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AUGUST 2015 JB Hi-Fi
BRIGHT GREY
The Phoenix Foundation’s Luke Buda explains to John Ferguson why theWellington
outfit’s new LP Give Up Your Dreams is actually an uplifting album.
W hen a band has been together for more
than 15 years – more, in the case of
The Phoenix Foundation, if you count
their high school beginnings – it’s not surprising
that for their sixth studio album Give Up Your
Dreams, lead songwriters Samuel Flynn Scott
and Luke Buda have been looking back and
doing a bit of soul-searching.
With songs that reflect on the ageing process
and whether it is even worth continuing being
in a band, you could be forgiven for thinking that
their new album might be a bit of a downer. But
while it might touch on some gloomier themes,
Buda maintains Give Up Your Dreams is still an
uplifting affair: “It’s party music but it’s pretty
depressing,” he quips, explaining its partly
because the band adopted a more collaborative
approach on this record.
“It was basically about making something
that was more immediately exciting, as opposed
to a slow burner,” he tells STACK on the phone
from Wellington. “All the reviews of Fandango
were like, ‘You’ve got to stick with this one,
it starts opening up after the 27th listen.' So
hopefully this will grab the listener from the get
go. It is definitely more rhythmically exciting
than we have been in the past.”
For Buda, that meant making some changes
to his songwriting process. Usually he writes
mainly on acoustic guitar, developing a song
from a chord and melody point of view.
However with his contributions to Give Up Your
Dreams, he often started from just a scrap of
rhythm and built the song up from there, before
getting further input from the rest of the band.
“The writing on this album ended up being
pretty collaborative,” he says. “With Mountain,
I had the rhythm, but the whole middle section
was kind of a band thing. With Bob, Lennon,
John, Dylan all I had [was the rhythm] and
the two chords and the rest we just jammed
out. And again, with Sunbed, I just had a bit of
the groove and a couple of a little bits of the
bassline when I brought it in. One of the aims
of the record was to make the band more of a
focus.”
Although still unmistakably a Phoenix
Foundation album – as always, it boasts
some gorgeous slices of pop, like the wistful
jangle of Prawn and the electro shimmer of
Celestial Bodies – the rhythmic focus gives it
something of a trippy, cosmic vibe; proggy but
in a good way. Buda reckons that it’s a pretty
fair assessment, although the band is always
conscious that things should never get too
self-indulgent.
“I am a muso and I don’t mind ‘muso-
ey’ music,” he admits. “But one of the
good things of having six people in the band
is that we’re always on the lookout to make
sure it hasn’t gone too far. If it gets too wanky
someone in the band, will say ‘Yuk, that sounds
horrible!'”
Lyrically, though, the new album explores
some darker places. For Buda, the most
personal song on the album is probably Jason,
which faces up to the fact that neither he nor his
friends are getting any younger.
“When we were touring Fandango, Sam had
a major slipped disc problem and I had never
really seen anyone in so much pain before.
When we did the gigs, he played them sitting
down. Then six months after he came right, my
partner went down with the exact same thing
and she was in chronic pain for something like
three months. It was just a bit of a time of going
‘Oh my God, we’re getting older – if anything
f**ks up in your body, you’re f***ed!”
Similarly, Scott’s title track offers a funny, if
somewhat mordant, take on the challenges of
pursuing a musical career. So has Buda ever
thought about chucking it all in?
“Give Up Your Dreams is actually a pretty
honest song from Sam, even though it is
completely tongue-in-cheek,” he muses. “It’s
kind of like, ‘We are approaching 40 and we
have no financial security whatsoever in an
increasingly nasty, right-wing, capitalistic world’.
“But in terms of throwing it in, I don’t really
know what else I could do. I think we’ve been
through our ‘personal differences’
time and those days are behind
us. We’re old enough now
not to let things be taken too
personally – most of the time
we all get along fine.”
One of the good things of having
six people in the band is that
we’re always on the lookout to
make sure it hasn’t gone too far.