South West musician Dylon Newport’s latest EP almost didn’t see the light of day, but is now set for release

Ferguson Valley musician Dylon Newport’s latest EP almost didn’t see the light of day. The songs, originally saved on just one hard drive, were some of the best he says he has ever created. So when that hard drive broke, he tried all he could to retrieve the workings — and ending up gambling some savings on a tech team over east, who gave him a 50-50 chance of recovery. It was a move which paid off, with all the songs returned to him, ready to be produced into what is now Seldom, Newport’s latest EP out June 4. “A lot of these songs are about coming to terms with, like, facing a new chapter in life,” Newport told the Times. “I had a lot of things happen and I felt a bit of doom and gloom around my life where I was like, things were never going to be as good as they were before and I just kind of wrote myself out of that. “I created this entire EP by myself, in my bedroom. It wasn’t necessarily planned that way, but I’m glad it happened. It gave me the freedom to make whatever creative choices I wanted. “While my previous EP touched on heartbreak, distrust and loss, this EP dives even deeper into the raw emotions I was facing, especially the process of coming to terms with an unexpected future without someone.” Newport’s love for music was sparked by his mum who was in a band he used to follow around. Once he got his own guitar and found out he “could kind of sing”, Newport just didn’t stop. “I became really obsessed with complicated contemporary finger picking ... and it’s basically all I did, I had no other hobbies,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the love that I got from my first song from Bunbury, I probably wouldn’t have taken music as serious.” To thank his fan who made a life in music possible — after sharing that first, just for fun, song online — Newport is set to play his latest tracks to a home crowd on Thursday night at the Prince of Wales. “Expect it to be more energetic than you would think. I know a lot of my songs are very like chill, but I love to just like, jump on stage and have fun,” he told the Times. “(My music is ) definitely pop indie. It’s also very like unpolished. I’d say a lot of my songs are very raw, and I don’t really like to just take out all the imperfections I think a lot of people appreciate the imperfections that I leave in all of my songs.” Newport also recently won a Triple J Unearthed competition to warm the stage up for Australian artist Thelma Plum in Margaret River and was the station’s feature artist ahead of Seldom’s release.