can see all these different things and people flying past you all the time… all these different energies you never would before… it’s quite exhausting but it’s super rewarding."
For Will, his passions lay within hip-hop and soul and when Kieran wanted to work with someone in that hip-hop space, a mutual friend connected them up. Ironically, the combination of busking and hip-hop would once again prove to be a galvanizing force for the duo when Ghostface Killah of the iconic Wu-Tang Clan discovered the duo busking while on tour in 2016.
Since then, they’ve gone on to notch up millions of streams and perform alongside the likes of Hobo Johnson and Tash Sultana. Despite the promising trajectory of their endeavours, the two treat their project with less mercenary ambition than you’d expect. They spend their day to day working in hospitality, waiting on tables and the songs just flow naturally rather than in any dedicated writing sessions.
“You get to a point where you’re not trying to be this thing or do this thing, it’s just who you are. You make music, you make art, you’re just doing it, you don’t even think about it so much”
The free-flowing combination of the two lends itself to something that doesn’t sound as if it’d fit entirely in a busking setting, nor is it evidently a hip-hop project. The two tend towards classic songwriting filtered through the lens of modern R&B with songs like Sink or Swim channelling the velveteen flex of Frank Ocean or Daniel Caesar.