I read in your bio
that you play with handcrafted guitars and I don’t know if that means you made
them or if they’re made specifically for you by someone else.
I make them. I was a woodworker as a kid – I grew up on a
farm making things with my hands – and I was a guitarist as well and I decided
I wanted to build a guitar. I spoke to my uncle about it – he’s a bit of a muso
– and he said, ‘You need to meet my friend.’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah, I might do
that,’ and he said, ‘No – you will
meet my friend.’ My uncle’s very much like that. [Laughs] So he introduced me
to a fellow named Peter Daffey who’s an incredible luthier – he makes really
amazing instruments. So the best thing of all out of it is that I’ve made a
friend in Peter and I’ve met dozens and dozens of great people through him. So
it started out as a guitar and ended up as a really great musical journey
influence wise, musician wise, and just friends. He just gave me some key tips,
really, and then I went away and did it, then I rocked up on his doorstep with
a finished guitar and I think I was the first person that had ever done that
with him – he’s had a few people come by and say, ‘I’d like to build a guitar’,
and I was the first to actually come back with one.
So how do you even know
which wood to pick?
There’s tried and true timbers that work and there are
Australian timbers that are constantly being tried out that are working well.
Most of my guitars have been made out of blackwood because that’s what’s
available in south-west Victoria, where I’ve lived most of my life or I’ve had
access to most of my life. The latest one that I’m using – there were two
guitars used on this album. One was a 000 style, which is an old Martin style,
and another’s an 0-28, which is a very small-bodied parlour guitar. The larger
guitar, the 000, is made out of blackwood and spruce on the top and it’s got a
really big, brash, almost metallic kind of sound. Then the little one, the
0-28, has sheoak back and sides, which is really spectacular looking. Casuarina
trees are everywhere, all over Australia. I’ve seen them in Cambodia. They’re
up here, they’re down there. But it’s incredible looking and it sounds amazing,
so that’s probably the best thing I’ve done. It’s got spruce top and sheoak
back and sides. Just talking to other makers, reading about it, experimenting
is the best way to go about it. Australian timbers are really good because it’s
getting harder and harder to get prime woods from overseas for reasons of clear
felling and endangered species, ethics. So Australian timbers are really great.
It’s a very
particular relationship, then, to have with your instrument because you can
essentially craft the guitar exactly the way you want it. Does that have any
influence on your songwriting – when you’re writing songs, you know what
instrument you’re writing for and with, but similarly when you’re making a
guitar do you think, I want my music to
head in a particular direction and I can make the instrument to do that?
To use a bit of a cliché-sounding analogy – I’ll just go
there – it’s kind of like with a child. You sort of have an idea of what you
want your child to turn out like and they end up being themselves, and an
instrument’s like that too. You have an idea of what you want and then it ends
up being what it ends up as. You can have some control over that but there’s
always going to be some surprises, and many of the songs on this album would
not have happened if I hadn’t had built that little 0-28. Because of the type
of guitar it is and the way it causes me to play, the effect that it’s had,
some songs on the record just wouldn’t have happened without that. And likewise
with the 000, and the banjo – I built the banjo as well – those banjo tunes
were written on that particular banjo. Different instruments promote different
styles of playing, I guess. There’s only one song on the whole record which is
played with a flat pick, which is a first for me. There are normally more songs
that are strummed or flat picked, but everything’s finger picked on this record
which I guess is testament to those guitars – they are well suited to that
style of playing.
Certainly they almost
act like duet partners in the songs – it really feels like you’re in it with
them and they’re in it with you, and I think that’s partly why the sound is so
extraordinary. It feels like a real integration of instrument and voice and
lyric.
Yeah, thank you, that’s a really good way of describing it.
This record originally, when I was planning it, I had a band in mind. I was
playing with some really good players – which I still do, from time to time,
when I need a band I call them. A good friend who plays fiddle and a friend who
plays double bass. My last record was very much in that direction but as it
evolves – originally it was going to be a solo album, and then I thought the
band, and then I went back to the original idea of playing solo. Which sort of
created a new challenge for me, because it’s more sparse arrangements. All of
my songs start out as solo songs anyway. I don’t have a band in mind usually, I
just write the song and it is what it is. So this record just took a particular
direction as things went on – I didn’t plan it to, but the whole circles thing
and the nature of the songs and the themes and the way they sounded all sort of
seemed to continue and continue and continue until I had a lot of songs, hence
why it’s a double album.
It’s great for your
fans to have that many songs.
