After recording all the songs for this album, I figured out what they all had in common: Faith, Hope, Love and Pain.
Deuteronomy 25:11-12
“If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.”
Wow—there’s faith, hope, love and pain all in one for you! And strong evidence to suggest Chuck Norris wrote the bible.
The album came with tasting notes– the stories behind the songs. These are repeated below on this page. You can listen to this album on SoundCloud and buy it on iTunes
My hope is my god
On a survival course I was once told: “3 weeks without food, 3 days without water, 3 minutes without air, and 3 seconds without hope.” Hope is powerful—“You give a man hope, and he’s yours for good.”
Jesus apparently made a blind man see once. He gave him hope but then the blind man saw him nailed to a tree. I wonder what happened to the blind man’s hope when he saw that? Belief in God isn’t about faith—it’s about hope. Hope that there’s something after and that it’s not going to be a burning pit for eternity. It’s hope that the faith will come to something. But when your hope is gone—it’s gone for good.
I wrote this song initially as a seethingly slow 12-bar blues but when we recorded the scratch track it was just boring as all buggery. It just didn’t click so I went away, tried a few things, came up with a good turn (which was a bit like “Cocaine”) and picked up the pace. When we pulled it out at the next session Reuben came up with this kick-ass marching beat and he said we should extend the solo for some wailing harmonica. Shit yeh—I’m into that, and I added a guitar track that was just feedback for good measure. That was fun.
This song should be listened to very loudly. Definitely at full volume. And at the 2:41 mark it should be turned up even more. At that point I start banging out some ‘high A’s and Rachelle starts nailing some screaming backup vocals. Holy cow—it still gives me a shiver when she wails “You give a man his hope!”. Here was my diminutive singing teacher, sitting on a stool with the microphone in front of her, 6 months pregnant, having rushed through city traffic to get to the studio on time, effortlessly pulling those wailing lines out of nowhere. That was seriously impressive.
I’m in love with you tonight
This is a song for anyone who finds themselves in a bar looking across the room at someone else wondering what to say and what the other person is thinking. The word for that in case you ever need it is mamihlapinatapei. (“The wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start.”) Best word ever.
It’s a bit of a backwards song because the verse is bigger than the chorus—but that’s sort of like the bravado and confidence that turns into caution, shyness and a touch of nerves when the big moment comes.
In the first version I had, the lyrics were a bit too twee. When Andy Clarke heard it he said—“I hate to say it Buins, but this song needs to be dirtier. Like, you know—‘I want to take you home right now baby!’” (or words to that effect). Sean (unsurprisingly) concurred.
So the middle eight came out along with a few other different lines. It’s still very much a love song—but with just a touch of dirt.
And if you listen carefully, at the end you’ll hear some banjo, which was Sean’s suggestion, and my second best banjo solo ever I suspect. It’s a nice little serenade with the banjo in the background as that little bit of love finally starts.
So for anyone having a mamihlapinatapei moment, here are the words for you: “I’m in love with you tonight…is that alright?”
Even though Paul Kelly (after “To her door”)
This song was the last song I finished writing and recording. Throughout the recording process it was always on the backburner but Sean kept telling me every other session “Dude—you’ve really gotta finish that song!”.
A couple of years ago I picked up this big sweet rhythmic J200 guitar and the chord progression for the intro and verse came out with the line “please—bear with me for a while”. Then about a month later another progression came that seemed to work as a chorus.
Then a few months on I was playing what I had with Andrew Valentine and between us we came up with the line: “Even though Paul Kelly had you walking out the door, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you no more”. Brilliant.
We knew straight away that it was just one of those killer lines.
So we both went away to write our own songs with that line and the rough chords. Andrew realised that the line was all the more powerful because it would bring in all the memories and stories people had of the Paul Kelly song “To her door” and so he wrote a song with the line as the opening lyric to bring everyone in, and then tell his story.
I wanted to use the line at the end of the song though. I wanted to tell a story first, and then when people heard the line at the end it would almost be like the punch line of a joke—something that would bring it all home.
It sat and stewed with me for a while—about a year. I couldn’t find the story. Then I realised my story needed to fit with the story in “To her door”. It had to be a story inside that story.
So I read the lyrics of “To her door” and tried to get inside the heads of the couple that Paul Kelly had created. I imagined them to be a normal couple. Just like everyone. They didn’t seem overly romantic or emotional. Just a couple who’d hit hard times. And I realised that although they didn’t speak of loving each other—there was still a strong sense of them being a couple, and a family, belonging together, that was worth the struggles along the way.
“Then he wrote a letter” and it all changed. Something in it made her think he sounded better so she “sent him up the fare”. That must have been humbling—after a year in alcohol detox to have to ask for a bus fare to come back. And when he came back he didn’t know what would be next. That would have been hard. Really hard…and incredibly gracious on her part.
