In this part of the interview Jed talks about how his band came together and also about the songwriting process, and what's great about Melbourne for musicians.
How
did you three first start playing together as a band?
Well, gradually. The
bass player and I have been together the longest. We met through a mutual
friend and I gave Michael a ride to a festival and yeah, we just were both into
music and yeah, met that way. And then I was going to do a solo EP and he was
busy with other projects, so it wasn’t a matter of me saying, ‘Do you want to
come and join my band?’ It was just, ‘Can you come and play some bass, or play
some keyboards’, because he plays a lot of instruments. So I think I got him to
play keyboard at first on that EP and then when it was time to release that and
do some gigs I said, ‘We’ve got this gig, can you come and do the gig?’ and ‘Yeah,
no worries’. So it was a gradual thing rather than setting out with a concept
in mind. And then Michael the drummer has been with us for something like two
years and we have sort of gone through several drummers – I lost count but [laughs].
But we’ve had a really stable thing with [bass player] Michael and I and then drummers
have sort of lasted a year or two before they moved on. Drummers seem to have
lots of projects on the go. If they’re good they are often in demand. They are
able to fit in and hit things [laughs] with lots of different bands, whereas
maybe if you play other instruments it’s harder to do that, I think. So [drummer]
Michasel was just a friend of the bass player Michael, and they had known each
other from studying together in Melbourne, studying music.
Do
you have different nicknames for them so you’re not just calling out ‘Michael,
Michael, Michael’?
Yeah. Michael
Arvanitakis is Arvo and he’s been Arvo for a long time, like to the point where
people know him just know him as Arvo, and if they hear someone call him
Michael they go, ‘Is your name Michael?’ So he’s very much Arvo. Michael on the
drums is just Michael.
Okay.
[Laughs] You probably want the drummer to have a thug nickname though. Something
about raw power.
We’ll have to think
up a good drummer nickname[laughs].
So
how do you find time to rehearse and gig with all the other things that go on
in a life, I guess, with children and a job. I so admire the dedication
musicians have to carving out that space and time to rehearse, let alone get on
the road and I know you have some gigs coming up around the country so you’re
carving out that time as well. Do you just have to make a commitment and do it?
Yes. I guess so. And whatever
you do there’s going to be sacrifices and I guess mysacrifice has been
sacrificing other paid work and just putting up with surviving on the smell of
an oily rag [laughs]. I can have time to write songs and, particularly on the
management side, because I do most of that – at the moment we have a couple of
publicists helping out with the release, which is great, and we’ve had booking
agents at various times and so sometimes there’s help with running it. But a
lot of time goes into that and you try to find time to rehearse, of course, and
tour so I think it kind of goes in phases. You can’t really fit everything in
at once, particularly if you’re doing it independently and doing some of your
management stuff as well. Like we had a stage last year when we were recording,
we didn’t do a lot of gigging and so we were able to focus on the recording,
and now I’ve spent a lot of this year on the management side actually, and not
much performing or recording or songwriting. But then we’ll have a touring
phase coming up and that will be the focus for a while, and then I guess at
some point we’ll do some more songwriting and recording. So you just sort of
have to focus on one thing at a time, I guess.
And
in terms of your songwriting, do you find that you kind of need to create a bit
of a vacuum in your life in terms of not much else to think about, in order to
have that creativity come in. or does it happen around everything else?
That’s interesting. I’m
sort of trying to remember because I haven’t been writing a lot of songs for a
while. One thing I do find is that since I started making albums anyway, once
it comes time – once the songs are sort of selected for an album, I tend to turn
off the songwriting taps completely and just focus on finishing off this album,
and the creative energy kind of goes into that, it goes into recording or
arranging or that sort of thing, rather than chasing after every song idea that
might come into your head. And then it takes a while to turn it back on after
that because again, at the moment, I’m not really writing a lot and I don’t
really expect to probably on the tour either. But what I found last time, for our
last album, was that it just took a while, the songwriting just took a while to
come back and I had to write a few songs that mightn’t have been keepers and
then eventually the good ones come through. And sometimes it’s a matter of just
having time to do it, but it’s always a mixture of some inspiration that just
comes from who knows where — that’s the sort of backbone of the song usually —and
then there’s the time to sit down and use whatever songwriting techniques you
have to finish it off. So it’s a
combination of those two.
