How did you name the
band?
Amarillo is a city in Texas and it’s just a word that I
really liked. I used to write it in notebooks and stuff, and I’d mentioned to
Jac [Tonks, bandmate] that I might have a band called Amarillo one day. I was
playing in Mick Thomas’s band and he knew that [Jac and I] were doing some
music together and he asked us to play a show. So Jac was just on the spot and
didn’t want to say we didn’t have a name so she just said, ‘Amarillo’, so we
kind of got stuck with it – which is good because I liked it.
So she kind of stole
your thunder, because if you were planning to use it, she made the executive
decision …
No, it was there for the taking.
What are your
personal musical influences?
They’re pretty broad. My other band, Raised by Eagles, is
more kind of Americana, alt-country. I think Jac is influenced by … look, I
don’t know. Who knows if you’re the best judge of what influences you? I’m not
even sure. My main influence, really, is my parents’ record collection. They
had a great record collection when I was growing up. They had the Stones, heaps
of Dylan and Neil Young. A lot of guitar music, a lot of acoustic music. For
Amarillo, me and Jac really love English guitar pop, like The Sundays, XTC, The
Smiths and Nick Drake – that kind of ’60s English folk stuff too. Jac and I
really love the same music, things that hit us both. When we get struck by
something new it really kind of hits us both. When we were making the album we
were listening to a lot of Australian stuff – contemporary Australian music. We
were listening to a lot of Laura Jean and Ben Salter and The Drones, that kind
of gear. But who knows? It just kind of seeps in – you don’t even know. Well, I
don’t. You don’t seem to get to choose what kind of songs you write.
And I suppose you
have to be mindful to not be too influenced by someone. I can hear a little bit
of the Sundays in Jac’s vocal style but not so much that I would have
immediately caught the reference.
It’s not for me, or for Jac, a very self-conscious activity,
writing songs. You don’t really know what a song’s going to be until after it,
anyway.
Do you pluck the
ideas from the either and try to find a way to bottle them, almost?
Yeah, I think so. Some songs just come out fully formed, but
definitely they just kind of pop up. That’s one of the good things about having
a writing partner. I play guitar a lot and something will catch Jac’s ear in
whatever I’m playing. I kind of improvise all day and they usually just drift
off into the universe but if Jac likes something she’ll say, ‘What was that?’
and we’ll keep it. Also when you’re writing music you’re navigating your own
self-doubt, so it’s good to have someone there who can confirm your enthusiasm
for something or your doubt, if you think it’s shitful, so occasionally I’ll
go, ‘Yep, yep, that is shit.’ [laughs]
It’s a bit like
having an in-house editor, but the editor is also qualified to do what you’re
doing.
Exactly.
So when did you start
writing songs?
I started writing music as soon as I picked up a guitar,
really. I started playing guitar when I was a kid and I’ve always written
music. Writing songs – probably in my twenties. I came to songs a little bit
late. Jac’s always written songs. When we met she had a whole bunch of demos, a
whole bunch of stuff to go, and I did as well. Songs for Raised by Eagles as
well. But definitely the moment I picked up an instrument I was writing
straightaway.
Were either of your
parents musical?
Jac’s whole family, her mum comes from this huge Irish
family and they were in this travelling Irish folk band that people still
remember to this day, called The O’Down Family Show Band or something like
that. So Jac’s family is super musical. But my family – my mum played a bit of
guitar and some piano. Dad was just a big music fan. And my cousin’s Shane
O’Mara, so there’s a few musical heads in the family.
With your parents
having that extensive record collection, they obviously had a passionate
interest in music and it’s always interesting to me to hear how these things
are sparked in musicians and at what age, and there’s invariably a passionate
parent or two in the background with a great record collection, and by osmosis
you pick up the guitar young and that turns into something else down the line.
For sure. And they were both really encouraging of it and
encouraging of me discovering new music. I got an acoustic guitar when I was a
kid and I was that real obsessive little-boy thing with it, but it wasn’t until
a few years later that the music I was listening to was this magical thing that
you couldn’t actually do. I was listening to guitar music hearing this
separate, magical thing as I was teaching myself, and it kind of came together
– ‘Oh, I can actually do this as well.’
Which is a pretty
cool realisation at any age.
It was.
You mentioned that
you were writing music but not songs – what do you think changed at the point
where you started to add words to things?
I played slide guitar and mandolin for someone who I think
is one of Australia’s best songwriters – Yanto Shortis, who doesn’t really play any more.
I think being around him – I was his sidekick for a while, just watching him
write songs. This was years and years and years ago. There’s such a neat thing
to just the process of writing music is kind of this magical fun thing to do,
and then after that songs are the same thing. I really love the process of
doing it. It’s really cool to have a collection of songs, too. Once you’ve
finished them and they’re done, they become this other thing – you kind of own
them, they’re like these little objects that you can pull out and show people,
like little statues or something. The process can be kind of fraught but once
you’ve done them I really like collecting them – ‘There’s another one on the pile’.
I guess it helps when
it comes to constructing an album – it’s not a desperate scramble for material,
it’s more like editing the collection you have.
Yes, that’s it.
Do you ever find that
other people tend to say, well, how hard can it be to write a song?
That’s so true. Writing music – writing a simple, neat
little song – is heaps more difficult than writing a big instrumental piece,
which I used to do a lot of as well. Writing a really concise little song that
has some beauty and honesty in it, and is within those boundaries, is hard.
