Interview: Timothy Carroll (part III)

This is the third of a multi-part interview with an amazing Brisbane singer-songwriter named Timothy Carroll. In this part Timothy talks about some of his songs and about the upcoming studio recording of the songs featured on The Swedish Tapes.

Part I can be read here and Part II here.

Brisbane residents can see Timothy play at the Joynt on Wednesday 23 November.

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Does Brisbane have increasingly more venues for people to play?

There was a real crisis, from my point of view, about the time of the floods. There was a real crisis with the Troubadour closing down and The Hangar stopping doing gigs in the space that they were doing them in Red Hill. Because those venues were medium-sized venues that were really beautiful and well run and had good sound, and when they fell apart I felt like there was a bit of a hole in Brisbane’s heart in terms of bands of about that size being able to perform. If you move up a bit higher there’s The Zoo and The Hi Fi and the Tivoli but that’s beyond a lot of people’s reach, really, because you need to get so many people through the door in order to make it pay. But now the Black Bear Lodge has opened and they’re doing some music. There are a few other places around town. There’s a new bar in West End called The End that I saw some bands at the other day. I’m doing some shows myself at the Joynt. I’ve formed a bit of a new band with some people to work out how we’re going to perform The Swedish Tapes.

Will you then record with them?

I was recording quite a bit of The Swedish Tapes with a guy by the name of Oscar Dawson, who is from Melbourne and an old friend of mine and a very talented musician and a really good guy. So he’s living in Berlin and performing and writing with his band, and he’s coming back to Australia in late November for a couple of months, so I’m going to get him in a studio and a few other friends and go from there. So it’s a bit of a mix of some of the people I’ve performed with and some of the people I recorded with overseas. And sometimes we might have both. It’s nice to have players that are performing the stuff come and be involved as well. We’ll just have to see how it pans out.

Now to ask you some questions about songwriting … You’re good at evoking place in your songs. In ‘To Frozen Lakes’, for example, I can almost feel the cold around the lakes and in ‘Where the Catholics Ruled’ I can get a sense of the city that the song is set in. Is that a conscious evocation of place and, if so, how do you do it? Or is it just something that comes through?

It’s certainly not conscious. And it’s funny that you should choose those two titles because those are two songs that were written in a really, really short amount of time. ‘Where the Catholics Ruled’ I wrote in about twenty minutes. It’s really simple in terms of the chord progression. I just sort of spat out a whole heap of verses and then chucked a few of them away. And ‘To Frozen Lakes’ – I was at a festival in Tasmania and there was a piano in a tent and the festival was either over or hadn’t started – there was nobody around – and I just had some candles on top of the piano and was just mucking around, because I don’t really play piano that well, and just sort of wrote that one really quickly – the story of a friend of mine. So I don’t know – I guess it just happens sometimes!

On the first album the song that haunted me, for lack of a better term, was ‘Alicia’s Song’ and I was wondering if you could tell me the story behind that.

It’s interesting that that’s a song that you like, because that’s a song that I struggle with. I never play it live. I don’t even know if I could play it. I’d started working at the Troubadour at that time and there was a friend of mine, Alicia, who was working there as well and she fell pregnant, with her partner, and was thrilled about it, and it was probably the first time that someone in my world was going to have a baby and I was just kind of thinking about the wonder of that phenomenon, of a human being forming, becoming a mother and all the different sort of relationships that that entails, like the protective father and the relationship with the mother. And so that’s what that’s about.

At the moment ‘Catholics’ is the one I can’t get out of my head.

That one’s about my parents leaving Dublin. My parents are both from Dublin and they left in ’82, and so that song’s a kind of study on what was going on in Ireland at that time. I get the impression it was quite a repressive society with Catholic values of getting married and it was that important, having children out of wedlock was frowned upon. And my parents were in that situation, having my sister without being married and they all moved down to Australia, and that’s what [the song’s] about.

It seems that you’re very much a storyteller rather than a confessional songwriter – you’re telling stories about the people around you, and perhaps about yourself as well. It’s quite common in country music but not so much in pop and rock, where it tends to be more the – to paraphrase something Tim Rogers said once – ‘I’m so miserable, that girl left me’. Is that accurate to say of you?

