|
|
HOTEL RADIO
"this was one of the most recent additions... warped genesis... I had a bad pop song "I heard this song, all the night long on my hotel radio" with four on the floor piano vamp that was demoed at woodend with phil wales… the lyric was inspired by a hellish evening of non sleep at a hotel in up state Louisiana as I drove around in a hired pick up truck recording sounds of the bayous and the mississippi… insects, undergrowth, cars on bridges, slow drawl conversations that kind of thing... everywhere in this hotel they were playing The Captain and Tenille, in the lobby, hallway, on my clock radio (can you ever get these things to work… all very well saving electricity but you have to reset the clock every time you leave the room!!!)… couldn't sleep... spent the night recording evangelist babble and David Duke ads off the TV... any way the lyric was frustrated rants alluding to the mediocrity of middle America/Australia... so much disposable income, personal freedom,... yet this is what we come up with David Duke, the Captain and Tenille and ads for lite cheesecake!... back to the song, we punked it up to try and save it but the demo is embarrassing... a month later Michael Barker popped into the Enormodome with a few tracks on his multi track... the piano hookline as it remains was there over drum machine. loved it... his song veered off into a jazzier bridge... kept the hookline over the cool 4 chord progression re worked the lyric pondered my tan after a beachside camping trip where it pissed down raining all week..... and added the "Air"ish bridge… took it up to Mangrove... Nick post acid absolutely fucked around with it, got me to sing little phrases on eternal circular loop and worked in analogue blips and beats... it sounded really cool but only half a song.... I worked out a structure theoretically and we got Felix and Floyd and Slater to warm up the track with the acoustic strum, killer drum groove and vibraphones... add in Jupiter keys, swoops, vocal aah chords by singing every note (oohs, aahs and eehs held for four beats for the C minor, e flat, b flat, f minor and major chord progression...) man, were we fighting with this one... but I knew it was going to be a killer song. we left it for a month... and then I brought in Frank Tetaz to cut and paste and produce it into something pretty much like where it is now... I was still re-singing parts during the mix with Ian Caple... a guy at school lived in the roman pillar house., merchant bank obscenity... you can’t buy taste... whatever… I neither aspire to the Johnstone's house or to the ideals of David Duke and his confederates flag... was kinda hoping it’d be a killer summer single... not to be... but the groove is sublime and the high vocal grab reminds me of the Buggles"
ON A DAY LIKE THIS
Was called Revanmates up til the last minute, based around a stringband sample from the Revanmates stringband from East New Britain... great band... happy dub. major chords in C... how simple... trumpets and happy guitar... lyric tells of those drunks and H-division users probably being happier than all of us at 4pm... sitting round the parks (the peanut farm) and malls (Highpoint west) chatting away, telling stories, completely off their dial... it’s down hill from there... too wasted and start thinking too deeply bout how fucked it all is... it’s okay until it gets dysfunctional... the major is Brian Murray, John Howards' drug advisor from the salvoes, slightly right of Genghis Khan... he is anti needle exchange, decriminalization/supervised injecting rooms. moral puritan, hard core... is it a single... some reckon the vocal level is too far back. Ian, Nick and I disagree. if you pushed the vocal level you'd lose the impact of the dancing daisies…
SAFETY HAVEN
‘twas written with Nick at his mum and dad’s place in Turramurra in Sydney... Nick had this half dubby loop and I placed this sparse circular chord progression and sang a love song using the immigration inspired Safety haven lyric over the top... simple, close miked... played with tots of bilas everywhere to give it the desired texture. love the bass... Amanda Brown, Dave Mason and myself sat around the piano at mangrove singing barber shop vocal harmonies over the chorus… twas a lot of fun. played around with inverting the chords at various places in the song… slightly jazz piano... Mark Hollis, a hero of mine… love the bass of Sam's… Ian kept the warmth and the subs… and Nick's programming is genius... lots of 9ths in there… avoid the third where possible... would be a single in a perfect world…
COME AROUND
