Interview: Steve Eales

Steve Eales established his reputation with country music fans during his time in the band Sovereign. Now his band is The Open Road and they have released a new album, Let's Love Not Fight, and sent it into the world with a launch during the 2017 Tamworth Country Music Festival and a first single, the cruisy 'Driftin' On'. I had a chat with Steve about the album, the creative process, and why he'd rather love than fight.

How was your Tamworth launch for the album?

It was great. Absolutely loved it. Really good responses – it was well worth doing.

Was that your only Tamworth show?

Yes. I did a couple of showcases with Tania Kernaghan and James Blundell, and a whole bunch of radio interviews, but that was the only show that we did.

It seems to be that strange thing for artists at Tamworth that you may only play one advertised show but the rest of the time it’s quite frenetic – it’s not like you’re hanging out, going to see other bands.

That’s right. Tamworth from an artist’s point of view is all about connecting directly with the fans who buy your albums and talk to you on Facebook. Not everyone is going to come to your show but everyone still wants to see you, so it’s about making yourself available.

Now to focus attention on the album: how and when did you start creating it?

I don’t know if I can pinpoint a time – it’s just the next step after the last one. There’s a couple of songs left over from the last album, The Open Road. I guess that kicked it off. So it was almost immediately after the previous one was released that we were working on this one.

From memory, your creative process is pretty constant – you’re always documenting songs as they come to you so you always have a stash of something to work with.

Yes. I’ve written songs for the next album that we haven’t even considered getting together and writing for or started to record or anything. But I’ve got two and I’m sure that Reggie’s got a couple as well. We really need two bands.

On the one hand, I would think it puts your mind at rest, in that you don’t have this looming deadline to write for the next album. When you’re living in that state of creativity and you stop yourself, it means you’ve got this work coming out and you can pick it up and make an album when you’re ready.

And the process then becomes ‘what songs go together’ – what’s going to make this album flow as far as flavours.

For this new album, did you start with a lot of songs and then have to whittle them down, or were you writing or choosing with a particular flavour in mind?

It was already ‘these songs go together as a flavour’ and then Reggie released a bombshell with ‘Mrs Wrong’ and it was, ‘Man, that’s fantastic, let’s put it on the album’. And he said, ‘I’ve got another couple that are the same kind of flavour’, and I said, ‘Let’s hear them.’ Then that became ‘Let’s Love Not Fight’. Then towards the end, we had our album put together – ‘this is it, this is what the album’s going to sound like, we’re happy with this collection of songs’ – then I came up with ‘Drifting On’. It just sort of happened. And my particular formula for putting together a song is that I’ll record the entire thing, so it’s a finished product, in my studio at home, then I’ll take it to Reggie’s studio and he does the same thing: he puts together a complete project, he plays all the instruments – he’s like me, he’s a multi-instrumentalist. So I’d put together this song and the band just fell in love with it, and the next day Reggie sad, ‘Well, I’ve put together this one,’ and it was ‘Southern Son’. And I said, ‘Okay – now we’ve got to change things.’ Because these two songs are the best on the album – that’s what we figured. But as a songwriter, the song that you’ve just finished writing is the best song that you’ve ever written.

I suppose in the process of playing those songs live, that changes.

Absolutely. There’s a process that I use where I try to work out what everyone else likes. The album isn’t really about me, or about Reggie or Robbie, it’s about how people connect with us and what we write. So the process that I use is that I’ll get a bunch of songs and introduce them as an acoustic thing somewhere in the show and see what the audience reaction is to them. If people start talking and looking the other way, you don’t have a winner.

Does it feel a bit brutal when that happens, or you’ve now been playing for long enough that you think, Oh well – on to the next thing?

There would have been a time when I would have been a little precious about that – ‘I just love this song, you guys just don’t appreciate good talent’ [laughs]. But the reality is that some songs take two or three listens, or it might be a great song but I haven’t arranged it well enough for any of the people’s psyches. And the whole thing of, ‘That was no good, on to the next one’, that’s kind of a maturity too, I think, as far as a songwriter goes. My process has changed a lot over the years, too, because I used to be all about, ‘I need to write ten songs this week and out of those ten songs I’m sure there’s going to be a gem. And it was all about quantity. Whereas these days I know whether a song’s going to be any good or not and I will leave it inside – I won’t even put pen to paper or pick up an instrument. When I wrote ‘Drifting On’ I sat on the beach under a palm tree, with a Bintang, in Bali and wrote that song in my head with no instruments or pens and paper.

And you obviously trust yourself enough now as a songwriter to know that song won’t evaporate before you’ve had a chance to put it down.

