Simon Gooding and Brendon Morrow already knew their way around the studio as session musicians for other bands and had already mapped out their future before they ever met.
While studying audio engineering at SAE in Byron Bay, Australia, they shared a cramped dorm room, and discovered a mutual love for Radiohead, The Beatles and The Mars Volta and when they returned to Auckland, The Map Room was already half born. It didn’t fully take shape – namewise – until they discovered a great bar with the same name in Argentina.
“I guess we had an ear for similar melodies and arrangements. We didn’t set out to start a band straight away but after a year or so we had the start of a few songs and an idea that we would like to collaborate further,” says Gooding of The Map Room’s recently released debut album All You’ll Ever Find.
“We ended up flatting together in Auckland, and I remember that the idea to travel came out of a late night conversation, something along the lines of, ‘South America would be great to go and spend some time in, maybe we should just do it’ And from there we started looking into it seriously.”
The pair were both writing a lot of music at the time but often found that their jobs were getting in the way.
“So the idea of travelling around and having endless time to write and record demos was very appealing along with the chance to explore such an interesting part of the world,” Gooding says.
“We had the start of a few songs before we left but the idea was to write an album’s worth of material while we were away. As soon as we landed in Buenos Aires, we started looking for two acoustic guitars that we could travel with. We hit the jackpot and found one of them in an antiques shop, a beautiful 60-year- old nylon string guitar for a ridiculously low price. Somehow both guitars made it home in one piece!”
More than half of the songs on All You’ll Ever Find were written in Argentina.
“We had a small portable recorder over there that could multi-track different layers, so that was helpful in putting the songs together,” Gooding says.
“It’s interesting listening to those demos now and compare them to the finished product.”
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