When Winston Surfshirt, aka Sydney artist Brett Ramson, began writing his fourth album, he thought he was making a disco record like Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall. Four years later, he arrived at a collection of songs that owes more to the late-’90s/early-2000s R&B of artists such as USHER, Craig David, and Aaliyah. “I just felt like everyone was doing it, and I don’t like doing stuff everyone’s doing,” he tells Apple Music of his shift away from disco. Also key to the move was his alliance with producer OSWRLD, aka Oscar Sharah. “Through our love for that [R&B] era, everything got pushed into that one street,” he explains. From the seductive R&B of “One Sugar” and nostalgic soul of “Spend My Nights” to the R&B, hip-hop and funk mélange of “Ice Cream,” the album is, says the artist, “almost like a pop record,” with each song a potential single. That he opted to call it WINSTON stems from both a desire to break the pattern of dessert-themed album titles (2022’s Panna Cotta, 2019’s Apple Crumble, 2017’s Sponge Cake), but also because the musical era that inspired the record is so key to informing who he is as an artist. Here, he takes Apple Music through WINSTON, track by track. “Turn Out the Light” “Probably the first song written, from before my first daughter was born, 2020, beginning of COVID. We were locked down and in a house with a new baby, and I was trying to write an album that was going to be disco, so the first demo of it is very disco. Some songs can have two meanings for me. Sometimes, I’ll be writing about love, but it can also be about music, which is another huge love of mine. Four years later, I feel like it’s more about music than love, and it’s more about me.” “Ice Cream” “This is the first song I wrote with Oscar. I get mad George Michael vibes from the verse. The chorus melody came within 30 minutes, and the verse was the same thing—he’d made the chorus beat, and then he flipped what he’d made to make a completely different part for the verses. I was like, ‘Oh my Lord!’” “One Sugar” “It’s just about my wife and love. That verse is the most literal thing in the world. She only drinks soda water and she makes good pavlova. I’d had that chord pattern in my head for the last four years, and it took till I met Oscar and he helped me work the chords out.” “Desire” “My second daughter is on ‘JEEP,’ there’s a sample of her voice, and my oldest daughter was upset that she wasn’t on a song, so I had to put her in ‘Desire.’ This song was from a writing trip in Kangaroo Valley with Oscar and a guy called Beso Palma and a piano player called Brekky Boy, and then my band and another mate. Musically, it was a lot of just getting people to jump in and mess about.” “Up & Down” “It’s pretty funny. We were pissing ourselves when we wrote it. [The inspiration came from a] guy called Domino, super-2000s hip-hop. And again, another chord pattern that I had but needed help with structuring. I sat down with Oscar, he played bass, I played keys, and the song was done.” “JEEP” “Another one from the Kangaroo Valley. We had no Wi-Fi, so there was only a television with radio channels, and there was a song on by Blackstreet called ‘Girlfriend/ Boyfriend’ that does that stutter beat. I couldn’t look up the song, so I had to try and explain to Oscar I wanted a beat like this with the drums, and then we just put some chords over it. The chorus melody, the baby’s sleeping thing, that’s an old song from five years ago when my [firstborn] was a baby.” “Chop N Bowl” “That’s just something I’ve always said. When people are like, ‘We’ve got to rock ’n’ roll, we’ve got to go,’ I’ve always said, ‘We’ve got to chop ’n’ bowl.’ We’ve got to get out of here. It’s time to go.” “Spend My Nights” “They’re all sort of [about my partner], or tongue in cheek. But it’s trying to evoke that feeling of when we were kids and I was besotted by this lady. We had the chorus and I remember that was in the Kangaroo Valley, and then months later it was like, ‘Can you finish that?’ The guy who plays drums in my band came over and helped me write this Q-Tip sort of thing.” “Fill My Cup” “Oscar had a chord pattern idea and I helped him figure that out. The song was called ‘Get Down on You,’ and I think we were like, ‘What does that mean? Is that a bit weird?’ We’ve also got a song called ‘Up & Down’ so we just used another title in there. Again, just a song about my wife, really.” “BOOTS” “It came after we had most of the songs. It felt like we were missing some upbeat stuff. And we were like, how do we do that in a ’90s way? And we started listening to Miami bass and stuff like that and went, ‘OK, let’s go at 123 BPM,’ which is probably the fastest song I’ve got, and it just worked. The chorus vocal melody was another thing I’d been singing in my mind for two or three years that never fit with anything.” “I Can’t Hide” “There was a three-month period where my daughter was a baby where I was trying to write a song for Elton John. A song that he would like to sing with me. I think I wrote 20 or 30 beats over this three-month period, and this was my favorite one. Then I got cold feet. He’s a busy man, he’s not going to do that!”