John Phillips and I wrote this song in 96... the circular chord progression coming from an ethereal cue from a documentary about a nunnery out the back of Newcastle called "God's Girls." It got given a driving drum loop similar to a track called Return by The Reels or the theme from Cat People that Bowie sang and was part of the demos for an aborted album that John and I approached Mushroom records about doing. John and I were going to call our duo, DUMB... never got off the ground, the approach fell on fallow ground, Johnny moved to the south of France, I kept going with the cake until I finally got motivated to do the solo thang... ‘tis a love song referencing my wonderful Samoan neighbours in Richmond who used to sit on their front porch strumming guitars and laughing their heads off until all hours of the morning. they made your heart sing... was trying to entice someone I was keen on to come round on a slow stinking hot summer night and at least we can listen to them next door! demoed it at kitty miller bay for AoFC but it sounded too eighties and didn't fit that album's scheme... re-jigged it, perfect fit for hotel radio…
NATION (of the heartless kind)
much of the developmental stages of this record coincided with the Tampa affair and the lead up to this war…enough said…not Australia’s finest hour. The lyric for this song came out at this time; trying to capture the mean spiritedness emanating from middle Australia. The music came out of a piece I wrote for this rather ordinary reality TV programme on the national drama school. The ascending semi-tone chord shift. It was further developed in Tempted—Jimmy’s drive to the shack—where the chord were accompanied by an in the pocket Michael Barker drum groove and the orchestra “double stopping” and floating the chords and also some harp rings on the accent. I kept the same tempo as the Tempted cue for the song so as to be able to reuse the 80-piece orchestra, which gives the track the fullness and epic quality. Having so much of the recorded material already there made for a fairly complete demo version of this song. It was the best of the demo cd that was doing the rounds between my studio and the record company and the various musicians who were sent rough versions of the songs. I was after a wailing Ofra Haza kind of vocal, the semitone shift in the chords allowed for a Middle Eastern flavoured vocal. Katie Noonan nailed this to perfection; the girl can sing. Sam Dixon’s bass playing is so cool. I am very pleased with the energy and groove in this track; the first attempt at the mix was more atmospheric and less groove based. While I liked this take on the mix, the album needed the more powerful energy, which we achieved with the second mix. Ian’s first mix can be found on the hotel radio single.
THE TENDER TRAP
the orchestra and oboe and Rebecca’s heavenly voice are of such beauty that the drums loop of Michael B’s and the vocal were crunched. heard Rebecca singing at South By Southwest with her band, Halou (their record is thoroughly recommended… they too are on Nettwerk in the US... I immediately earmarked Rebecca for a vocal sent the pro tools file, she replied with vocal on top... beautiful, hymn like... such purity... tender trap is a bar in Sydney... odd… belly dancers, sad lone bagpipe, strange challenging women, 1am on a Sunday morning… one special night there after a relationship crunch point... It fell apart... friends took me to the tender trap… I vowed to write a song... thanks to Kerri Simpson for the Sagasso Sea imagery... in certain moods, my favourite song on the album...
100 FLOWERS IN BLOOM
I think I’ve written three songs called 100 Flowers in Bloom in my time, one of them, the My Friend The Chocolate Cake instrumental appears on the album, "Good Luck"... I guess its the romantic notion mixed with the Mao Tse Tung reference. Has the classic four on the floor rock bass riff (descending bass line, ascending melody, vaguely suggestive lyric = formula for pop song... so says Michael Barker!) Have had these chords (lots of 6ths in there) hanging around for a while... one of the first demos for the new album... wanted it bright... Nick convinced me of the vibraphone... used the moog a fair bit... nearly takes your head off in the middle section... love the brass... i was tempted to grunge it up more with dirty guitar but Nick convinced me not to... that’s my Stella, aged 3, singing "I like the flowers, I like the daffodills, I like the mountains when the lights are low, boom de ada, boom de ada..." at the beginning... the keyboard is played on a DX100 the crappiest keyboard sound in the world... Nick recorded it 5 times, each slightly out of tune with each other... came up as treat... anyone who can make a DX100 sound decent was going to be asked to co-produce my album!!!
