Snowy premieres new single & it's everything
An in-depth interview and spotlight on new single "Everything Is Another Thing" and more from forthcoming album "Philharmonic"
Congratulations on releasing another album in 2024. "Philharmonic" which you have penned as a side-quest sounds like quite a different experience, having lost all the sketches of the album on your phone that you made in the US on a Qantas flight between LA and Melbourne and then re-imagining it after returning to Aus. It must have been pretty devastating to have lost all your work. How did you get the energy and patience to piece it all back together?
I came up with the idea of calling an album “Philharmonic” because I liked the sound of the word and because it’s translation “Loving Harmony” fit fine with a couple of songs I had already written, thematically. I also liked the ring of “Snowy Philharmonic” as a kind of stupid band name for something I had been toying with, a collaborative live band of as many different instruments and players a possible that could come and go as they pleased.
I thought on it a bunch while I was touring, thinking about what an album called Philharmonic could sound like, the extremes, and the potential irony of it. Having a vague enough concept where anything goes was enough to frame whatever sketches I could muster on the road: melodic ideas that I recorded and words that I jotted down. It was nice to be able to put them under one umbrella, something to look forward to when I got back home.
Most of these were saved in my phone that vanished mid-flight. Thankfully, I could fairly accurately remember the more memorable ideas, but for the most part I was just left with an clear impression of what I wanted to do and what I wanted to avoid in making a “next album”. As it goes, I was blessed with a lot of time to think and not at lot of time to tinker and record on the road.
I can’t say I had that much energy OR patience when I got back, but I did have a self-imposed deadline and JUST enough downtime to make it come to fruition.
I am interested in your brief acting pursuit in Sydney, which is where you pieced the album back together and recorded it in hotel rooms and house-sits. What was the acting your were involved in and what was it like to record in those locations?
The bit about me pursuing an acting career that I mention in the liner notes and press release is a little tongue in cheek but it is true that I was up in Sydney for a good while working in theatre. I was lucky enough to be a performer in a show called Autotune that had a short run at the Opera House. The theatre company - re:group - make the best contemporary theatre in the country. It’s next level; accessible, thoughtful, clever, fun and multilayered. It’s not really my world, and the quality of their output is way above my pay-grade as an artist, but I feel a real affinity with the way that they develop their work. They’re my friends too. I was lucky enough to get to compose a lot of the music, help develop the show and perform it live. It meant that I also had a scene or two where I was acting. I’m hooked. With any luck this show will get some more runs about the country so keep an eye out for it and any of the other amazing re:group shows.
I wrote and recorded large parts of the Philharmonic album between rehearsals and performances: in my car, in hotel rooms between cities and in the apartment where I was cat/house-sitting.
Tell us about the instrumentation on the album, are these your instruments or borrowed ones from the house-sits you stayed at?
It’s a bit of both really. I loaded up my car with whatever percussion and acoustic instruments I could plus a microphone. If I came across a piano or a guitar in my travels then I’d sit down with it, pull out my phone and record a bit of it. I’d buy second hand CDs and sample bits that I liked. Record voice memos of incidental noise and ideas for vocal melodies and lyrics that I would upload and force into a structure. The recordings I made were samples that I moulded into working, not so much ideas to be re-written and recorded. There was a vague rule that every instrument be acoustic. Vague rules are good because they can be easily broken.
It’s worth noting that this album was made under a fairly extreme time constraint. I came up with the album title and concept, booked the launch tour and sent off the artwork to be made into CDs.
I had the release date before I had finished the album. This way I had to stay true to the initial concept in order to finish it. I didn’t afford myself the luxury of writing and re-writing. It was about creating a problem, a jumble, and finding a way out the other side. I finished the record a week ago.
There is a real calmness to this album, with mediative and reflective vibes which might be to do with so much of it being acoustic by the sounds of it. Does this have anything to do with the how you recorded it? Is this calmness and album quality reflective of you as a person do you think?
In my solo and Snowy band records I have always skewed towards playing quietly, as I most enjoy doing live too. I remember that someone reviewed the last record and said that it sounded as though it was made in an attempt not to wake the people in the next room. That is sort of true, it was mostly recorded in my apartment and, truth be told, if I think that anyone can ever hear me recording or practicing then it defeats the purpose. In that situation I am always, without fail, distracted by the idea that it is no longer an insular thing, it becomes a performance if anyone else can hear. I record my own music, without an extra engineer, and for this music that’s the only way I would want to work.
When I’m recording on my own it’s on my laptop, it’s all digital, so the potential for dynamics is close to infinite. In that way I’m always interested in the unique sounds I can get out of instruments at an extremely low dynamic level. I think that it makes for interesting results if they’re turned right up loud or placed against other acoustic sounds that make for unrealistic arrangements. Situations that wouldn’t really function in real life; a full volume drum kit played accompanying an acoustic guitar where the sound of a finger on a string is as loud as the actual note being played, someone whispering alongside a recording of a plane taking off... Etc.
I’ve also learnt slowly and painfully over time that my voice doesn’t sound convincing if I try to push it too much, I like the music to work in conjunction with where my voice naturally goes. The calmness is definitely reflective of my self-consciousness as much as a vibe I’m trying to convey! I would love to write and sing heavier music to be quite honest.
