Interview: Nigel Wearne

One of the most outstanding albums of 2016 was Drawing Circles by Nigel Wearne, so what better way to start 2017 than with an interview with this extraordinary musician and songwriter. Hopefully you'll feel as inspired reading this interview as I felt talking to him.

 

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.

Drawing Circles is available from nigelwearne.bigcartel.com

www.nigelwearne.com

Single release: 'Just Like Magic' by Casey Barnes

As I'm fond of saying, country music is a broad umbrella - which is why I like to cover the odd bit of country rock/pop if it's well done. Casey Barnes is an Australian artist and ARIA Top 10 artist with his recent album Live As One. His new single 'Just Like Magic' is a great, upbeat tune - and, frankly, at the end of this year the up-beats are in order.

The video was a family affair: Barnes’s eight-year-old daughter chose the dancers from amongst her teachers at the dance studio she attends. It is released ahead of Casey's appearances at Tamworth Country Music Festival and elsewhere (dates below).

CASEY BARNES TOUR DATES

Sunday, 22 January, 2017 @ 1:00pm
Toyota FanZone Stage (Corner of Fitzroy and Peel Street) - Tamworth Country Music Festival

Sunday, 22 January, 2017 @ 5:00pm
The Albert Hotel w/ Ben Ransom & 8 Ball Aitken - Tamworth Country Music Festival

Monday, 23 January, 2017 @ 3:30pm
ABC Stage (Intersection of Peel & White Street) - Tamworth Country Music Festival

* Monday, 23 January, 2017 @ 7:30pm
Flags of Country International Muster, Tamworth Town Hall (with McKenna Faith - U.S.A)

* Saturday, 28 January, 2017 @ 7:00pm
Johnny Ringo's, Brisbane QLD (With McKenna Faith and Band - U.S.A)

Friday, 17 February, 2017 @ 7:00pm
NIGHTQUARTER (with full band) - Helensvale, Gold Coast QLD

* shows with McKenna Faith. Tickets and info: http://mckenna-faith.com/tour

'Just Like Magic' is available as a single on iTunes or as part of Live As One. 
www.caseybarnes.com.au

Single release: 'Somnus' by Hayley Wilson

Singer-songwriter Hayley Wilson turned to some experienced hands to produce her debut album, Further Than Forever (to be released on 24 February 2017): the late, much missed Karl Broadie and Glen Hannah. 'Somnus' is the first single from the album, and it's a piece of melancholic wonder, a wistful, sweet tune that will stay in your head for a long time.

You can watch the video for Somnus below. 

Buy 'Somnus' or you can receive the track when you pre-order Further Than Forever on iTunes. 
hayleywilsonmusic.com

Single release: 'Porcelain' by Gina Horswood

A big, turbulent year needs a great, gutsy ending - just like the new song 'Porcelain', the title track from a new album by Gina Horswood.

Gina originally performed with her sister Melanie, sharing bills with Kasey Chambers, amongst others. In 2013 Gina headed for Nashville to write and record, and started playing to North American audiences. She has found success in Canada and is heading home to Australia for some shows in January 2017

Watch 'Porcelain' on Youtube or buy it on iTunes here.

www.ginahorswood.com

Interview: Rachel Collis

Sydney singer-songwriter Rachel Collis has a voice and a talent that can't be ignored - thankfully, both are well documented on her new album, The Remains of the Day. I very much enjoyed speaking with Rachel recently about the album, her songwriting break and her musical background.

In the past you’ve written songs on piano and this time you wrote a bit on guitar – did that shape the songs differently, to use a different instrument?

I think so. I really don’t play guitar well at all. I’ve always wanted to, but piano’s always been the main instrument for me and the one that I studied. But I think with songwriting any change in your process is a good thing, it’s going to evoke different sounds and ideas, so I wanted to play guitar well enough to be able to write and explore songs on the guitar and see what comes. I think it really does change where things go.

I suppose there’s also the fact that you play gigs and pianos aren’t that portable – a guitar has that benefit.

Absoutely. I think I’m somewhat of a whinger when it comes to lugging a big, heavy keyboard around [laughs]. I tend to do shows where there’s a piano there already. But sometimes if it’s a folk club or if I’m just doing a few songs, it’s a real pest. So I though if I can play the guitar at least I can do a few songs. So I’m working on it. I have done a few performances where I’ve got the guitar up for one or two songs. Still needs time, I think [laughs].

I saw a video of you playing guitar onstage, so I know you’ve done that. I saw something on your website – the song about the duck.

