Go back to where you began.
I’ve been conducting an experiment. It began as a conversation with an old friend of mine, Jonathan Lee, who has been playing guitar in the immensely popular Cut Off Your Hands, but is a maestro songwriter in his own right.
He reasoned that perhaps the most organic thing for any songwriter to do is search their roots for systems and processes, style and character, abandoned along the way.
Because music is inherently cyclic, the genres of our teenage years are right now enjoying a revival and a reinvention. Where Jonathan planned to recapture the earnest emotive potential of Jeff Buckley, I was left to ponder what a modern day Smashing Pumpkins would entail.
The revelation couldn’t have been timed better. I’ve been curious to find a new angle on some songs I once played with my band Hold Dear. Several months back I re-labelled the band Heartspells, but what I didn’t have a solution for at the time was how the new incarnation would present itself musically.
I wasn’t interested in trying to repeat the formula that had worked to ensure Hold Dear’s hurried assent to moderate local indie success. The limitations of that arrangement had already made themselves clear. Unless I found a partner who was stylistically and technically identical to myself (does this ever happen?) the skillset of the less-experienced member would dictate those possibilities. When you’re a two-piece, there’s no wall of sound to hide behind.
So I began to imagine a larger band, a 5-piece, that retained what was essential to the Hold Dear dynamic: a boy and a girl chirping naive love songs at one another from across the stage, the hopelessness of young love, the guttural pain of geographical distance, supported by brutally simplistic chord structures and easy hooks.
By preserving those key ingredients, I knew I was free to play with the form in every other way, and given the conversation I had just had with Jonathan, I felt compelled to at least test our new theory.
When I was 16 I remember running from the bus stop to my computer. I had found a way of jacking my guitar straight into the sound card on my PC and was using a Zoom 505 pedal for my effects. The drums were midi loops, the vocals were recorded in the same way as the guitar, with a cheap knock-off of an SM58 microphone processed (for some awful reason) through the 505 unit.
I would sit on the bus home from school dreaming up ideas I could apply to a recording session that night. Sometimes they’d work, sometimes they’d fall flat. Either way, my songs generally began as a guitar part played over an extended drum loop. When something good emerged, I would snip that section and paste it four times. Then I’d build a chorus section in the same way. Copy, paste, copy, paste. I’d layer up infinite guitar parts until I was happy with the mood, play some bass, experiment with some vocal melodies from which lyrics would usually emerge, and I’d jot them down and rework them as I kept pushing forward at pace. My Mother would go to bed in the next room at 10pm, and with a break for dinner, I only ever had four hours to complete a song. I’d never have parts prepared before the recording process began, simply because I leaned so heavily on this process to facilitate the songwriting.
I was really happy with the recordings at the time. Some of them I still consider to be great songs, if rotten production. I’d burn them onto a disc and listen to them in the same CD player I would use to play my favourite albums. In that way I was struck by the immediacy of music production.
It was that immediacy that led me to fall in love with lo-fi as a recording option, and later, as an aesthetic. I felt liberated by the idea that what I was aiming for was so different from what professional recording artists were trying to achieve that my songs defied critique. I didn’t care if people thought my recordings sounded like shit, because that’s how I intended them to sound.
In time I would discover the early Flying Nun bands, local rogue Darcy Clay, and artists like The Mountain Goats and Neutral Milk Hotel, whose unrefined aesthetics I could appreciate. As I immersed myself in each artist’s back catalogue I noticed production values that would improve with every release. Hearing The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely in 2006 was the first time I called into question my attachment to the DIY lo-fi production process. If John Darnielle (who famously recorded his early albums to cassette using only a boombox with his television still going in the background) was prepared to use a professional recording studio, so was I.
In June this year, when it came time to write new songs for Heartspells, I wasn’t really sure how to go about it. Writing for a 5-piece band wasn’t something I’d done in a long time. I decided to try an acoustic guitar and a laptop microphone, layering up the guitar parts over a simple Garageband drum loop, applying in-software effects to the raw guitar, dropping a guitar part down an octave to roughly mimic a bass, adding four vocal parts to loosely plan the harmonic structure of the song.
The process came back very naturally, and rather stunningly so did the genres of my youth. The first song I wrote echoed the Headless Chickens and My Bloody Valentine, or maybe New Order. The second song began with a smooth Santana-like groove, which then swerved violently into Smashing Pumpkins territory. Of course, they’d be overlaid with any number of modern style references. That is the whole challenge of songwriting, after all: hide your sources.
I was astonished to see how quickly and freely I was able to break free of the genres that I’d associated with my own songwriting these past years. The demos are rough as guts, but they represent something really exciting to me. Given the opportunity to collaborate with other musicians and flesh these ideas out into real songs, and then get into a real recording studio and lay down the tracks with real gear, I’ll have an end product I never could have arrived at in the way I’ve become used to - sitting down with a pen and a pad in the vague hope that an entire song will arrive at once.