And
have you learned those songwriting techniques through experience or did you go
and study somewhere when you were younger?
A bit of both. I’ve
done different things, studying. I studied music for a year and singing was my
kind of major, so there was some music theory and probably a bit for songwriting.
I actually studied creative writing as well at uni for – again, I think for about
18 months, and that has helped with lyric writing definitely, because the assignments
were sort of sit down and write short stories and develop characters and things
like that, so that comes into it.
And
it shows, because if I look at your CD insert with the lyrics set out, it looks
like poetry. It’s set out with that poetic rhythm, like you’ve studied your
cadences and your meters and constructed it that way, so those 18 months
definitely had an effect.
Yeah. And I’ve always
liked writing and I’ve always liked words so it’s not just the study, it’s just
also partly the way my brain is wired. Whereas to some people music is much
more about just the musical elements and the words are just the vehicle to give
you something to think, which is fine too. And there’s music that’s great to
listen to where that’s the case.
You’re
a New South Welshman by upbringing and you’ve defected south of the border. Do
you find Melbourne to be a more supportive creative environment, particularly
if you’re an independent artist? I’ve noticed that your CD has got a bit of
funding from Arts Victoria.
I’m not sure about in
terms of government because I’ve never applied for sort of arts grants or
anything. I never did that when I lived in New South Wales. I think Melbourne
is definitely a much bigger scene probably than anywhere in Australia, I think,
in terms of music. So whatever kind of music you’re into there’s probably a
pretty good team going on in Melbourne. I think it just helps; it helps for the
quality of it. You need be around people who are doing really good stuff and it
can work, in terms of it being a supportive scene, it can kind of lurk the
other way too; I think in Melbourne, to an extent, that there’s so much good
stuff going on that it’s hard to kind of stand out from that crowd because it’s
a big crowd [laughs] whereas when we first started touring we would kind of
often have better responses interstate than some of our Melbourne gigs, just
because you’d go to some country pub and they’re like, ‘Oh, wow, you guys are
great. This is good.’ They don’t get as much good music going there, I guess. So
in Melbourne audiences can be a bit spoilt for choice and it can be a bit hard
to be impressive [laughs] maybe.
And
do you feel like you’re part of the country music community? One of the things
I love about Australian country music is that it is quite a supportive
community in terms of new artists in particular. People in country towns will
turn out —if you say you’re a country music performer they’ll turn out for you.
For me you fit completely within a sub-genre of country, so it sounds like
country music to me.
That’s interesting. Like
I wouldn’t say I’ve set out to be a country artist or a blues artist or a folk
artist or a rock artist or whatever, but I guess I just love good songs and I
tend to like a wide variety of music, and that tends to show up in the songs
that I write. And the country has kind of been more of a thing of the last few
years, as far as listening goes, I just sort of come across some really great
songwriters, stuff like Gillian Welch and I love the album that Kasey Chambers
and Shane Nicholson did together, Rattlin’
Bones, and things like that — perhaps you would call them old country, I
don’t even know. I know it’s necessary to categorise music but I always find it
hard to put it into words or categories’.
I
guess one of the main reasons why I think of your music as country is that
country music, more than any other genre I’ve identified, is a storytelling
genre.
Absolutely.
And
it’s what the audiences expect. In country shows you get a lot of talking
between songs because the artist is setting up the song, in a way, because they
understand they’re telling a story. This album is like reading a collection of
short stories — it’s the most literate album I’ve heard in that sense —and you
seem to really understand that role of being a storyteller, that cultural role
of being a storyteller.
Oh well, that’s a
good – good compliment to get. I think that’s one of the things I would set out
to do. When I first started actually listening to more country stuff that was
kind of why, I guess, just because it’s where some of the great songwriting was
going on.