It didn’t feel right to break them up. I could have put them
over two albums – I thought about that for literally two seconds, I just didn’t
want to do that.
And they do all sound
like they long together. If you’d left some of them for another album then more
time goes past and you might tinker with the songs and then it’s not the same
thing any more.
That’s right. And I write lots of songs and there’s lots of
songs that I really like that I’ve written that I just don’t play any more
because I’ve got new songs [laughs]. It’s about keeping it fresh, I guess.
It’s also about the
challenge of editing your own collection of work, and I would think when you
have a lot of songs it is a challenge because you might emotionally think, I really want to play that song, but
then from almost a business point of view, new material has to have its day.
Yes, new material just have to have its day and I’m very
much about that. As an artist and songwriter and whatever else, my compulsion
is just to keep creating, really. Every time I sit down – I’ve been wanting to
learn folk songs for years, old-timey sorts of songs, and I’ve been threatening
to do it for years and years, and every time I sit down to learn a few I might
learn one and then I’ll end up writing five songs [laughs]. I just keep writing
songs. It just seems to be my go-to. I’ve sort of embraced that with this
record a bit, but I still want to sit down and learn those old-timey songs.
I’ve just got to do it.
How do you source
those old-time songs?
In essence, I’m a gleaner – I collect things: ideas, quotes,
books, stories, songs. Things that speak to me often are the really long story
folk songs. If I’m going to learn a [Bob] Dylan song, the ones I end up
learning are the really long, drawn-out story ones. They’re the ones I love.
And folk songs are kind of the same. I like the tearjerkers and I like the ones
that take you somewhere. But what I’ve been wanting to do for a long time is
learn more of the singalong, communal stuff because I love nothing more than
having a good session with other musicians and playing songs. I want to learn
more songs to create the community. I love the community of music and sitting
down with strangers and just having a universal language, playing songs and
stuff. Which I can do but I want to have more songs to do that. So I listen to
artists that I respect and every now and again I’ll come across a song that I
absolutely love. There’s a song that I play by Norman Blake called ‘In the
Spring of the Year’, which is on this wonderful album called Nashville Blues, and I don’t think I’ve
ever met anyone who has that album. It’s referred to n a Gillian Welch song,
‘Back in Time’ – she sings, ‘I’m sitting here in Nashville with Norman’s Nashville Blues’. She makes reference to
this beautiful album. And there’s a song on the record on the first side, last
song, and it’s ‘In the Spring of the Year’. You can’t get the lyrics on Google
– I had to sit down old school with the record, playing it over and writing
down the lyrics till I had it, and learning the song, and it’s one of those
songs that people’s ears prick up and they say, ‘I’ve never heard that before,
that’s a beautiful song’. And they’re the sorts of songs I really love, and you
can go digging for them or you can just come across them. I guess I’m the kind
of person who just comes across them. Some people really go digging for those
songs, which is really cool.
When did your own
songwriting start?
I was always interested in writing as a kid and in school I
really liked English – I liked writing stories. I never knew I was a songwriter
particularly until I just started doing it over years and years and I realised,
actually, that’s who I am. I think the first song that really moved me ever was
Eric Bogle’s ‘Singing the Spirit Home’. We had it on cassette and we used to
listen to it going on holidays. That song’s about a guy getting executed under
the apartheid system in South Africa and all these people singing to him when
they did it. Music has that ability to really move me. So writing is something
I could probably talk to you for about half an hour, at least, about how I
write songs, but suffice to say I use a variety of ways of writing. And maybe
most interestingly on this album, a lot of the songs weren’t actually written.
I have a recorder and I sit down regularly and just start playing. Often when
I’m feeling a little bit inspired I’ll just sit down and start playing and see
what happens. Start singing. A number of songs on this record – ‘Drawing
Circles’, the title track, being one of them – I literally sat down and started
playing, starting singing, hit ‘record’ and recorded it, then I went back and
transcribed the lyrics verbatim – didn’t change anything – and that’s the song.
You’re obviously at a
point where you trust what’s come through – you don’t go back and doubt what
you’ve done. As it arrives to you, whether you think it’s channelled or
something else, you trust that that’s a good form.
