One of my favourite 'finds' of recent times has been The Jed Rowe Band's album The Ember and the Afterglow. Seeing the band play live in Sydney recently just made me love their sound all the more - it was truly a fantastic gig. With a catalogue of beautifully crafted songs and three gifted musicians, it would have been hard for it to be anything other than that.
I spoke to Jed Rowe before he embarked on the tour and found out that there's a reason why his songs are so great: he's a thoughtful, diligent songwriter who has been developing his skills for quite a while now, and he understands the role storytellers play in a culture, regardless of the medium in which those stories are delivered.
This is the first part of a two-part interview.
I’m
going to start off the conversation by saying I think the album is just
fantastic.
Cool. Thank you.
One
of the things I found really amazing and noteworthy was that the first song, ‘Castlemaine’,
has a female narrator and then I worked out that four of the songs on the album
have female narrators, and that’s really unusual for a male songwriter, let
alone a singer-songwriter, to do. So I was wondering if you could talk about
why you had chosen that song to start with and also how these female characters
developed for you.
I think that choice
of that song as the opener was Jeff’s – as in, Jeff Lang, the producer – and I
think he just went for it because it was a kind of a strong musical statement. So
it certainly wasn’t a conscious choice to, you know, let’s open with one of the
female perspective ones. And nor was it a conscious choice, like we had sort of
30 or so songs to choose from that we could have recorded, so it wasn’t really
a conscious choice, either, to pick four that had that female perspective. I
think it’s just that ... I read a lot and I’m kind of just interested in
stories, good stories, and so it didn’t seem weird to me to write songs about
female main characters, and having it in first person with a female actually –
the main character – narrating it, I think just gives it a bit more immediacy,
it makes it a bit more real. So yeah, that’s kind of why that approach, but
it’s just a kind of an accident that it works out that way [chuckle].
Because
you have, I think why the first song is such a surprise –
and it was a surprise to me more than
once, actually – is because you have
a really masculine voice and quite a deep voice and so it’s just that almost
kind of mental shift of, ‘Oh, this is a woman’s story’ and then it completely goes
to show that stories can be told by anyone, if the intent is there.
Yeah. I haven’t
really thought of that but, yeah, that song particularly is kind of, I guess
low – low-ish – in my register, so it is very much a male voice telling the
story of a woman.
Well,
a woman giving birth and laying in the ground. It’s just really almost a visceral
story.
I think that side of
it comes from my own experience with having kids, because my kids are pretty
young and that’s sort of been one of the main themes of my last seven years, having
kids, and lots of my friends are having kids. And I just know my wife’s had her
struggles with sort of pregnancy and childbirth and depression and stuff, and
also I’ve just had lots of friends who – it’s the same. So I took something of
that – that kind of sacrifice that goes with carrying a child, for a mother,
and it sort of found its way into the song. The stories are just sort of the
way its told but yeah, I think as far as the themes go that’s where it comes
from.
It
sounds like an historical song as well and I get the sense with your songwriting
that it’s kind of like a fabric of Australian history in a way – not Australian
history but Australian stories, there are all these perspectives of country
towns and travel, like travelling through the countryside. You said you read a
lot –
do you read a lot of Australian novels or
Australian history?
Yes. I do. I read sort
of a lot of whatever, I guess. Something that comes to mind is Peter Carey’s
book The True History of the Kelly Gang,
which is the alternative story of Ned Kelly and that one is told through Ned
Kelly’s perspective, so it just really recreates a feeling of being in that
time. And I’m just interested in history so I kind of read bits of history when
I come across it.
And
are audiences quite respectful, in terms of they’ll sit and listen to you? Because
these are songs that don’t really go on in the background.
Look, it varies. No
matter what songs I was playing some venues and some settings are about people
sitting dead quiet and attentive and listening, and other venues are about
background for something social that’s going on and it doesn’t matter what song
I could be playing in some venue, they’re not a listening venue. I think
actually the recorded form is often kind of where the songs get really soaked
up, too, because if people can listen to it again and again and listen to it in
a quiet setting or however they like, as far as the stories and lyrics go
sometimes, yeah, recording is good for – for that getting that across – more so
than live sometimes.
That’s
true. And I found with the musical setting of each story it was – it seemed
like it was – there wasn’t a single song on that album that I thought, ‘Oh well,
that doesn’t really work, that musical setting for that story’. So having those
30 songs demo’ed, had you pretty much set the tone musically for the songs then
or did Jeff Lang actually contribute quite a bit at the production stage?
I’d say a bit of both.
I think the very choice to work with Geoff is kind of a choice anyway that affected
that, because I know of his music and I knew that it would really suit what we
do, his sort of style aesthetic. And it’s his approach to do everything as live
as possible and just to sort of have the core of the song being what the three
of us do, the three of us being the band [Michael Arvanitakis on bass and Michael
DiCecco on drums], what we do when we go and play it live and then to add some
things in a kind of a subtle way to just support that. As far as
instrumentation goes, there were a couple of songs where I had the two of the
string section – I’d already written those string parts before we got together
with Jeff, and they would have been part of the demos that I sent him, those string
arrangements, so they were set. But other than that I think a lot of it was
just choices. But, again, I kind of knew – I had a good idea of what we would
be getting in working with Jeff, in terms of it would be pretty live, he would
focus on just the real instruments, mostly.
So
the songs that didn’t make it on, are they like your orphan children now? They’re
just sitting there going, ‘Will we ever find a home?’
Probably not all of
them. There’s at least one song on this new album that I wrote – oh, I don’t
know, somewhere eight years ago or something like that. The last song, ‘When
the House Shakes’, the last song on the album, I wrote that about eight years
ago and it was one of the ones that Jeff picked out of those 30, and we did a
little bit of rewriting of sort of a bridge section and cut a few lyrics out,
but other than that that the bulk of that song was around eight years ago. So
you never know when it’s going to turn up, and also there’s those two that we
did record as well and left off the album, so who knows where they will end up
too. Particularly one of them, I actually really like it, but we didn’t leave
it off because we thought it was bad – we were just going for the right sort of
mix of the up-tempo songs and the more down-tempo acoustic ones. So that was
just a choice based on what we thought would work for the flow of the album
overall rather than sort of leaving off some that we thought sucked.
But
it must be hard knowing they’re kind of sitting out there just all recorded ready
to go.
Kind of – but it’s
kind of handy to have extra songs, like they might turn up as bonus tracks for
something or something like that, who knows.
Part II will be published soon.
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