It’s really hard. Or it can be. Sometimes it’s really easy. I often say that if
people are really critical of someone’s song – ‘sit down and write ten classic
songs, see how long it takes you’ [laughs].
There’s also that
process whereby you have the song, you go into the studio, you record a version
of the song, and if you’re taking it on the road there’s probably a point in
time where you’re thinking, Hang on a
second – that recorded version is not the one I like any more.
Definitely – they become something else. They grow legs and
they can morph. Sometimes you can get so far way from them. I’ve had that
experience where your recording of something comes on and you think, God, this doesn’t resemble what we do now.
But Amarillo’s pretty close – the arrangements are pretty sparse, so it’s kept
pretty close to the recording.
I noted on the
songwriting credits that there was one shared credit with you and Jac but the
other songs are split between you. But I found on each song, there’s a real
interplay between her voice and your guitars, and I’m presuming you are behind
most of the guitars on these tracks. So even though you write separately, do
you have that feeling as you’re each writing that you’re dancing around each
other, not jarring at any stage, but there’s a real sense of symbiosis. Do you
feel that before you start to record?
Definitely. That’s really cool that you notice that. So the
songs that are Jac’s and the songs that are mine they’re still really informed
by what the other person is doing with them. With my songs that Jac sings, they
become something else because she sings them – even in the arrangement of them
and construction of them, we do that stuff together. And I love writing guitar
parts for Jac’s work as well. She’s a really lovely acoustic guitar player,
really simple but it’s a lot of fun to ornament her songs. She has some really
super-personal songs - her lyrics on the album are really beautiful, so it’s
really nice to get invited into other people’s songs and help them out.
And it’s a great way
to put, to ornament the songs, because whenever you add lap steel to a song it
does have that sense of an embellishment but a necessary one.
Hopefully, yes, just keeping it within the boundaries of
whatever idea she had of the sound world of whatever the song is – you don’t
want to break it. But Jac definitely knows what she wants musically so we just
help each other.
A lot of this album
was written on the road, and quite a bit in the Top End, in the Northern
Territory and Western Australia. Were you there playing at the time or did you
go on a songwriting trip?
We did a couple of gigs in Darwin and the Kimberley but we
spent a little bit more time up there too, just trucking around and staying in
hotels and motels and stuff. We’d never been up there before, either of us. It
just blew us away. You feel like it’s foreign – it’s so Australian but you feel
like you’re in another country. It smells like Asia or something, it’s just
incredible. We went to Arnhem Land. The landscape looks prehistoric. We did
write a bunch of songs up there that are on the album and we both had
notebooks, we filled them up. It felt like that crept in a little bit. Then
there was one track and we really thought about it when we recorded it – ‘All I
Can See’ – when we were in the studio we wanted it to sound like how we felt
about the landscape up there. I think we got it. I think Shane got it for us.
I’m curious about
that process, because obviously translating a feeling and an impression into a
song is tricky. As you’re talking to him, are you trying to describe it or are
you experimenting musically until you get it?
Mostly you don’t but you’re right – there’s not really the
language to do that. Talking about music is really quite difficult because you
can only talk about it in really broad strokes. So if you say, ‘I want it to
sound like the desert’ [laughs] that can be meaningless to someone who has no
idea what you’re talking about. Or someone could kind of know what you mean. I
suppose that’s the beautiful thing about music – you can’t really pin it down
with language. But I guess it does make the process harder.
It no doubt helps
that you know Shane well, so I’ll move on to asking about him. Were there any
family squabbles in the studio?
No, no, none at all. We got on really well – it was really
fun. He’s really good in the studio, in every way. He’s a world-class engineer
and as a producer he’s really good at knowing when things are getting stuck.
He’ll move things quickly. All the performances were pretty much one, two or
three takes, mostly live. It was done quick and I think his experience is
really so broad and he knows when something’s happening and something isn’t
happening. So he’s really good like that. He really guided what was going on.
And we were on the same page. We were driving there and I said to Jac, ‘I want
my guitar to sound like Ry Cooder’s guitar on Sister Morphine.’ And I was setting up and Shane said, ‘You should
go for that Ry Cooder sound on Sister
Morphine.’ So there were a lot of simpatico moments for what we were after.
Shane is obviously
quite busy and producing a lot of Melbourne artists. I recently interviewed
Shane Nicholson and made the point to him that when you start to produce a lot
of different artists, there’s a level of influence there culturally speaking –
not that any of Shane’s productions sound the same – but there’s this sense
that these people who are producing a lot of artists can really have a big
influence on culture, because they have a lot of knowledge. I always pay attention to producer credits
because I think it’s so interesting to see those webs of connection and Shane
[O’Mara] certainly has one in Melbourne.
Absolutely. That’s really interesting. He’s like our sonic
overlord [laughs].
There’s a few of you
in the Melbourne alt-country scene doing great work – it’s obviously a mutually
supportive scene and creatively rich. I don’t know if you feel that, being
there?
Definitely. I feel so fortunate that there’s this thing
going on – we just make really good friendships, really good collaborations. In
every city in the world there’s thousands of musicians with nowhere to play,
and we feel so lucky that there’s this thing going on that seems really rich
and people are excited about. It’s a really good thing to be part of.
Eyes Still Fixed is out now.
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