There’s always an element of doubt. Some artists say they’re
full of self-doubt and other artists say they don’t have it, but I reckon
that’s bullshit – I think everyone has self-doubt. I used to always try to talk
myself out of it but as time goes on I have less of it, I guess. There was a
time when I was creating this record when I did wonder if the songs were any
good, because that was the way they happened, and I thought, Is that enough? Shouldn’t there be more pain
and anguish in writing a song sometimes? [Laughs] Or enjoyment. So I let it
sit for a while. And the ones that stick are the ones I go with. There’s a
couple on this record that I forgot about completely. ‘The Most of You’, the
second song, I forgot about. It was one I left off my last record and then I
found it in my songbook one day and said, ‘Oh, that’s right – I’ve got that
song.’ It didn’t match the last record and it matched this one well. A big part
of this record, too, is that I know it’s not a feel-good hit for the summer.
It’s not going to be on Triple M. I’m not going to be playing on big stages
selling it to hundreds of adoring fans. I’ve moved past any sort of belief that
that might happen to me and I’m more focused on the thing itself, making sure
that it can be as good as it can be, putting it out there, and I’m happy with
it. And just letting people mill over it themselves and see what happens. I
hope it’s a record that will grow on people.
I don’t think it needs
to grow on people. Immediately, from the first song, I thought, We’re off to the races. It’s a serious
piece of work. People can take their work seriously but not necessarily produce
a serious piece of work, and by that I don’t mean that the tone is extremely
serious – I mean that this record declares that you are to be taken seriously.
Thank you. A lot of work went into this and Mick Wordley,
who recorded it, he was very patient with me, because my ears have got to the
point where I hear the minutest detail. [Laughs] I didn’t realise it until I
made this album, just how much of a perfectionist I’m becoming. But I’m
friendly about it – I don’t think I’m some crazy pain in the arse, but stuff
’em if I am [laughs].
And it’s your
prerogative – it’s your work.
Yes [laughs]. It’s my
work! [Laughs] Mick was great to work with – he really dug deep, particularly
in the last stages of mixing and all that, because as you can imagine there
were a lot of takes and a lot of songs. Even though the arrangements aren’t
complex in the amount of instruments, the detail is in the way it sounds and
the microphones that we use and the reverb and the compression and it was
recorded to tape – just all these little details that Mick was great at. I
produced it myself but really Mick co-produced it in many ways because he was
the one who got the sounds that I was describing. So it was a real joint
venture working with him. And it’s the third album I’ve done with him, so I
trust him. I should mention too, the artwork is the next thing – the guy who
did the photography, Ryan Toos, he’s an incredibly talented photographer and I
did all the artwork myself: layout and this booklet that goes with it, and that
all matches the work.
Back to the songs:
there are literary references in there; there are historical references and
contemporary references. In a way it feels like an Australian storybook, not so
much an Australian songbook. Did you have that sense of documenting
contemporary and past Australian life?
You’ve hit the nail on the head – I’m so glad you did that
[laughs]. It’s not prescriptive in any way – I’m not trying to skew people
towards any particular idea other than I guess … I like to plant seeds when I
write and create, just plant seeds with people. For example, ‘Right Now’ starts
off talking about the pace of society and it sort of veers into how we’re not
evolved for this, we’re not built for this, and we’ve got to deal with it. It’s
about as activist as I get, in some ways – I talk about asylum seekers being in
boats and trying to find somewhere to live, and then I cap it off talking about
the improbability of true love and somehow you can manage to find somebody. Not
all of us – it doesn’t always end up lasting but it happens. In ‘The Most of
You’ I talk about threading the eye of the needle – I’m talking maritime there.
We’re Australians, we’re here. Like me – I’ve got Anglo heritage from Cornwall.
Threading the eye of the needle is navigating your way through King Island and
Camp Otway, which from a maritime perspective is literally like threading the
eye of the needle – if you get it wrong you end up smashed on the rocks of King
Island. There’s references in there, certainly, of our Australian heritage and
certainly mine. The song ‘Son of a Blacksmith’ is about my grandfather and my
grandmother, and that’s biographical – that’s what happened to them. I’ve
always admired the resilience of my grandparents, [my grandfather] going to war
and coming back and then having half his farm compulsorily acquired and sold at
wartime price, so he got bugger-all for it. Then it happening again, because he
wanted to build an airstrip and moving down to the south-west, which is where I
grew up, near Warrnambool, in Ellerslie. So there certainly is those references
and moving forward I’m already thinking about the next projects, which a friend
of mine, Luke Watt, who’s an amazing songwriter – we’ve been accepted to go to
Bundanon, which is Arthur Boyd’s home. So we’ll go up there and work on a new
project, hopefully.
No comments:
Post a Comment