It does seem to be the case but again it’s not really a conscious thing. I guess I listened to a lot of storytellers growing up – I used to listen to a lot of Neil Young and Emmylou Harris and Bob Dylan. Perhaps some of that seeped in, in some way.

On the first album in particular there’s a certain wistfulness to the songs, or to your voice. Does that come through when you’re playing? Or maybe that’s the wrong question to ask as you may not hear it, as you’re the performer!

I do think that recording a take with the right emotion in it is the most important thing for recording – it’s not so much about how well you perform or how perfectly you sing a song, it’s about getting the take where it feels right and you’re able to perform the song ending up in a way that’s true. And when we recorded the first album it was a really beautiful studio. It was with Jamie Trevaskis who used to own the Troubadour and now owns the Junk Bar in Ashgrove [in Brisbane]. And it was late at night in his old Queenslander in Bardon and we were really close friends - I don’t see a lot of him now because he works a lot and I work a lot – but it was really relaxed and kind of wonderful. So perhaps that comes through. And also, I guess, maybe because I hadn’t recorded anything before, really, apart from a little home recording, so it was all fresh and new and exciting, and we did a lot of takes, like, first take or second take – it’s not like we were doing lots and lots of tracking. That’s something to remember – maybe I should do that on the next record.

There are some epic-sounding songs on The Swedish Tapes so it will be interesting to hear what becomes of them in the studio, in terms of many instruments and multiple tracks, but I guess you won’t know until you try.

I think we won’t have too many instruments – I don’t want it to be crowded and overdone. Another friend who’s a producer said when he wants something to sound big he puts less in it – he just has four tracks handled a certain way and that’s when you get a big-sounding moment, is when it’s simple, well recorded and well written ... I’m excited to be recording the next album live, so we’ll be in the room with drums, electric [guitar], bass and me, and that will be really nice for the ebb and flow of the songs, so we can hear each other and bond, to a degree.

Because your voice is so strong as an instrument, really, you don’t really want to drown it out, and when you take a lot of care with your lyrics – which you seem to – they need to come through. And there is the danger with a lot of instruments that the voice gets lost.

Yeah, that’s true. And the guy who I’m most likely going to be recording with, Matt Redlich, he has some wonderful mikes that are like some of the older mikes that [Roy] Orbison and the Beatles at Abbey Road used to use, and we’ll be recording to tape, so it will be nice for him to be capturing what we’re doing while we play.

Timothy's first two releases, For Bread & Circuses and The Deepest Dive, are available from timothycarroll.bandcamp.com and also from iTunes.

Interview: Timothy Carroll (part II)

This is the second of a multi-part interview with an amazing Brisbane singer-songwriter named Timothy Carroll. In this second part Timothy talks about arts funding, living in Sweden, visiting Berlin and the challenges of making music independently.

Part I can be read here.

Brisbane residents can see Timothy play at the Joynt on Wednesday 16 and 23 November.

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When are you recording the next album?

I teamed up with a manager about the last half-year, a friend of mine who’s pretty savvy and hasn’t actually worked that much in the music business but it’s been great to have him to build some more concrete plans and bounce ideas off ... We’re looking at a schedule of potentially going in in December and January to have the recording of tracks done then … But I don’t want to put to much of a deadline on when it’s going to be done because I don’t want to feel pressured. When I did The Deepest Dive EP I was going to Sweden, and it had to be done by this really inflexible date and it was a little bit of hard pressure, and I don’t really want to have that pressure again. Recording in December/January and then early next year is the plan.

And do you want to stay independent? I would imagine it’s a lot of extra work in terms of promotion and distribution – well, you’re distributing online mainly – but ideally would you like a record company to come along and say they’d help you out.

