STACK #130 Aug 2016

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with TIM CARROLL OF HOLY HOLY

After last year’s The Pacific EP , how did you approach putting this new material together? Once we’d signed with Wonderlick – they feel like a family business: they’re small and they don’t have a heap of artists on their rosters so they put a lot of care and attention into everyone – we could’ve released an album but they said ‘We think you should put together an EP and then do a bunch of touring and continue to write and record, and then we’ll do the record a bit later.’ So that was how it ended up coming together. We chose some songs for the EP, put that out and then did I don’t know how many tours; five or six tours, we were on the road a lot. That was great; tt was really good for the band to get comfortable together on stage and work out what did and didn’t work. We also wrote a bunch of songs during that [including] History, You Cannot Call For Love, Outside Of The Heart Of It and Holy Gin . You and Oscar live in different cities – you’re in Brisbane and he’s in Melbourne. How does jamming work? Organising rehearsal studio [time] is... really important. When you’re going back and forth and you’re all separate there’s no capacity for the band to work together; the other thing that happens is somebody will do something as a joke, like a solo or a drum part, and then it ends up being something awesome. How do you lasso writing inspiration when it comes, whether it be on tour or in the studio? Song writing to me is very hard to control. It’s difficult to be like, okay, I’m now going to sit down and write. It’s more the case that, I guess it’s cliché but inspirational, come what else. I’ll be in a certain mood and feel like playing and then things will happen. So, you have to be more responsive to when things are happening. But, we do do certain things. Often before a tour we’ll rendezvous in a city and get a studio for two days and just go down and get some cheap beers for two days before we hit the road. So, because we live in different places we have to make certain arrangements.

(L-R) Oscar Dawson andTim Carroll

How did you, Oscar and the touring band get along during the recent European tour?There’s such a cute snap of all you guys on Instagram. We got along great. We had a lot of fun. It’s a really good band tour and it’s a good bunch of people. Interesting conversations about interesting music, film and politics: the van journeys are pretty good. Tour life is kind of funny: it is harrowing at times ‘cause it’s late nights and early mornings and long drives and so on. But it’s also in some ways like a holiday, because you’re just sitting in the van for six hours and reading or talking or listening to music and then getting to a venue and having a few beers and playing music. So it can be really nice. And adding into that the European landscape – I’ve travelled around Europe a bit but I had never been to Amsterdam, Belgium or Cologne. which was interesting and fun, and a bit more poignant because a lot of the other shows we did we were on a festival or on a showcase or something, whereas this was our show; and it was our first show outside of [Australia] that we were headlining. It was a really nice venue in London and the place was packed and there was a real excitement and buzz in the air, and we got to play a bit longer, for an hour. That was definitely exciting ‘cause I wasn’t sure if we were going to get there and there be no one there. Amsterdam was really nice. They really know Which was your favourite part? We did a headline show in London

how to look after artists over there and it was cool to just see some of the other bands, and the different styles of music that were getting some attention in that scene. We played Manchester, Nottingham, Bristol. Those shows were underground little cabin venues of maybe 150 capacity. But sometimes those small rooms really work, and they were all packed and really jovial as well. The new album gives us Fleetwood Mac vibes, particularly tracks like Outside Of The Heart Of It .The word “nostalgic” is used a lot around you, too.What does that word mean to you? A lot of the equipment and the way we are record is kind of a ‘70’s approach. We use two inch tape and Neumann microphones, but as the project developed we did decide at times to use Pro Tools. We grew up listening to music through our parents, and I guess turned around in our 20s and realised that we loved [those bands]. I used to work at the Troubadour and Black Bear Lodge in Brisbane, and DJs would be in there playing those hits on vinyl and stuff, so that is a big part of what we were influenced by. Neil Young is a big influence, but there’s also a set of things that influence [us] in the more contemporary world, like Here We Go Magic, Lower Dens, Band of Horses and Father John Misty. Even Sharon Van Etten, and things like that. So there’s times when the nostalgia is there but there’s times when we want to push into contemporary song writing as well.

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