Album review: A Foreign Country by Jed Rowe

Listening to an album for the first time is akin to starting a novel: there is a process of working out what is going on and also deciding if you want to continue with the story that is unfolding. It is rare for either album or novel to grab hold of you immediately; either you arrive at a point of being swept away or you don’t, and the decision is made accordingly. This is true even if you’re predisposed to like the creator: they have a certain advantage, in that you’ve decided to listen to the album (or, first, their single) or read the book. But they still have to win you over.

When I started listening to Jed Rowe’s new album, A Foreign Country, I was predisposed to like it, having found his previous work to be compelling, fascinating and complex. Still, no free pass here: I have a lot of music to listen to and I still need to reach that point of being grabbed.

That point came in song five, ‘Tailem Bend’, which Rowe has also released as a single. But I need to be clear: songs one through four were very, very good. It’s just that it was ‘Tailem Bend’ that made me think that we were off to the races. If you pressed me as to why, I couldn’t say – music is an art, a science and a mystery, and when all those elements are in harmony it’s impossible to say exactly what captures the attention apart from to say that it’s magic. And on the second playing of the album it was clear that the same magic was present in all ten songs.

A Foreign Country is Rowe’s most Australian album to date, meaning that the lyrical content names Australian places more regularly than his previous works; Port Douglas, Mission Beach, Bondi, the Murray and the Coorong and Narromine all appear. And while Rowe is Australian, the title of the album may be a nod to the fact that Australia is geographically so diverse and vast that even its lifelong residents can find themselves in what seems like a foreign land even if it’s a hundred kilometres down the road.

As with his previous albums, the songs are stories, usually of others – and if they are stories from Rowe’s own life we’ll never know, because he tells each story with the same feeling. Rowe is a deliberate, considered, meticulous lyricist, as well as a poetic one – if you read the lyrics on their own, it is immediately clear that they don’t need music to bring them to life, because Rowe has taken care of each word and line to ensure that they are works of art. That perhaps makes it more difficult for him to turn these into songs, for poems don’t always lend themselves to accompaniment. In Rowe’s case, though, they do. Rowe has always had a wonderful voice, and he’s an accomplished guitarist, using both instruments to bring more life, and nuance, to his lyrics.

The instrumentation on this album is sparse (but not threadbare). It’s true that Rowe doesn’t need much to bring his lyrics to musical life but he’s also wise enough to exercise restraint – not so much a case of ‘less is more’ as ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.

Rowe has built an impressive catalogue of songs that satisfy on many levels. The lyrics always tell a story that seems complete until you realise that there are layers of story which aren’t in the songs but which have informed Rowe’s choice of words. Musically, Rowe always delivers because he applies the same attention to detail to the music as he does to the words. And then there is the meaning that Rowe brings to the songs and the space he allows for the listener to bring their own. When an artist is aware of his role, as Rowe is – when he’s aware that he is the creator but he is also the messenger and that the message never belongs completely to him – he produces songs like these, which gave the listener room to put themselves inside them. That requires a sublimation of ego to the greater purpose of art while also believing that you’re the right person to bring that message. It’s the same kind of delicately balanced dance that is required to make a great song, and Rowe has it.

A Foreign Country is out now.

or Google Play.

www.jedrowe.com

Album review: The Last Day of Winter by Jed Rowe

Jed Rowe's 2012 album The Ember and the Afterglow was an outstanding, musically diverse piece of work that functioned much like a collection of short stories, offering many narrative voices and quite different experiences.

Rowe's new album, The Last Day of Winter, is a completely different affair. Still diverse, nevertheless it does not have the same elements of darkness that could be found on Ember. Instead, it's a mostly upbeat affair that showcases something that didn't exactly disappear on Ember but which didn't stand out as much: Rowe's voice. On Ember Rowe was the storyteller and his voice was used in service to the stories. On The Last Day of Winter Rowe's voice is a real feature, and it deserves to be. He has a beautiful tone and it wouldn't really matter what he was singing, it's all worth listening to.

For this album Rowe has worked with The Stillsons as his band, and the differences in style are obvious: previously Rowe's sound was lean (double bass, drums and guitar) yet muscular, and it suited the songs he was crafting, just as the different instruments and backing vocals brought by The Stillsons suit these new songs. There are some traditional country sounds here - as well as the odd '70s rock note - that are brought to life by piano and fiddle. One sound is constant, though: anyone who has seen Rowe plays live would know that he's one of the best slide guitarists to be found.