I’m not really that fussed about it, but I tell you the money side of things is kind of freaking me out a bit at the moment. Going into making a record is really expensive. Studio time, and you have to pay the musicians, then printing CDs, and then if you want to go down into doing some degree of press and publicity and promotion, and that’s before you’ve even looked into touring or anything. And so it’s a little bit scary when you’re at this end of it, when you’re just way in the red, you know. So some financial support from somewhere would be awesome. I went for a grant from Arts Queensland but was unsuccessful with that, so I’m again funding this next round of recording out of my credit card and savings. Arts Queensland said we were pretty close but weren’t successful, so I’m kind of moving on now. The grants are a funny beast because they take a long time to do and then you have to wait a very long time also to get an outcome, like six months, and you’re pinning hopes around that and then it falls through, not only have you not got the grant but you’ve lost some of that time. But I’m just going to move forward now and fund it myself, and if I can sell a thousand CDs – which isn’t a huge number – it’ll more or less pay for itself.

It’s interesting you say a thousand, because there is someone – I forget who it is - who has worked out that if you have 1000 true fans, that as an artist you can make a living that way.

Well, great! That’s what I need. I have a job as well – I’m a social worker, and I work four days a week doing that. So I don’t need to make a living [at music] but it’d be nice for the art to pay for itself at least.

Are you back from Sweden permanently, or are you to-ing and fro-ing?

We’re back now for a while – my partner’s from Stockholm, so that’s why we were over there. She’s got permanent residency in Australia now and she’s got two years of uni to do here, so we’ll definitely be around for two years, and then I don’t know what will happen after that. I adore Sweden and was learning the language while I was over there, and I’ve got some dear friends and family over there, and I would love to go back and spend another chunk of time. And another thing was that while I was away for that year, it was so wonderful to have enough time to be able to write and to get into the space where I was just someone who was writing music. Because when I’m back here in Brisbane working as a social worker and managing that side of life, I do find it harder to write. I can still perform and do shows and that side of things, but that pure creative process of writing, I find it somewhat challenging to sit down and do it.

It’s incredibly challenging. I don’t know how anyone does it. I guess that’s why the patronage system of the Renaissance was effective, because someone else would take care of all the concerns like making money and running a household, which all takes time and energy away from being creative.

I went to Berlin three times while I was living in Stockholm, because it was just so close and easy and cheap. And there’s a community of Australian artists that I was lucky enough to be hanging out with over there, so that’s kind of the model they’re using – living in Berlin because it’s so affordable and rent is really cheap and food is really cheap, so they can make a living from their art and really focus on it. And there were painters and sculptors and musicians and film-makers all kind of living in a community and interacting, and there was a real symbiosis of everybody living next to each other and inspiring each other. Just to spend some time amongst that – and we did some recording over there – was really inspiring. So that’s a model. Maybe I could do that.

Brisbane is getting more expensive to live in, I guess, but it’s certainly been fertile ground for musicians for the last few years, or it seems to have been. Given that Brisbane seems to produce a fair amount of rock music, do you feel like you could technically call yourself part of the Brisbane musical scene, or do you stand somewhat apart from it?

I’m feeling quite apart from it at the moment, just having been away for a year. And a year’s not that long, really, but it feels like a long time coming back. I go out and see music fairly often – it’s what I like to do on the weekend – and there are lots of bands that I’ve never heard of and whole scenes that I hadn’t seen. So I do feel a bit different. I feel kind of old, as well. There are all these young bands – 21 years olds, really talented, really eclectic bands happening. So it’s quite interesting and I guess they’re going to start performing more and you can work out what’s going on.

Interview: Timothy Carroll (part I)

In 2008 Brisbane-based musician Timothy Carroll released an extraordinary album called For Bread & Circuses (available from iTunes and also here). It's not a country album but it has some country elements, so for classification purposes I thought I could slip Timothy into this blog - also because it's my blog and I can what I want (so there!), and because I believe him to be an incredibly talented singer-songwriter who deserves to be widely known.

In 2010 Timothy released an EP called The Deepest Dive, and he's also made the demo tapes for his next album available for download only, under the title The Swedish Tapes (as he was living in Sweden when they were made). If these demos are any indication, the album - which is to be recorded soon - will be amazing.

Timothy kindly agreed to be interviewed by telephone, and as he gave me quite a bit of his time this is a fairly long interview that will be split into parts. I found him to be as interesting and thoughtful as his music suggests, and it was a great thrill to talk to him.