Oh, that’s a ukulele, that one.

Clearly I wasn’t looking closely enough!

I’m quite short, so it probably looked like a guitar.

Since you play the ukulele I’ll divert and ask you a question about that. What do you like about the uke?

The funny thing is I only play the ukulele marginally better than the guitar, but it was a very similar thing. Part of the reason why I’ve never taken to guitar is that I have very small hands and I have a thin, small spread between my fingers, so playing Bach has always been a huge challenge. A few years ago I thought, Why don’t I get a ukulele? They don’t cost too much money. So I did, and I wrote a couple of songs on that. Then a year ago I woke up and thought, I’m going to get a mini guitar – and that was the problem solved. So I have a ukulele and a mini guitar, and that’s how I’m coping with it all [laughs].

You’ve been writing collaboratively with Peta Van Drempt and your husband, Steve – what you do you like about collaboration?

Two heads are better than one. I think that in the creative process you’re trying to bring ideas together. You’re constantly trying to generate ideas and ditching the bad ones and creating new ones and combining them, and you get stuck when you run out of ideas. But when you’ve got someone else with you, they throw in ideas and create new ideas for you. There’s more rubbish to ditch because there’s two people generating lots of bad ideas, but there’s also two people generating good material. All my favourite songwriters out of Nashville cowrite and I think it’s the best practice. The only thing that stops me is my ego that says, ‘I have to write this song on my own to prove to myself or to the world that I’m a genius’. I do write on my own but sometimes I think, Why not grab Peta, my friend, she’s such a great songwriter and let’s work this idea out together. So I do that a lot more now. I think both of us probably write better together than we do on our own. I mean – she’s written great songs on her own and I’m really proud of songs that I’ve written on my own but I think together we can be more productive, because so many of the songs that never get finished because you get stuck, we’ve been able to finish together.

When you were talking about how it was your ego demanding that you write the song on your own – of course, you are very well qualified to write songs because you have a Masters in Composition [laugh]. When you have that background, are there things you need to unlearn to write songs that you want to sing?

I think as a performer there have been things that I’ve needed to unlearn. Writing wise, I haven’t found that to be so much of a problem. I’ve always been able to separate the way I approach writing folk or something really simple from the way that I approach something that’s musically much more complex. Whereas I think performance wise that was a big jump for me, particularly vocally, that I had sort of let go of the need to sing something properly or even well. To just allow the voice to crack and show emotion and to let it be no big deal – that was a process I had to go through. Not that I regret doing the classical training but I think unlearning that really affected way of singing is really important when you’re trying to sound like you just spontaneously picked up the guitar and the singing and it’s just got to be so relaxed and natural, and I think that’s a challenge for a lot of formally trained musicians.

I guess you’re trained to sing in service of the song, whereas when you’re performing your own things, you’ve got to sing in service of the story you’re telling.

Absolutely. And emotion is shown in the vulnerability of your voice, and if you’ve been trained for your voice to be flawless and powerful, and suddenly it needs to sound vulnerable and weak, that just involves a very conscious process of letting go of the need to control everything, which is hard [laughs].

Very hard when you’ve had professional qualifications in getting that way.

That’s right, and spent many years doing it. It’s amazing how much becomes unconscious as well. I’ve listened back to – this was before I started pursuing music, when I was about twenty, and I had recordings I’d done of just singing folk stuff, but at the time I was right in the middle of my classical training. And even though I thought at the time that the way I was singing folk was completely different to my classical stuff, it’s very, very obvious that I was classically trained in the way that I was singing there. It’s something that you just do unconsciously because you’re in a world. I don’t think I would ever go back and do further classical voice training because I think that would interfere with singing the folk-rock stuff too much.

And because you are classically trained, your voice could have gone several different ways – you could have become a jazz singer, or you could have become a classical singer, and you’ve chosen a style that really suits your voice. I think it takes a certain amount of courage to come from that background and say, ‘I will sing the way I want to.’

Yes, it does. My old singing teacher has been such a powerful musical mentor for me and it took me ages to get him out of my head. The very first professional gig I did was a one-woman show back in 2012 and when he came along to that opening season, I was terrified that he would disapprove of all these horrible technical things I was doing that he’d taught me not to do. But of course he didn’t – he was pleased and proud. But that was a big fear at the time. Now it feels like no big deal.

Your voice certainly sounds relaxed, so you must be at a point where you’re comfortable.

That’s right [laughs]. I’ve gotten over it.

I saw a note saying you’d started writing songs five years ago for the first time since you were a teenager. I’m curious about what made you stop writing songs then.

