Picture This

We’ve been following Picture This’ musical journey from the get-go and from playground days to huge world tours its been one hell of a ride. We sat down with Ryan, Jimmy, Owen and Cliff to find out where they’ve been and where they plan to go.

“We all went to the same school but we never hung out at the time, we were all quite separate. Even though we are from the same town, we had never really been around each other.” Ryan tells me as we chill out after a busy shoot day. “I was never really into music ever, it was only when I was 18 that I started to sing and realised I loved it. The boys had been playing together for years before Jimmy discovered me through Facebook. After that, we wrote some songs one of them being “Take My Hand” and that’s kind of where the whole thing started so humble beginnings.”

Humble beginnings indeed. Coming from Athy, a small town outside of Dublin with a population of only 9,600 people the boys were worlds away from the bright lights of the music industry they find themselves in today. They had no choice but to write and produce their first releases themselves, but their DIY attitude to songwriting, at first a locational necessity, is now a grounded philosophy. “I think with writing and producing everything ourselves a lot of people might think we are control freaks or whatever. But at the beginning we didn’t want to go down the normal route of finding a record label, we wanted to do our own thing which we did, and that meat we gained tones of experience in how to do a lot of these technical things. It was born out of necessity really, we just kind of had to do it. I think if you distil it down even more we didn’t have any obvious pathway. I didn’t realise that the songs that I wrote could even be played on a radio station, we couldn’t perceive that. So we just were making songs that I was writing in my bedroom, and we loved them. We just kept posting them online and people were loving them, they were really connecting with people. That’s all we’ve ever really wanted to do, connect with people and that’s what we’ve continued to do. That’s always been the most important thing for us. When people talk about success -obviously we have done a lot of amazing things, sold-out shows and charting tracks - but success has always been connecting with people and how these songs affect people. That is always the most rewarding thing.”

“When it comes to Picture This, I don’t think we’ll ever get others majorly involved in it. We are very creative and we do a lot of work for other artists and we enjoy working with people, but then once we realised that we do it all ourselves, it’s like, I don’t know why we would just bring somebody to do it for us. I guess if you ever felt like we needed to, we would. We’re not completely shutting off the opportunities for sure.”

If you’ve heard any of Picture This’ music it wouldn’t shock you that they have graced some of the worlds biggest stages. Sold out shows and screaming fans are part of their daily life (before COVID anyway) but it is still a reality the four lads still struggle to come to terms with. The shock that four small-town lads, with a small but dedicated local fanbase, have risen to such heights evident in the way they retell their story.

“There’s definitely a core group of people who have been there from the beginning. When we started playing shows, it was crazy to us to see a ‘fan base’. But to see people come at the beginning is a good sign that your music is doing something for them. Originally it was 16 to 25-year-old girls that were showing up but shortly after when we started playing shows, it was crazy, there were grandparents and there were kids. That was pretty insane for us. I remember walking on stage at one of our first-ever shows and just seeing a man, an old man with grey hair and it was mind-blowing to me because I kind of thought that other generations would overlook us because we came from the world of social media. Like our band became known through Facebook, which is weird, because I thought we’d be the last people to break on Facebook, especially because everyone had kind of moved to Instagram.

After a while, we grew such a dedicated fan base who we know are always rooting for us no matter what and there’s a great trust and dialogue between us and our fanbase. We’ve been holding off our album for like two years now, not because we didn’t want to, we wanted to release our album in October 2019, but the fans have been very understanding. For me, as a consumer of music, I would get frustrated if my favourite band were gonna release an album but end up delaying it. But it’s testament to them and to our relationship and dynamic with them that they’ve been supporting us the whole way.”

But don’t get confused Picture This isn’t a small-town band breaking into the scene that you should take note of as humble and gracious as they are, they are causing waves across the pond and have become a firm favourite in the LA scene. A large queue outside a venue one night even turned the head of boy band royalty Joe Jonas who’s record label Let’s Get It Records! the boys recently signed to.
“It was mad. We were on an American tour and playing The Troubadour in Los Angeles. Joe Jonas pulls up and he asked the people waiting outside who’s playing? They say us, Picture This and he says, ‘Oh, I know that band’. I’m not entirely sure how he knew us, I think because of Sophie [Turner, Jonas’ wife and actress], she might have known who we were and must have told him about us. He became interested in us and then he got to see us play live. It was very natural. And here we are all of a sudden, you know, it’s incredible for us. He’s such a lovely guy and they’re [The Jonas Brothers] just very accommodating genuine people.”