Well, yes – that’s the whole thing about not being precious about anything. If it does evaporate, too bad. I know that I’m a good enough songwriter to leave things inside and let them come out when they’re ready, and trust that they will.

That’s a fantastic way to be, and a lot of people strive to be like it, but it would be hard for a lot of artists who perhaps are less experienced to trust in that process – to believe that the good songs will hang around. They might hurry to document everything and then that makes the editing process harder.

I go through the process of humming a little tune or singing along in the car to something that’s buzzing around my head and I will sing it into the phone, but the reality is that I’ve never listened back to any of them.

[Laughs] I guess you really do trust that process: if it’s still in your head when you get home, or later on, that’s the one that’s meant to be and if it isn’t then there was no point recording it in the first place.

That’s exactly right. But at the same time I’m just forgetful [laughs].

There’s some way the subconscious works whereby you might compose lyrics in your head and then think you forget about them, but they emerge weeks or months later.

I’m a big believer in that – that the subconscious is the driver of our life. Whatever we programme into it is going to show up in our lives over and over, on a daily basis. Put it in there, leave it in there, and when it’s ready it’s like a piece of a puzzle.

Have you always felt this way or is it something you’ve learnt over time?

It’s something I’m learning still. I had a friend whose son passed away on a weekend and I’ve got sons of my own, so I really felt it, and I felt it because I knew the kid. And on the Monday I was up in the wee hours still mulling over this situation, and I don’t like to write things that are sad. I don’t write that many sad songs, everything’s kind of up. At two o’clock in the morning I got up and penned this page of lyrics and the same thing again: I didn’t put any planning into it, I didn’t look to see if it rhymed, I don’t check anything, I just wrote it out. Wednesday I was playing the banjo and this little riff came out and I just left that as well. On Thursday I sat down and the lyrics that I’d written and the melody that was going through my head and that banjo riff all fitted together. So at two-thirty I started writing the song and by four-thirty I had it completely finished with all the guitar parts and the bass and the drums. Because that’s now my process.

That’s a great place of maturity arrive at, as a songwriter.

I think it is, to the point where it didn’t matter to me if it became a song. And the fact that it did just amazed me. I don’t think the process will ever cease to impress me and amaze me. I always talk about how you don’t create music, you just pull out the plug from your end of the pipe and it flows through you.

There is still that magic about it all, isn’t there?

Absolutely. There was nothing there before and now there’s a song. They played it at the boy’s funeral. I will never play that song live and it will never be recorded on an album or anything, it’s just for that one thing and the magic was for the people at that event. It wasn’t for me.

Given all the songs on the album, how did you choose ‘Let’s Love Not Fight’ as the title track?

I’m a bit of a philosopher and anyone who hangs around with me long enough will get a bit of an insight into some of the things that go on inside of me, because I just don’t shut up. And the whole thing of philosophising about why we are here – the whole reason we are here is because we are connected, we are one, and love is the main ingredient of life. You look out your window and you look at all the beauty – I’m looking out my window now and I see mountains and trees and it’s just magnificent. That is a love creation. It comes from love. Everything’s about love. The opposite to love is fear. Fear causes anger and desperation and fighting and everything else. So there’s always this love versus fear thing going on. One of the manifestations of fear is trying to get our own way and manipulate and have control – that’s what fighting is. Whereas love is surrendering and knowing that everything is going to be okay. I’ve been talking about this with Reggie for the last two years or something and then he comes in with this gem of a song and I said, ‘You have captured it. This is perfect.’

Was there even a tiny twinge of thinking, I wish I’d written that song?

On the previous album I’d written ‘Fix It With Love’ because I have this philosophy that whatever the problem is in life there is always a love solution.

The feeling for me of your album is that there is this really laidback quality to it, by which I don’t mean slow or lazy, but there was this sense of things being laidback even if the lyrics weren’t necessarily like that – ‘Mrs Wrong’, for example, is not a laidback song lyrically but the sound is very much of you and the band being at ease. Do you feel at ease?

We do. That’s what our gigs are like – they’re very comfortable. We’ve been playing together for ten years, so we know what each other’s going to do. When it comes to writing and recording it’s the same. I know what Reggie’s going to play and I know what feel Robbie’s going to put on with the drums and the percussion. So there is a whole heap of, ‘Well this is where we’re at and this is what we sound like.’ On previous albums – This is the Life, for instance – I was still overcoming the rejection that I felt when Sovereign split up and the two brothers went their separate ways and one took off interstate and I was, like, ‘Well, damn.’ And on the Battler album and then This is the Life there was that whole feeling of, ‘I’m going to prove myself. I’m going to prove that I’m more than just this and more than just that.’ Especially on This is the Life there’s so many feels and genres on there, and there’s some really angry songs and some really loving songs. Whereas now I don’t feel like I need to prove anything, I just need to connect with people in a way that is right for me. This is what I sound like.