I think fear. Probably lack of self-esteem. I’m a big believer that one of the most important things in being able to be creative is that you need to have a strong sense of self-worth because you have to be able to tolerate your own mistakes and trust your own instincts. And I think that there were times in that period when I wasn’t writing that I would try to write again and I just had no compass for, ‘Is this any good?’ Because I just didn’t trust myself even remotely … I think something just switched in my brain when I decided to start writing again and I just said, ‘I’m going to write something good. That’s all I have to do. If it’s not good, just write it again until it is.’ But I think it takes a certain amount of confidence as a person to be able to do that. And I know some people don’t ever struggle with that but for me that was a big thing, that I had to get over that anxiety about not being perfect, about not being brilliant all the time. I gave myself permission to be terrible – [that] was also part of that transition, was to go, ‘I’m going to start writing songs and I don’t care how bad they are.’ And then I was surprised when people were suddenly turning heads and I thought, Oh, I might actually be all right at this. So that was a lot to do with it. And I didn’t have the courage to pursue a music career so I pushed all that aside. I still played a lot of piano because I would get work as a piano player but in terms of doing my own stuff for a while there it just disappeared off my radar.

It’s a good thing that it’s back now – and speaking of songs, do you have a favourite on the album?

I have two. One is ‘Twenty to Nine’ which is a song I wrote based on Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. And the other favourite is a song called ‘Rest Assured’, which is this sort of unpretentious track buried all the way – I think it’s track seven – it’s just such a simple lullaby-type song. I really love songs that are simple lyrically and musically but are elegant and I’m really proud to have written something like that. I guess referring to the classical training and the composition training, it’s kind of easy to make something interesting by adding complicated features to it but to write something that really only has a couple of chords to it and not that many notes and not that many words and make that interesting is always a great challenge.

How did you choose your producer, Sean Carey?

I worked with Sean for my last album. My drummer, a fellow called Mike Quigley, does a lot of session work for Sean. Mike played with me for my first album and was gigging with me, and I was talking to him about the things I wasn’t pleased with on the first album and what I wanted to achieve, and he said, ‘I think you should check Sean out. I think he might be a good fit for you.’ So I madly researched Sean’s music and people who he had recorded and listened to the sound, then I went into a meeting really prepared – just really clear on what my ideas were, what sounds I liked, what sounds I didn’t like, which artists I liked, which artists I didn’t like and why, and presented that to him and he was absolutely on board. I’d say, ‘I think the piano sounds disgusting in this track’, and he’d say, ‘Absolutely – it sounds like they shoved it on a football field and covered it with a blanket.’ He understood exactly where I was coming from and I thought, This is somebody who has similar taste to me. Because what I took for granted beforehand is that everybody’s different, everybody has a different style and taste and you can go in any direction, and it’s so important to find somebody who agrees with you so that you’re not pushing this uphill battle where you’re trying to get them to create a certain sound. They have to be inspired by what they’re doing too. So we did Nightlight together and it was a no-brainer to work with him again for this album.

It sounds like you had a lot of fun recording it and it sounds like a blended whole, if that makes sense.

Yes, absolutely.

The Remains of the Day is out now and availble on iTunes.

www.rachelcollis.com

Buddy Goode has More Rubbish

Connoisseurs of fine music will already be familiar with Buddy Goode - and if you haven't introduced his Christmas album to your Yuletide festivities, do not hesitate to buy it immediately. This Christmas, however, Buddy has no new carols for his fans. Instead, he is offering them More Rubbish, a brand new album of brand new songs. And he's launching the album - his first launch ever - at Rooty Hill RSL in Sydney on Saturday 17 December.

Ahead of the launch, and the release of More Rubbish, I spoke to Buddy and, maybe, to his alter ego, Mike Carr.

The first thing I have to say is that I have not heard the album.

Well, the reason why is that we only finished recording it about ten days ago. No, it was delivered about ten days ago so it was finished recording about fourteen days ago.

And when did you start writing it?

Oh, about three days before that [laughs]. No, I started writing it a while ago but there wasn’t going to be a new album this year because I didn’t feel inspired. But I got some inspiration one night. I woke up and spoke to L Ron Hubbard and just got the inspiration. The next day I rang ABC [Music] and said, ‘Look, I’d love to do another album’, and they decided it would be a great idea, so we thought we’d do it. And it’s done and it’s here and, to be honest with you, I think it’s one of the best ones I’ve ever done [laughs].

Maybe that distilled process of creativity and productivity was the trick.