This song is what I’d imagined that letter to be.
Paul Kelly has described writing songs like problem solving—and I had a few to solve here. I wanted to use that killer line as a chorus, but I only wanted to use it once and it had to be at the end of the song. That’s not normal. And I needed it to stand out. Andrew had earlier shown me a chord progression that was a bit country and would take the song from the key of D to A. I realised that would be the way to solve having a one time chorus at the end that stood out, as well as creating a bit of a middle-eight (that all good songs need). So the progression for the chorus at the end is the same as the progression for a sort of “false chorus” earlier in the song but it’s in a different key and so it’s a chorus but at the same time isn’t. Problem solved…collaboration is king.
This song wouldn’t have happened without my good friend Andrew and without Sean pushing me to finish something that he saw potential in. And it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t sent him up the fare.
Beau came in and did the piano without blinking. Holy cow—Sean and me were listening in the control room and were blown away. Sean was doing 1—arm push-ups. We wanted something that was reminiscent of the piano in To Her Door and Beau mixed that with a bit of Bruce Hornsby. Reuben added his harmonica—simple but super sweet lines.
Andy Clarke who is my oldest friend played the bass on this one and I did the guitar track at the same time. We tried doing it separately but it didn’t work so we did it together—it needed that little bit of musical chemistry that comes only from playing with the oldest of friends.
Andy also suggested somehow using the phrase “To her door” somewhere. I’m a bit of sucker for adding voiceovers and so I added a couple of spoken lines at the end. I like how those lines make the story very personal and they come at a time in the song where they sort out the ambiguity of the lyrics. The guy is coming home, he knows they might be through and he can’t take anything for granted, but he’s dry now and he’s ready to start again.
They were hard lines to sing— it was a pretty emotional song to do because it’s a story I think we can all relate to somehow.
And neither Andrew nor I can still work out who came up with that killer line.
She Dances
I’ve got three daughters and they all dance. One day I was in the lounge room playing guitar and my youngest daughter came out of her room dancing without realising I was watching. There was no music to be heard—but there was music in her heart and she was dancing like an angel, waltzing like a queen, floating by like a butterfly.
When we started recording, I was in a singing lesson with Rachelle working on this song and we were tossing up ideas about what to add to the vocals. I think it was Rachelle who said to get my daughters to sing something and so the girls came to the studio with Rachelle as vocal coach to April and Eloise. At the end—they just started laughing and Sean grabbed it. I couldn’t convince Lily to sing, but I’ve seen her dance just like her sisters and she’s every bit as beautiful too.
When it rains
It was raining in New York and I was crossing “Church Street, between White and Walker” in Tribeca. I was thinking about those great country and western lyrics with those funny juxtapositions—“You got the gold mine, I got the shaft”, “If the phone ain’t ringing, you’ll know it’s me”. That kind of thing. Cowboys are funny. “It rained all day when my luck dried up” popped out of nowhere.
The lyric sat there for a while until I was back in Australia and with a lot of things changing on a rainy day I came up with the rest of the lyrics, the tune, and a song about the happiness of hard times and change.
I recorded it in Miami on an earlier album but it was one of those songs that could be played in any number of ways and so I wanted to hand it over to Sean and Reuben to see where they’d take it.
Reuben was hearing a JJ Cale groove—something like a cheap drum machine. Sean was hearing “Riders on the Storm”. I was hearing a long solo at the end like a Dire Straits song. It all came together really sweetly. Reuben did a drum machine impersonation even better than the real thing, Andrew laid down some schmoooooth bass and Beau pulled out some great lines on the keyboard. No need for that big guitar solo I had in mind. Sean somehow made my voice sound far better than it is and apparently it sounds really “wet”. Nice.
To me it’s the kind of song you can put on when you’re on a long road trip. Pass the bucket bong to the passengers, wind down the windows, start driving and fade to end.
And if you can catch it— at the 4:33 mark there’s my tribute to Mark Knopfler doing the “twiddly bit” from Sultans of Swing.
My boy
I’ve known too many mothers and fathers who have lost their sons or daughters late into their pregnancies or very soon after. I can’t imagine the pain. I was on a road trip on my motorbike and had stopped at Milthorpe when I heard that another friend had lost their son and that night this song came out.
When we were recording it, I told everyone the story and we talked about the pain of such losses. Maybe because of this, everyone brought something very special to this song.
Reuben, who normally beats the living daylights out of his kit, played the kit with his hands instead. Beau touched the piano like he was hardly playing it at all. Rachelle brought in the mothers voice that speaks of the reassurance that’s unique to all our mothers. Andy played some of the simplest, sweetest bass lines that pulled everything together and Kathy in the mastering created space in the song to be like a heartbeat that’s strong and ever present but still so gentle.