On this album that’s been achieved. The other word I noted when I was listening to it was that it sounds really open – maybe it felt a bit like an invitation to a listener.

That’s nice – I like that [laughs].

As you mentioned, you and the band have been together for ten years. Is there a secret to staying together for so long? Most bands will not last ten years.

I think the secret with us is that we don’t do everything together. For instance, Robbie has played for just about every top artist in Australia as a drummer, and I’m not talking about just country. He’s played for Shania Twain. He does the Australian Bee Gees tour, so he goes to Vegas and goes around Europe. He’s of that calibre and I guess if he was just hanging around waiting for me to put together a tour that he could play on there’d be a bit of, ‘What are we doing next? What are we doing next?’ But there isn’t. And the same with Reggie – he’s got other bands. He goes over to Europe and sets up studios with people over there. He records with people like Tommy Emmanuel and James Reyne. Tonnes of high-end people that he works with. And I do a lot of solo work. I’m off around the world doing acoustic solo work. I play in America and around Europe and Asia. So when we get together and do our band thing it’s like, ‘Yeah! This is where we’re at.’

And you’re all bringing lots of different experiences and audience experiences as well into what you’re doing together.

Yes, it adds a lot of dimensions to what we do as far as the live shows, that’s for sure.

I noticed on your gig line-up that you’re playing at a rodeo this weekend. Have you played at many rodeos before? Is it a different kind of experience?

As a solo artist my biggest hit is ‘Girls On Horses’, which is about rodeo girls, barrel racers. And with Sovereign our biggest hit was ‘Tooraweenah Cowgirl’, which was about barrel racers. So rodeo is a great place for us as an act. A lot of our songs are written about horse riders and I’ve had horses all my life as well. It’s a great environment. The people there enjoy what we do and we connect with them on the lyric basis.

Have you ever had any barrel racers come up and say ‘thank you’ or ‘I think that song is about me’?

Tonnes of times. And it is about them. When they’re out there racing around I can’t tell who’s who – they all look the same. I’m not a rodeo guy – I wouldn’t go to a rodeo, but I would go and play there because of the people.

And that sounds like what all of your work is: connecting with people.

One of the things I try to get across – especially in songs like ‘Long Way Here’ on the previous album – and I did it again on a few of a songs on this album, another thing that I say a lot, and it’s true right to my very core, I absolutely love people. I don’t pick people to pieces. I know everyone’s got faults and their own idiosyncrasies. But I just love being with people. I love having people around me. And that’s my point of connecting. When it comes to playing live or writing a song, it’s about how can people benefit from this song, not about me trying to express my inner angst or whatever.

Let's Love Not Fight is out now.
www.steveeales.com

Interview: Steve Eales

Steve Eales will be familiar to many country music fans as the lead singer and main songwriter of Sovereign. Flying solo since then, Steve's latest album is The Open Road. Steve took some time recently to talk about songwriting, mysterious guitars and road testing songs. 

Congratulations on the release of your album. An album takes such a long time and effort and thought and energy, I was wondering if it now feels like a relief that it’s out or do you now move into planning a tour and thinking about the next album?

It’s actually the latter. I’m in a constant state of writing and recording, because you constantly get inspired. As a songwriter there’s something or a predicament or an environment or some personality that’s influencing you and inspiring you, so I’m constantly writing and being inspired that way and in order to keep it fresh I record in some kind of fashion. So I’ve got this huge catalogue of songs that are ready to go for the next album and even the one after that.

When you get ideas – some people might sing a line into their iPhone, but do you go in and properly bed down a track with a guitar or something else?

It’s a different way every time. I’ve got ideas that I’ve sung into my phone. I’ve got riffs that are just a guitar riff that I’ll play over and over. If I go back through songs that I listen to on the album I can remember how every song was seeded – I can remember how I came up with that riff and it reminded me of that thing I was thinking that day. So it’s different every time. If a song wants to come out, if it wants to be a thing somewhere in the world, then it’s going to come out. It’s a weird thing. It’s not like you intellectually sit down and think, I’m writing a song now, and then you come up with something. I think if you did that you’d end up with a really poor-quality product. For want of a better word it’s more spiritual – or emotional, I guess, that’s the best way to describe it.

