What is wayward about
you?
Probably just in the way we’ve lived our lives, I suppose.
Me and Natalie, the other songwriter, we’re husband and wife in the band. We’ve
known each other since she was sixteen and I was eighteen. We’ve been together
and been apart and gone off and done our own things, made some crazy decisions,
some good ones, some bad ones, and we’re still together. And nothing’s ever
straightforward with us. Gigs normally end up something crazy and something
happening. Nothing’s ever smooth sailing but we enjoy it anyway.
You say you make
crazy decisions, some good ones, some bad ones – it’s all good songwriting
fodder.
That’s right, exactly. We’re never short of material, that’s
for sure.
It says in your bio
that you grew up immersed in an ‘offbeat country record collection’ – what did
that collection contain?
It contained everything from the classics like Waylon and
Willie and a lot of early Canned Heat. Stuff like Chad Morgan and Tex Morton.
The whole gamut of weird Australian country guys and a lot of the American
standards as well.
I was listening to a
Chad Morgan song on ABC digital radio the other day and it was really clever
and funny, and I thought, This is why
he’s lasted as long as he has.
Exactly right. I remember as a kid my dad used to play him
and we used to laugh and love it. He’s still going now. He was old then
[laughs]. Maybe it makes me feel young, I don’t know.
So you’ve got that in
your musical background – I imagine Natalie has her own musical background. How
did you arrive at your joint musical style?
She sort of dragged me into it. She grew up in a country
music household as well, and of course she hated it until she got a bit older
and then she loved it. I played in other bands and listened to a lot of punk
and other sorts of music, and she dragged me into playing and listening to and
performing more country-orientated stuff. So I blame it all on her. It’s funny
– the stuff you grow up listening to and don’t like, eventually you come
around. Classic songs and classic songwriters, eventually you appreciate them,
especially as a musician.
In punk there’s a
certain amount of discipline – you really have to keep those lyrics tight and
keep the song structure tight. I can hear in your music the discipline in the
lyrics in that you’re not self-indulgent. Is that something you learnt in punk?
For sure. I definitely take that attitude across into
songwriting. I was listening to a lot of that music before I really understood
what it was all about, because I had older brothers who were into it. I think
in the alt-country genre a lot of people take that punk attitude across to it.
It’s a can-do
attitude, in a way, isn’t it?
That’s right, and I think it’s the way the music industry is
these days – you’ve got to have that can-do attitude whether you realise it’s
got its origins in punk or whatever. No one’s going to do anything for you –
you’ve got to do it for yourself. You’ve got to get up and play in front of
people and you’ve got to push your music, and you’ve to believe in it, because
if you don’t nobody else is.
Especially these days
when a lot of artists are crowd-funding their albums, which makes a lot of
sense in music because you’re essentially pre-selling the albums. The standard
of what’s coming out of crowd-funded or independently produced albums is really
fantastic. Certainly that part of the punk-rock attitude is working really well
in country.
It’s sort of a double-edged sword, that crowd-funded thing.
I think it’s great for pre-sales and stuff like that but when you see bands on
Gofundme because they want a trip to Nashville to go and make an album, you
think, Am I just paying for your holiday?
[laughs] There’s plenty of good producers and studios in Australia where you
could knock out an album. I suppose it’s each to their own.
Some of the
information about your album says, ‘It’s the break-up album minus the
break-up’, so how did you and Natalie get to the point of thinking you’d make a
break-up album without breaking up?
It just sort of happened, and then when we started to get
the songs together for the album we said, ‘This is a break-up album. Are you
trying to tell me something?’ We were both thinking the same thing. We’ve got a
couple of young kids and in my day job I work a lot – I was away for long
periods of time, and she’s stuck at home with kids, and there’s that isolation.
You get used to being on your own. And just the normal ying and yang of
relationships, [they] aren’t always rosy, especially when you’ve been together
for as long as we have. We thought, well, this is one way to get the anger and
the frustrations out without actually breaking up because we obviously love
each other a lot and we’re never going to break up, hopefully. But you have
your moments when you think, It’s
probably not that bad an idea. [Laughs]
I suppose the album
is therapy, then.
Absolutely. It’s our way of dealing with it. And it’s also
that coyness – I’ll write a song and she’ll be thinking, Is this song about me or is this about someone else? We don’t
interrogate each other too much with the songs – we just think, Oh yep, this one’s about me – but it might
not be.[Laughs]
It’s lovely because
it preserves that mystery in your relationship, which could be why you’ve been
together for so long.
Yeah, absolutely.
But on the other hand
I suppose you’re both desperately wondering who it’s about.
That’s right. If it’s a particularly nasty one I just bury
my head in the sand and say, ‘It must be about someone else.’
Well, of course!
[Laughs]
So is your
songwriting process a bit like Lennon and McCartney where one of you writes the
bulk of the song and then hands it over to the other one for a little bit of
tinkering, or is it more of a collaboration?