Timothy Carroll and his band will be playing a residency on Wednesday nights in November at the Joynt in Brisbane, from the 9th.

When did you start singing?

I’ve pretty much always sung. Even the preschool I went to, the woman who ran that had a guitar and I always really loved it when she would play guitar … She used to play old Beatles songs and stuff. So I’ve always sung and I used to sing in the car with my family, like old Blues Brothers songs. So it’s always been something that I’ve done and enjoyed.

Listening to you sing, I could swear you have perfect pitch – do you know if you do?

Well, I’m not very musical in the sense of knowing what notes are what. I haven’t got much musical training at all – I can’t read music on a staff or anything. And if someone told me to sing a certain note I couldn’t do it. I’m not too bad at just hitting the notes that I want to hit. But lately I’ve been writing some stuff up in the high registers and finding it a bit more challenging, maybe because I’m getting a bit older … I have to be a bit more careful about not drinking and smoking beforehand ... I do have a few things that I do before I sing – I very rarely eat before I sing. But that’s more because I’m nervous and I just don’t feel like eating.

Do you do a lot of three-set gigs?

I very rarely have done three-set gigs – more one set – and I do believe in the kind of less-is-more approach to performance. I usually like to do fairly short sets and not give people time to get bored.

Given that you started singing quite young, is your voice your preferred instrument, as opposed to a guitar?

Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. The guitar is just a medium for finding melodies and for accompanying singing. Because I’m not that handy on the guitar, and I picked up the guitar much later, when I was about sixteen. So I just play the guitar to give myself something to sing to, I guess.

So when you’re writing songs, do you tend to sing them out first to compose, or do you use the guitar to compose?

I use the guitar to compose. Usually I’ll find a couple of little progressions or melody lines. Lately if I’m just noodling on the guitar I’ll record little sections on my phone or something, just so I don’t forget ideas. And then I’ll also work through a little bit further into a whole progression into a song without any lyrics. And then I’ll sing ad libbing and record big, huge, long versions of the song – like, fifteen- or twenty-minute long versions – and then I go back and find little fragments that are good or that could be fleshed out, and then cut it right back down to something about normal length – three to five minutes.

On The Swedish Tapes some of the songs are a bit more epic sounding, like ‘Where the Catholics Ruled’, and those songs could sound like the fragment of an epic track.

I definitely have made a bit of a conscious move in a new direction, in the way that I’m writing at the moment and the people who I’m collaborating with, which is exciting. My first record [For Bread & Circuses], I didn’t really go into it thinking, ‘I want to make a record that sounds like this’. I just had these songs and the only thing I knew how to do was to play like that and to collaborate with people who played the other instruments on my first record, which ended up being fairly folk/countryish, and I’m really proud of that piece of work and I really enjoyed making it. But with this one [to be recorded soon] I have had more of a thought about what I’d like to be doing and some different influences and it’s exciting to be pushing out into a new direction and working with some different people and I’m looking forward to re-recording those tracks, because those [The Swedish Tapes] were the demos that were done really roughly in my apartments in Stockholm and Berlin.

You say that they’re rough, but they don’t sound rough – they sound like fantastic tracks.

Thank you. I guess from my point of view most of them were recorded with one crappy mike and it’s not even a vocal mike, somebody had a T-shirt over it. And also some of the drums are not live drums, they’re programmed drums. So it’s just meant to be a platform to explore an idea and get a sense of what the song could be, and then it’ll be really nice to record it live with the whole band playing together and feeding off each other and stuff.

In terms of changing genre - for lack of a better term – it can sometimes be tricky if you have an audience for one kind of music and then you move in a different direction. But you’re an independent artist - you’ve put out everything yourself, and you don’t have a record company telling you what to do - so I guess that gives you the freedom to change.

Yeah, I do have complete freedom to do what I like, which is awesome. And I’m aware that there will be an element that the people who have previously enjoyed my records might not enjoy this one as much, but I don’t really mind about that. They can continue listening to the old records. It’s obvious, I guess, that I just want to make music that excites me and that I feel really good about and that I’m excited to play and perform and things like that. So I’m feeling good about the new record.

Part 2 of this interview will be published soon.

timothycarroll.bandcamp.com