EPIPHANY
the orchestra was composed for "My Brother Jack'... I had always earmarked it for a song... the notion of the epiphany came from one of the short stories in James Joyce's Dubliners... the grandeur in the lyric is hopefully there in the music and production…wont go into the lyric meaning... wrote it at Woodend on the same day as Blue Black Sky was in that kind of dark reflective mood... the bridge was an after thought after a criticism at demo stage from the record company that the song dragged a bit. (they were right... )... compu-rhythm and Floyd Vincent's wondeful strum. "words writ large" rolls off the tongue nicely... very talented guy ol' Floyd... the epic song... almost over dramatic, but I like it a lot... also single material in a perfect world... as with Blue Black Sky, would love to one day be able to sing it with an eighty piece orchestra backing, me in a tux! maybe a carnation in the top pocket…
LOOKING AFTER OURSELVES AGAIN
the blackshirts are a right wing suburban men’s rights group in Melbourne who campaign against abortion, about divorce settlements, outside women’s refuges… they wear balaclava hoods... an unfortunate bunch of people… similar to the brown shirts… fascist groups of all sorts. take your pick... the sample is from a UK scientist marvelling at the Maralinga nuclear test site at Woomera in the 1950’s… Nick and I went to town layering for days analogue blips and blaps, cut up snippets of anything we could lay our hands on… there was a Prophet at Mangrove that we used quite a bit on this and Hotel Radio, Katie Noonan’s voice is used as an instrument… Sheila Chandra-ish, wanted a little piano sting a la nine inch nails song off closer to fade into the distance at the end… got it via the piano motif reminiscent of The Cure’s A Forest… the lyric about the live war coverage being superior to a delayed telecast is way too timely…
CANOPY
lugubrious hassellesque tropical swamp, a trek through the Baliem valley cross footbridges over ravines and thunderous rivers... slip and your dead... love my analogue Nord... layers of sounds from that red keyboard... was part of an instrumental cue called Insect Harmonics... would have made it on the record as an instrumental 'til I spoilt it and mumbled over the top... the word pictures work with the sound pictures... bilas for days
BLUE BLACK SKY
was always a duet... Rob Snarski could have sung it as well… Rob actually helped out a lot with the record… well I bounced some ideas off him… he helped me to not fuck with tender trap… orchestra written with Helen Mounfort from ‘My Brother Jack’… Ben Frost and I jiggled with the form one winters afternoon at woodend… his guitar work is great… a non musician’s lateral approach… as is Nick’s… lyric inspiration came from a painting on the wall at mary’s house…the boy at the piano isn't me… he’s in the painting so it ain't autobiographical… hopefully a song of hope to those on the fringes… a guy I went to school with, an outsider... non sporty, didn’t fit in… often bullied, teased, somewhat of an oddball, sensitive, I hope he turned-out better than they… those who became businessmen, stockbrokers, the blokes… amongst this war there is a mountain range I escape to… it provides answers in its own way… Dave Mason’s second verse is beautiful melancholy, emotionally charged… I remember the way he used to wander the stage with The Reels singing the slow version of Prefab Heart… "I don’t mind at all, I've got my telephone and television… my prefab heart just falls apart when you depart again…" the ascending semitone shift in the last chorus is to die for… gives it a beatlesesque flavour. would love to sing it on a TV film awards night with Dave and an orchestra wearing a suit with a carnation in my top pocket… dream on white boy…
WIRES
similar genesis to Safety Haven… had the chords for a while... bought a pump organ from an auction yard... used to belong to a church… pump with the feet... a big harmonium in some regards… there's five 8 minute takes of it... would make a concept record of its own!!!… great trumpet part… every record should have one song where the self indulgent play outs don't get edited off the record... this is the one for Hotel Radio... a wandering night time walk amongst the night lights and telegraph wires lyric... again had fun with the bilas... lumpy broken wurlitzer helps out the chords… the acoustic guitar is a sample off some 70s Spanish record... pitch shifted to create the chord progression… bilas and spoken word float amongst and in between the chords…
STUMBLE AWAY
the oldest of the songs, have been playing it at solo gigs for the past three years… the cake wanted it to go on the Curious album, but for some reason I promised it for myself… has been a closing number… live I've been playing it with the crunch loop that sits 'neath Anti-Chase Music which works really well... the lyric is the most linear of any on the record… the images are real events... the man with the card, the public celebration in the rain… feel a bit funny bout the “I don’t feel so good today”… sounds a bit whiney... not the intention… was on a Not Drowning demo as an up tempo groove song for Curious… our A&R person at Reprise questioned the reference to Australia day for an American audience which threw me a bit… the wurlitzer is chunky… the melodian was sitting by my side whilst I did the vocal take… and I just chucked it in for entertainment on the 7th vocal take to relieve the boredom… but it stayed… Phil's guitar is great I think… the middle section piano chords is almost a carbon copy of the instrumental Curious… ripping myself off again... had to be the last track on the record…
|
|