It sounds very much as if you exist in a state of constant creative flow. A lot of people struggle to get to that state and often it’s because they’re trying to make that intellectual decision that they want to write something or they need to write something, but that’s the wrong way to go about it. Whereas it sounds like you’re open to the stories and the songs that come to you and that’s why they can continually come, because you’re not trying to force them.

You’ve nailed it there. It gets to the stage with me where I’ll say [to a song], ‘I’m not ready for you to come out yet – you can just stay in there a bit longer’, rather than sit down and wrack my brain and try to come up with a word that rhymes with ‘hay’, you know. I don’t do that. I used to stress about it – I used to think, How am I going to construct this song? And I would listen to other people’s music and wonder, How did they write? What did they do? And I guess it’s probably a good way of getting your grounding as a songwriter, but I’m at the stage now where there’s so much going on inside of me and anything could come out at any time that I’ve got to control what comes out, to the point where I will half-write some songs and think, That’s going nowhere, and I won’t let the rest of it out.

At what point in your life did this start? Because for some people this point will never arrive. Is it something you’ve had since childhood?

Yes, it is – it’s something I’ve had since childhood. When I grew up – my dad is heavily into the church, he’s actually now an ordained minister. But I remember way back in the day a friend of mine – who was much older than I was – was getting piano lessons and he was sitting around this organ playing some tunes, and I would make him go over the same thing over and over again because I was getting lyrics and melodies forming in my mind and I was humming and singing them along. I probably would have been seven or eight years old.

Has it always felt like a gift, to be able to do that, or has it sometimes felt like a burden?

Interesting question. I used to be a carpenter back in the day and I can remember hanging upside down from the rafters on one particular job – I was three stories up – and I was trying to handle a power saw and I’ve got lyrics going through my head and I cannot focus on what I’m supposed to be doing. My mind just would not stay on the job. And I’ve had similar experiences when I’ve – I love playing sport, and I’ve got some ability, but I have never been any good because I don’t have the focus that you need to be a great athlete, simply because I’ve got music inside of me all the time. It just pours out, basically.

Did you grow up around music?

Not really. We had a piano in the house that we weren’t allowed to touch. We’d wait until Mum left the room to see if the lid was locked. But no one ever played it. And there was a guitar that was kept in a canvas bag behind the couch. No one was allowed to touch that either. So there were instruments there but nobody played.

So where did they come from, these mystery instruments?

I had this guitar – I’ve recently just given it away. It was literally a priceless guitar. It was a handmade Spanish guitar that’s over a hundred years old, that ended up in our family probably before I was even born, from a friend of my dad’s who used to do a few burglaries. He ended up getting locked up and he stashed a whole heap of stuff around different people’s places and my dad ended up with this guitar. Now Dad has never known if this guitar belonged to the guy or the guy ripped it off from someone else, but when this friend of his got out of jail Dad said, ‘I’m sorry, mate, I can’t have you round my family’, but he didn’t want the [guitar] back either. So it stayed in the family for years. I think that’s the reason we were never allowed to get it out and play it. But I remember being about two or three years old and sticking my hand up inside the broken zip and pulling on the strings to make a noise.

That guitar sounds like it deserves a song of its own.

Yeah, well, I named it Matilda and I’ve written heaps of songs on it, but I recently passed it on to another family member.

Back to the album – the first single, ‘Cos I’m Country’, was about living in the country, but I’m wondering if it also applied to your musical tastes. Having said that, the song ‘Love it When it Rocks’ suggests that you’ve never been just strictly country.

Well, that's true. When I wrote ‘Cos I’m Country’, that’s more about the actual life of living on the farm rather than being country music. Country music has such a broad brush these days, when you swipe something with the country music sound it could be anything from Slim to Big & Rich, for instance, that have a rock and rap in their songs. So that song’s not really about the country style, that’s more about growing up on the farm and having the ethics of a farmer passed down from son to son, not just the skills of farming the land but actually ‘this is why we live in the country, this is why we do what we do’. Whereas ‘Love it When it Rocks’ is, when I’m playing live and I’ve got a couple of hundred or a thousand people in front of me who just want to move their feet, there are some types of songs that I can’t play because they’re, like, ‘Will you hurry up? We want to dance’. So there are some songs that I’ve got to bring out for that kind of environment, and that’s what ‘Love it When it Rocks’ is all about – not everything is going to be a country ballad.