I Can't See You Anymore is a beautiful way to enter the album with two minutes of a pure breeze hitting your face as the lyrics glide along beginning with, ‘connected dots coloured by numbers'. Can you tell us what this song is about? You also finish the album with a different version of this song. Without spoiling it for listeners I appreciate the surprise element it gives as the album comes to end.
As much as I try to avoid any sort of songwriting trope of my own, I always seem to end up back at double-meaning, repeated chorus lines.
This sort of thing, not being able to see someone through a façade or through distance that’s grown between them over time, is what the song was originally ‘about’ I suppose. I do like that some people have interpreted it differently as: “I shouldn’t see you anymore”. That’s equally valid.
Seems fitting in that way that I’ve put the same song on the album twice.
I used to like listening to a CD for the first time as a teenager and at the end of an album the Disc-man would skip back and restart from Track 1 automatically. I’d find myself listening to the first track for the second time, thinking it was just the next in the album.
I’d always feel like: “Wow, I really like this one straight off the bat. It sounds instantly familiar...” Without realising that I’d actually already heard it 40 minutes ago.
I’ve been playing this song first and last at shows too. Sometimes people will notice but just as often they don’t. There’s something nice in instant familiarity. A nice bookend... if a cheap trick. The song is literally the same recording twice on the album (apart from one small twist)
Big Blind introduces the use of what sounds like auto-tune with your vocals. I must admit it was a surprise to me initially but the more I listened it started to make sense as another layer with a different quality, like a big chorus effect. It is a departure from your usual vocal sound, and it also apparent on other tracks on the album. What was the reasoning behind adding this effect to your vocals?
There are lots of happy accidents across the album. Recording things ‘incorrectly’, singing the wrong words or coughing during a take, background sounds. Analogue, real-life accidents. These sorts of things that (maybe superficially) give character and charm to recordings. It’s pretty common-place to associate lo-fi and vintage recording techniques as evocative and pleasing to our ears. The limitations of the past that we hear as timeless and authentic. I’ve begun to embrace, more and more, the limitations and artifacts and ‘faults’ of current technology as equally valuable. My recorded music is absolutely a digital medium, which I think becomes even more apparent when it begins as a recording of an acoustic instrument. As well as using auto-tune, absolutely everything is manipulated digitally to some degree. Everything, everywhere is these days. I’ve stopped trying to hide the edits and make a more transparent document of the process of recording.
I think that embracing the crapiness and limitations of the day is the only way. Otherwise, I myself, feel like I’d be making a poor attempt to emulate recordings of an earlier time or even worse, an especially poor attempt to emulate real life.
The auto-tune of the vocals on Big Blind is a pretty clean attempt at using the technique tastefully - inspired by the theatre show mentioned above (auto-tune - which uses the effect of it’s namesake literally and metaphorically) but also inspired by hearing it EVERYWHERE. It’s the signature sound of our time. Later on the album as things break apart a bit more I enjoyed pushing it further to its limits. It’s just another instrument to be played wrongly.
Buried Alive was recorded in your car. Tell us more about that? Was it a conceptual choice due to the lyrical content or more to do with the acoustics of being in a car?
I would say neither. In my own recordings I’m pretty rarely concerned with acoustics. If I have been in the past then that has come from a place of control as opposed to discovery. I’ve found that whenever I’ve tried to re-record an idea or song “properly” then I have almost always preferred the slapped-together, crappy demo that came before it. Most often I’ll actually end up using those original takes. In the case of this album, I particularly wanted to relinquish control about how anything was recorded. That way there is SOMETHING unexpected to bounce off or to push against. I find that invaluable in a solo recording, where there’s not the need for collaboration and compromise between real people in real-time. My favourite part of the record is the piano that I recorded with a mic accidentally facing the wrong way.
I recorded the vocals for Buried Alive in my car. I had one day left to finish the song before I needed to upload and release it. I wanted the privacy that I couldn’t get at home that day. So I drove to Greensborough and recorded it next to some park there.
Everything Is Another Thing is a driving upbeat track oozing with repetition in such a wonderful way. The piano and violin really stay with me. Is Chloe Sanger, the violinist on this track and more, the only other musician on this album ? Tell us how this collaboration came about?
Chloe and I essentially met and became friends through playing together in the band Good Morning, who we toured the US with in April / May. Chloe is an amazing musician and we recorded an album of her own music (McKimmie) in one day at the “studio” that we timeshare. My payment in return for the recording was that she would play violin on this record. To be completely honest, I had foolishly planned to learn violin and record parts myself. That was never really going to happen though.
Chloe came in one Sunday, I’m pretty sure she hadn’t slept, and improvised arrangements along to the whole thing. I think it took and hour and a half in total. It was very much in the spirit of the rest of the record. It was perfect. At one point her phone alarm went off and got recorded through auto-tune. Also a favourite moment of mine on the album.
Finally, who are your favourite local Melbourne bands at the moment or who would you like to see interviewed for Tempo?
McKimmie (album out early next year). The Great Divides (album out tomorrow - 15th November).
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You can grab a CD version with a signed photo and handwritten personal message or digitally via Bandcamp here
The album is out Friday November 15th (tomorrow!)