It’s along those lines. Most of the time I’ll write a song
and I’ll take it to her and she’ll say, ‘You should do this here and that
there’, and she’ll panel beat it around a bit, and I sort of do the same –
she’ll have a song written and I’ll say, ‘You probably should say this here or
that there. No, try this chord here’, and stuff like that. Lately we don’t tend
to start from go to whoa together. Normally we’re finishing off the other one’s
ideas.
I think that’s a
great process in that it’s always a good idea to have an editor and you both
have an idea who lives in the same house.
Which makes it really easy – you’re not sitting around and
waiting to organise the time to do a co-write or get someone to try to help you
out with stuff. We sort of keep a leash on each other – she stops me from going
off into too weird a direction and I stop her from going too traditional
country, I suppose.
And you find each
other somewhere between those two poles.
Yeah, we find a happy medium – something that we both like
and hopefully everyone else does as well.
Well, it’s a great
album so you’ve achieved that happy medium. But it’s a big undertaking to put
out an album – it’s a lot of songs and a lot of decision making about what goes
on it – so at what point did you think, An
album is the next step?
Natalie’s the real big driving force in, I would say, 99 per
cent of all the things that happen with the band. Writing songs was something
we’ve never struggled with – we’ve almost got too many songs. That’s not to say
that they’re all classics … But [the album] was just a natural thing. We met
Lachlan Bryan, who recorded it, and we knew we had an album in us so we were
just really keen to get one down.
Since you mentioned
Lachlan – I know he’s been doing a bit of producing. But when you’re meeting
another artist like that, it’s not necessarily automatic that you’ll think, You’ll produce us. So how did it evolve
that he came to be your producer?
We met him in Nundle, at the Dag Sheep Station. And I’d been
listening to his first album, Ballad of a
Young Married Man, and I thought it was a really great album. He’d seen us
perform; he liked what we were doing and what we were about. He and Natalie
wrote a song together, which is, I think, the last track on the album. So from
there we built a relationship. We went down to Melbourne and played a few gigs
down there. We were talking about making an album and I started asking [if
there was] anyone he recommended to make it with, and he said he would love to
do it.
He recommended
himself.
He did. So we said, ‘Righto, let’s do it.’ So we thought
we’d just record some songs and see how they come back. We wanted to put a
single out before the album was ready, just to keep something out – because it
had been a while since we’d released anything – so we did that, and we loved
the results. He was really great to work with, sort of effortless. Cool
studios, we loved being in Melbourne, and we decided to keep going with it. It
was a pretty long process – over twelve months from the first song till
finishing the album.
Give that you have
work and family, it’s not surprising.
Absolutely not. The easy part is writing songs and going to
record them. That’s all the fun stuff. But after that it’s the editing and
getting songs sent back to you – ‘No, we don’t like this, we don’t like that,
do this, do that’ – the back and forth and everything else that goes with it.
And then you have a
lovely body of work, and one of the great things about an album is that it can
stand there forever.
And it’s a real signpost of where you are at that stage of
your life and your musical career. It’s something you should be proud of.
I won’t ask you if
you want to work with Lachlan again, though, because if the answer’s ‘no’ …
[Laughs] He actually just edited a film clip we just made.
He’s busy!
He’s very busy. There’s plenty of strings to his bow. I’m
more than happy to do anything with him because he’s just a good guy to be
around creatively, and especially when you can sit and talk music with him. I’m
more than happy to have him involved in anything we get up to.
Of course you’ll see
him again in Tamworth – I’m presuming you’re going?
Yes. We’re looking forward to Tamworth. I think we’ve got a
show at the Frog and Toad with Lou Bradley, so that’s going to be exciting. And
we’ve got a couple of other shows – I’m a bit sketchy on the details. Nat
organises all of that. We’ll be playing out at the Dag Sheep Station again, for
sure. John Casula and his crew out there run some great things over the
Tamworth Country Music Festival. It’s a really great place to play and sort of
feels like home to us when we’re up there, which is good.
And it’s really
developed, that programme, over the past few years.
I’d implore anyone going to the Tamworth Country Music
Festival to take some time to head out to the Dag Sheep Station. The shows and
the catering and the way they look after you up there, and the quality of the
musicians, it’s second to none. It’s a real highlight for me to come to
Tamworth and head down to Nundle.
When you have a
daytime job and children and travelling to do, what’s your inspiration? You
might get up every day and write songs – is there music or books that you
regularly find inspire you?
Music, for sure – a lot of the older stuff, for sure. Not a
lot of the new stuff inspires me. But in saying that, there’s an artist called
William Crighton – it sort of blew my hair back when I heard that album. He’s a
real inspiration. A lot of it’s in books – old Kurt Vonnegut books and stuff
like that. And the human condition – what you see around you.
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