A short tale of how we rambled our way into the making of our self-produced upcoming debut album.
by Dann
Through early 2024 we together wrote and recorded demos for an LP, which we felt would be called The Sky is Always Bluer. We really loved the songs and still believe in the album, but demos can sometimes be very rough, as often you are just trying to get the ideas down. A song might still be coming to you, have scratch lyrics, or bad noise or levels. So when we had finally narrowed down to the twelve songs for this album we were then waiting for a good time to devote a couple of intense weeks to recording it, likely after Nick finished his last year of high school.
But while we were waiting for that time to come, new songs kept arriving. Nick wrote around 10 songs and I wrote a couple that we now loosely call the Orange Album, just as a way to distinguish it from the “Blue” of the “actual album” we were “meant to be working on”. These new songs had a different feel, more quirky, more acoustic and folksy, more intimate, less anthemic than many of the songs we wrote for “Blue”. We thought, oh, did we just write a second album? Or are these just for us?
Then, in July or August, when I was visiting Seattle, Nick got inspired again and wrote another big batch of songs, these just him and a guitar which he’d been learning. He sent them to me as he had the ideas, and I found these song ideas were different again, but all of a kind. They felt very summery, for example A Coconut Song hit me like a cool self aware blend of a laconic indie groove and calypso inspirations. Strangely it was actually cold in Australia at the time, but it was HOT in Seattle, unusually hot apparently, and it didn’t rain the entire two weeks we were there. So I walked around every day, exploring the leafy parks and streets of Seattle, past Kurt Cobain’s old house, through the Arboretum, along the edges of Lake Washington, one eye always on Mt. Rainier, listening to these little demos on my phone as Nick continued to send them over. I started imagining them becoming this really vibey slightly trippy summer indie rock album.
We were excited about the songs and talked about recording an EP as fast as we could, slipping it in before our Sky album, just something quick and dirty, calling it Until Next Tuesday, one of the songs and the first day of each week that Nick would be with me when I was living in Australia. So while in Seattle I whipped up some cover art, suitably lo-fi and irreverent for this imaginary album. But after I returned to Australia, Nick was understandably busy with school as I was with work, so we continued to bide our time.
As part of Nick’s school projects we recorded an early version of a song from this “summery” batch of songs, a song called Early Bird (that is on our upcoming album). As school finished up, we finally scoped out some time to record! It looked like early December would be the only window of time that worked. I’d be moving to the USA more permanently at the end of the year, and Nick was set for college, so we wouldn’t be together again for a little while. And so it became really important to have that time together for personal reasons, and to finally get these songs down. But which ones?!
Oh, and then Nick wrote a handful more great songs about a week before we started to record…
It was getting deep into the Australian summer and what made the call for us was that our inspiration went towards songs that we simply felt like playing and working on in the moment. We didn’t really have a choice, it was “Okay, we have two weeks, we need to basically do a song a day, which are most exciting right now? Which feel right together? What is this album?”
Over those two weeks some of the Until Next Tuesday songs grew into full songs, with new parts written. Added to those were three of those newest newest songs, moodier songs, People in the Room, Snakeskin, and Would-be Killer, written only days before we started recording, provided another texture to the breezier tracks to deepen the mood. Barefoot Bruise grew out of three song ideas from Until Next Tuesday, capped with a new chorus. Surprisingly one of the very first songs Nick wrote a year or more before, which we had left off “The Sky is Always Bluer” as it didn’t seem to fit, ended up fitting really well on this album, though it took on a completely new lyric inspired by those days recording. None of the “Blue” or “Orange” songs made it on this album, not because we don’t think they are all good, and some great, but they just didn’t fit.
So… in the end it was fine, we recorded this first album we call Barefoot. It’s called that partly because of the summery vibes, and because somehow so many of the songs seem to be about themes of growth, trying things out, treading lightly, touching grass etc. Its not an all light album throughout, there are a few dark, challenging, and mysterious patches, but it has a definite grin and warmth to it.
I’m glad we did just go with the inspiration of the moment last December in that sweltering Frankston back room, rather than try to get back into the cooler post-modern mood of many of the Sky songs (as cool as I think they are). We could have also just opted to record some demos and hoped and waited for someone else to come along to produce a more professional sounding album with us, but we really just didn’t want to sit on these songs forever, as we have more we want to move on to, plus we wanted to make an album with a complete vision, that’s what is fun for us. So the whole 2-week Barefoot recording session just flowed, the only issue ever being with glitchy equipment, and how hot the room got! I remember recording on the last few days we’d had little sleep and had sweat pouring off our brows, the only time I felt us flagging, but we just rode that out, had fun, and put down what was flowing into the room from the mysterious place music comes from. Then Nick went straight to the beach, and I think I might have just slept.
And since then he has sent me about 20 new song ideas, almost all of which I can imagine belonging on an album people would enjoy. Got no idea what we are going to do next, but there are plenty of options!