I think so, yes. And when you spend extended periods of your life really bored, the only way to get out of it is to be creative. I’d had a great break from it this year. I hadn’t done many Buddy shows this year – I only did a couple of things during the year because my alter ego, Mike Carr, was doing other things [Adam Brand and the Outlaws] and then I thought I was going to take the whole year off, but then I guess I got a little bit of itchy feet.

There is now a lot of thinking and writing about the value of boredom when it comes to creativity. The kiddies aren’t getting bored any more, they’re always occupied with the screens – it’s not good for them.

No, it’s not. I believe the children – and a lot of this album I dedicate to the kids out there, hence the reason why the very first album launch that I’m doing on December 17^th at Rooty Hill – after all these years, I’ve never done one for the other albums.

Why not?

I don’t know. I can’t answer that question! I just never thought it was something I wanted to do. I haven’t even had an unofficial launch or anything like that. I’ve just released an album and gone and done the gigs. This year I thought, Oh, you know, let’s do it a bit differently. Have a launch. But it was mainly for the kids, as I said. My album launch is twelve plus – the families can come along. Not meaning that I’m going to change anything that I do in my act.

[Laughs] I was about to say, ‘How does that fit in with your act?’

Well, you know, the whole things is [that] you’re not watching Kevin Bloody Wilson. There’s no swearing in the show. It’s all double meanings. So it’s entertaining for the kids because Buddy’s just entertaining – I could be the fifth Wiggle, in all honesty. Over the years I’ve just discovered that there are a lot of families who do enjoy it with their kids and the kids like certain songs, and they’re not necessarily the dirtiest songs. Sometimes they are but [the kids] don’t have a clue what it’s about, they just think it’s funny. I’ve only ever had half-a-dozen walkouts before in all my shows, and I’ve performed to a lot of kids and families over the years. I don’t see it as a problem. It was a problem for a lot of people for a long time because they didn’t quite understand. But I said, ‘Look, you’re obviously not fans, you’re not listening to the albums – you have to listen closer.’ And once they got closer to it they could see the value in it for their children [laughs].

There’s a lot of colour and movement in a Buddy Goode proposition – the kiddies love that.

That’s right. It was Cruisin’ Country, I did a show one night in one of the bars and there was a family of six sitting right next to me – Mum and Dad and four kids – and I just looked down and the kids were all singing the words to one of my songs. Probably not the most appropriate one, but they were all having a wonderful time. So I just thought it was about time [for a show for kids] considering, as you said, technology – they’ve all got an iPad, they’ve all got a smart phone, they’re all on them all the time, they’ve seen a lot worse than Buddy Goode on there.

It must be pretty fantastic when you can look down and see people singing along.

Especially ten-year-olds. It’s amazing, you know. Because there’s nothing out there for them, ten-year-olds. What have they got to pick from – Miley Cyrus? The Jonas Brothers and the occasional two-week wonder that pops along? Buddy’s something that can stay with them forever, you know what I mean?

Just like a bad Christmas present.

That’s right. Exactly right. Like the knitted reindeer jumper. There’s a lot of influences for the songs. There’s nothing that child friendly on here but there’s some stuff that they can have a good giggle at along with their mums and dads.

If you only delivered the album ten days ago, how did you organise that cover photo so quickly – with a garbage truck, no less.

It was quite random. I had my photographer with me and we were driving round the streets looking for some alleyways and some garbage bins, just to have some shots. I drove round this corner and there was this garbage truck pulled over with three garbos having a smoko [laughs]. So I just drove in, fully dressed, and I said to the boys, ‘What are you doing for the next ten minutes?’ and they said, ‘We’re smokin’.’ And I said, ‘Can I take some photos on your truck?’ and they said, ‘Absolutely [laughs]. As long as you don’t put the numberplate in there.’ So that’s how that happened. It was totally random and I promised them all an album for Christmas. I’ve got all their addresses. So they were stoked. They had no idea what was happening to them and neither did I.

And I love the fact that they saw a fully dressed Buddy Goode and said, ‘Yep, mate – go ahead.’

[Laughs] Absolutely. They did. They were in shock.

In the press release for More Rubbish it mentions that this is a good album for the ‘average Joe and Joelene’. Does Buddy Goode relate to the average person? I’m not convinced that Buddy Goode is average.