On your album the ballads are really lovely. When I heard them I thought we don’t get a lot of ballads. A lot of alt country albums, the songs are a slower tempo and you can’t really classify a lot of them as ballads. On a lot of country rock or country pop the pace stays really upbeat or the slower songs are really melancholy so they don’t have that ballad feel – they can feel like a dirge sometimes. So you obviously like that balance of ballad and up-tempo yourself.

You do. There used to be a time when you’d buy an album and you’d like two or three songs, and then you’d put up with the rest or they’d grow on you. I don’t think that belongs in today’s era. Most people will say, ‘I like that song so I’m just going to download it and the rest of it I don’t like’. So now the challenge is there for artists – if you’re going to put out an album with twelve songs on it, all twelve of them have to be a song that people want. You can’t think you’ll pad out this album with some stuff that doesn’t really matter. You can’t do that any more.

It’s a lot of pressure, though, isn’t it? Part of the beauty of an album is to have that ability to have it telling a story across the whole work, but when you’re thinking that people are perhaps accessing just one song at a time, the entire story needs to be in that one song and whatever you’re trying to convey to a listener has to come across in that one song.

You’re right – every song has to encapsulate the thought that inspired you to write the song and if you are smart enough or it just happens to work that way, all the songs on the album will sort of tie in to a similar theme. And that happened when I brought the Battler album out: every song was a handshake to the next song or somewhere on the album it sort of belonged. And the next album I brought out – This is the Life – was more about, ‘I don’t want to be boxed in to only sound like this sound’ or ‘Don’t think that I'm just that kind of muso’. So the album was eclectic as far as styles go. I had 1920s, 1930s style swing songs on there as well as the country ballad and country pop sound. This album is a little more mature – I’m not trying to prove anything like I did on the previous album. Now I’m putting the songs on that I’ve road tested and I know people want to hear.

Although I would think it’s a bit of a comfort to know that you have a vault of songs – as you said, you’ve been banking them up. So you can go to the vault if you need a song.

That’s true, too – I’ve got so many that I can just say, ‘Hang on, this song doesn’t exactly fit on this album – let’s try that one over there’, knowing that that song works in front of a crowd as well, because one of the most important things is to write a song, get familiar with it so you’re comfortable playing it, and then slip it into a live show and see what people’s reactions are. You can’t do that on the bigger shows but every now and again I do some more intimate pub-type gigs where it’s laidback or sitting on a stool and I’ve got good crowd reaction going on, so I explain that this is a new song I’ve just written. If people are tuning out and just talking amongst themselves, I know it’s not going to be any good on an album either. I haven’t got a good enough hook.

Has there ever been a song you’ve really loved and you’ve road tested it like that and it’s gone down like a lead balloon?

Yes, it’s happened a lot [laughs].

I suppose if you write a lot of songs then you’re less attached to each song than if you didn’t write many at all, but does it still hurt?

I don’t really feel hurt. The best way of describing it is that if I was to assume that the gift of music was a gift for me I would probably have that approach – ‘well, you people just don’t know what you’re listening to, it’s a great song’. Once you get through your skull that the gift of music is for everybody else and you’re the conduit for it, then it kind of brings things back into perspective where it’s, like, ‘okay, this song may be for another era or it may never come out’. But the reality is that you’re playing for people’s pleasure. You bring it back to the basics – what is a song? If somebody buys a song from you, what are they buying? It’s not like they can take it home in their hand. Or if they come to a show they can’t stick it in their pocket and take it home. They’re not taking anything. It’s an emotion, it’s a feeling, it’s an idea. And if people can’t connect with that on a level that affects them, then either you haven’t done your job properly or it’s not a good enough concept or melodically it’s not sound. You haven’t allowed the gift to develop properly.

That’s a great way to put it. I also love the idea of the song not being in the right time or of the right time. That’s a very philosophical way to see creative work. But I think we’ve already established that that’s how you approach it anyway.

That was a trial-and-error thing. I’ve got songs on the first album that I brought out with Sovereign, back in 2000, that would be better now. They’re good songs – they’re great songs – but they didn’t make it as a single, they were like a B side, whereas the music now has caught up.

I’m going to ask one last question: the album is called The Open Road – what are your plans for taking it on the open road?

That’s a good question [laughs]. I’m always on the road. Pretty much every weekend I'm out gigging somewhere. And the plan is for the second half of the year to take the Open Road band and album up the eastern coast and then down through the centre.

Given that Tamworth gigs get booked quite far ahead, are you thinking of Tamworth already?

Definitely. I haven’t been to Tamworth since 2008. I’ve been in the [United] States pretty much every year or on tour somewhere else in the country, so yes, definitely. 

The Open Road is out now.

www.steveeales.com