I don't tend to write about individual songs in album reviews, as the name of a song means nothing to someone who hasn't heard an album yet. And if you have heard the album I may love a song that you may not, which means we're already fighting. I prefer to write about the feeling of an album because what most people take away from music is an experience that is emotional and visceral before it's intellectual. If an album makes me feel something positive - if I'm intrigued, if I'm moved, if I've been entertained - then that's worth telling people about. So it's worth telling people about Jed Rowe's The Last Day of Winter. It's also worth seeing him live, just in case he appears in a town near you.

The Last Day of Winter is out now through Mountain King Music/WJO.
www.jedrowe.com

New Jed Rowe clip: 'Castlemaine'

From one of my favourite albums of recent times, The Ember and the Afterglow by The Jed Rowe Band, comes a film clip directed by Lachlan Bryan, the creator of one my other favourite albums of recent times, thereby proving my theory that there's some big creative country music cauldron happening in Victoria ...

It's a testament to both Lachlan and Jed that this clip is absolutely fitting for the song, 'Castlemaine', which opens the album. Rather than telling you the story of the song, why not watch for yourself ...


Jed Rowe and his band will be touring the Australian east coast in July - having seen them play in Sydney, I highly recommend that you do not miss this tour if you're within cooee of one of these venues:

Thurs 4th July THE FRONT CAFE GALLERY CANBERRA ACT 7:30pm, $10. 

Fri 5th July No 5. CHURCH STREET BELLINGEN NSW Dinner from 6pm, $10. 

Sat 6th July MANDALA ARTS ORGANIC CAFE GOLD COAST QLD 7pm. 

Sun 7th July THE POWERHOUSE BRISBANE QLD 3pm, free entry. 

Thurs 11th July THE RAILS BYRON BAY NSW 7pm, free entry. 

Fri 12th July THE GOLLAN HOTEL LISMORE NSW 9:30pm, free entry. 

Sun 14th July THE CHANNON MARKETS THE CHANNON NSW from 10am. 

www.jedrowe.com

Interview: Jed Rowe (part II)

This is the second part of an interview with the wonderful Victorian singer-songwriter Jed Rowe. The first part can be read here. The Jed Rowe Band's new album, The Ember and the Afterglow, is one of the best releases in recent memory (well, I think so). 


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.  

www.jedrowe.com

Interview: Jed Rowe (part I)

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.

www.jedrowe.com

Album review: The Ember and the Afterglow by The Jed Rowe Band

It's only June but I can confidently say that 2012 has been a fantastic year for country music releases, especially from Victorians. Lachlan Bryan's January release, Shadow of the Gun, with its robust, masculine sound and intriguing stories, indicated that something interesting was going on in the deep south. It seemed unlikely that he'd have a challenger for that particular throne, but then I heard The Ember and the Afterglow. Now it seems that Jed Rowe and Lachlan Bryan may have to reign side by side.

The Ember and the Afterglow starts with an auditory surprise - a deep male voice singing the song of a desperate woman, in 'Castlemaine'. It seems so unusual, but as we go deeper into the album it becomes clear that Rowe has four female narrators out of eleven songs, and that their stories are diverse and fascinating and compelling. Rowe is an incredible storyteller - each song is a self-contained world with a narrator who seems to be sitting next to the listener, looking into their eyes and holding their hand. They're not all sympathetic characters, but they're sympathetic narrators. From a lyric point of view, this album seems more like a collection of carefully, lovingly shaped and curated short stories.

If Rowe had achieved only that - to create such an extraordinary song cycle - he'd have my attention, but it's the music, carefully shepherded by producer Jeff Lang, that really delivers those stories and draws us in first, before we realise what the lyrics are saying. Taking in country, blues, folk, rock and other influences, these songs are musical delights. Rowe has a strong, commanding baritone, and he understands what many singers do not: he respects the song and doesn't try to get in its way.  If the narrators of the songs sit down next to us, Rowe's voice is what has led them to us in the first place. His voice is backed by his own acoustic and lap steel playing, as well as by double bass from Michael Arvanitakis and drums by Michael DiCecco. They're a tight outfit and they, too, understand what's needed to make sure those songs do what they're meant to do.

I'd never heard of Jed Rowe before this album was sent to me. I'm so very pleased that I had the chance to found out who he is and what he can do. The Ember and the Afterglow is now one of my favourite albums of all time, and I thank him for making it.


The Jed Rowe Band is touring: details at www.jedrowe.com 

The Ember and the Afterglow will be released on 6 July 2012 (independent, through Fuse Group Distribution).