Well, no, he’s not. He can mix in any circle, you know what I mean. He can certainly lower himself for any occasion. And the proof is on the record that he can lower himself for any occasion. The reason the album is for the average Joe is because the last two albums have been specifically themed albums: Songs to Ruin Every Occasion and the Christmas album. This time I’ve gone back to The One and Only Buddy Goode and Unappropriate. Unappropriate won my first ARIA and I think it was a great album. So this is a bit of a return to those days of Buddy Goode. There’s no themes. It’s just writing songs about the wonderful world that we live in.

When you come to write these songs, what sort of inspiration is there – is it an object, is it a person or an experience that sparks things? Or is it all completely random and you never know when an idea is going to pop in?

It’s completely random and it all depends on whether my prescription’s run out [laughs].

Prescription glasses, you mean.

Of course, of course! It depends on a lot of things. Sometimes it depends on the weather. Lots of people ask me how I write these songs and I tell you, I find it a lot easier to write these songs than I do to write normal songs because normal songs have to mean something – these don’t have to mean anything, and you can write about anything, you can make up anything you want. You can even make up words that sound funny. So I never find much pressure in writing these songs. But I do like there to be a strong meaning – at least a message that one person in the world, whether he be a garbo in Kazakhstan, something that someone can latch on to.

The fact that you can have more fun with these songs means that you can play with language more, which would be part of the fun.

Absolutely. And I have a lot of influences from my life, and I like to incorporate these people that have major influence in my life. On this album Kevin Bennett and Lee Kernaghan both get mentions.

Well, Lee and Kevin are both big presences in Australian country music.

Absolutely. Kevin just recently got nominated for 400 Golden Guitars. I was really excited for him and I was there at the party, at the nominations. I went            up to him and said, ‘I’m really thrilled for your nominations – you must be too’, and he said, ‘I heard on the grapevine that Buddy Goode has mentioned me in a song’, and I said, ‘Yes, he has’, and he said, ‘Well, that’s much more important than the six nominations I got.’ [laughs]

[Laughs] It would be pretty special to be immortalised in a song! Now – as you mentioned the Christmas album, I do have a related question: what is on your Santa list this year?

That’s a good question.

And have you been naughty or nice? That’s the next question.

Oh, I’m always naughty.

I figured that would be the answer.

Well, you have to be naughty to be nice. Because if you’re not naughty you don’t get anything out of life and if you don’t get anything out of life you can’t be nice to anybody.

Words to live by.

And my Santa list … to be honest, a Golden Guitar nomination is high priority, because I feel like the ARIA has embraced me for many years but I feel that the Golden Guitars haven’t quite embraced Buddy Goode, considering that’s where he started – his first gig was at the TRECC in Tamworth. I opened for Adam Brand, I did three songs. My very first song was an instrumental – it was ‘The Magnificent Seven’ played on the bottle with wooden spoons.

Do you remember what you wore?

Yeah – I had a white jacket on, and a white skivvy, and blue jeans tucked into wonderful white cowboy boots, snakeskin leather. No one remembers that – the gig was with Adam Brand and Michael Spibey from the Badloves, and James Blundell and Buddy Goode. That was the very first gig. I only had one song out at the time – it was before I got signed to ABC – and I walked out on stage and did ‘The Magnificent Seven’ with the bottles, then I performed my one song, then I think I finished with ‘Thank God I’m a Country Boy’ and walked off. [laughs] So I’d love to be embraced by the Golden Guitar awards but I can’t seem to get a look-in. Maybe I’ll have to do a duet with Kasey Chambers.

Or maybe give Adam Brand an alter ego and you two can duet –they love a duet at the Golden Guitars.

[Laughs] They do. Well, we’ll see what happens.

Before I wrap up I will ask you about Tamworth – do you have a show or shows?

I have the one big show on the 25^th of January at the Diggers Showroom at 7 p.m. I’ll be doing the charity event, Country Turns Pink, as well on the Saturday night where I’ll be introducing special guests to perform a song with me. And a few little bits.

And I imagine you’ll have special guests at that Diggers show too.

Last year I had Adam Brand and Seleen McAllister. Adam and I did a wonderful version of ‘Shaddap Your Face’ just for Adam to get in touch with his Italian origin. This year there is a surprise but I’m not going to announce it until the week out.

More Rubbish is flooding your neighbourhood on 16 December, courtesy of ABC Music. You can order it here or buy it on iTunes.

Buddy Goode is on Facebook.

           

Interview: Nick O'Mara from Amarillo

One of the greatest Australian country albums this year has come from Melbourne duo Amarillo. Eyes Still Fixed is a gorgeous, studied piece of work, and a valuable addition to the national canon. So it was with great pleasure that I spoke to Nick O'Mara, one half of Amarillo, about the band's work and the album.

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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