Sean suggested some cello and brought in Amelia. My daughters were in the control room when Amelia played and, listening to her play, they were awestruck. When Amelia finished, April said: “She just made it glow dad.”
This song is for William.
If I could
This is a sad song that came from the heart too easily.
Originally the song was just for acoustic guitar but Sean suggested using piano. He laid down a rough idea of what he had in mind and that’s what we ended up using. I love it—it has such a strength and gravitas to it. He also suggested adding an instrumental in the middle—he had a couple of ideas that I ran with and we came up with something we both liked.
James Barton very early on, when he heard me sing it, came up with the simplest of changes to the lyrics—taking out some phrases that were repeated to give the rest of the lines more space. That was a masterstroke.
At one stage though we had some near disco bass, really fantastic piano and much more guitar—all great musically. But it wasn’t working. In the recording process I think we’d become lost. We’d been adding too much too fast and after a while we had to go back to the drawing board and rediscover the original song. We’d forgotten where the song had come from and so we threw away a lot of what we’d done to come up with the final track.
It’s hard to realise sometimes your best isn’t good enough.
God made the devil
I wrote the music of this song when I was in London one time—originally a 12-bar blues instrumental with a different turn—I called it “London” and recorded it on my first album. But I’d been wanting to get some words for a while and then a couple of years later I was listening to it in the car when the phrase “god made the devil” came out and the other lines followed a few minutes later.
At the beginning of the recording process, I played 15 or 20 songs to Sean—mostly country/folky stuff. Then I got into the control room and loosened up with a version of “After Midnight” by JJ Cale and some raucous guitar. Sean said—“Dude! We need more of that! That other stuff is ok but that’s where you come alive!”. Around the same time Andy Clarke had said the same thing—“Your songs are ok and other people sing much better than you, but playing lead guitar is your thing— you need to get that out more often!”.
And so it came to pass…..
This is a song about the good and the bad. You can’t have one without the other and the stories in Genesis have both. God made Adam and watched him die. God sent the floodwaters and watched everyone else die. Nice touch with the rainbow though. He gave angels’ wings and the devil his fire. Makes you wonder why, right?
There’s one note in the lead guitar at 3:22 that is perhaps my favourite guitar lick on the album. And there’s this bit shortly after at 3:38 where I manage to do a scream up from an A below middle C to an F# a couple of octaves higher. I love that bit—it sounds like the pixies squealing.
I was never quite sure how to sing it and then Sean came up with the idea of a low spoken part paired with another voice over the top. I didn’t quite know what he meant but he said to go with it and then he mixed it so that the two voices kind of crossover each other during the song. He’s a genius. Second only to Chuck Norris. And as far as who made Chuck Norris? No one. Chuck Norris is a self-made man dude.
Hell it’s hot down here (and it’s goddam crowded tonight)
I was at a songwriters competition awards night with Karen a while ago because I’d entered a song that was selected as a finalist. I didn’t expect to win but there was free booze and I guess I did think there was a remote possibility…
We sat up the back and they were running through all the categories—jazz, rock, blues, country (“Ha—I could do good country song” I thought), funk, children’s, religious/spiritual (“And I could do a religious song too—I went to church for years!”)
Well, with the combination of those thoughts and all that free beer I came up with the line “Hell it’s hot down here” and Karen then piped up with “And it’s (goddam) crowded tonight”.
Half an hour later we were in the Lord Wolseley Hotel in Ultimo and the lyrics came out in 5 minutes—memorialised on the modern day equivalent of the coaster… the iPhone. (I’m going to invent an app called the “iCoaster” just for musicians who write songs at the pub).
Beau did some fantastic church organ work and Rachelle put in some 1950’s style “ooo-sha-la-la-la” backups. Then a bit of a Brian May styled guitar solo, walking bass from Andrew, Reuben’s skipping drum beat, a joke about the pope and a big Elvis finish—honestly what else does a song need? Some people might think this song is heretical but I think it’s closer to the truth than they realise.
Lullaby
This is a special little tune. It’s an arrangement of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” that I play for my daughters. It’s played on this fantastic Cordoba flamenco style guitar that was a present to me from some dear friends at work.
I wanted to finish the album with something sweet and gentle because that’s part of me too and when I play this to my girls—that’s what I want to give to them.
Thanks
Many thanks to everyone who has been a part of this project—you have all contributed something very special and unique. It’s been fantastic working with you.
The corporate world talks about “playing like a team” ad infinitum—one day they might wake up, smell the roses, get off the Kool-Aid and realise they should be “playing like musicians” instead.
Thank-you to you all for your creativity, inspiration, ideas, professionalism, musicianship and, above all, your heartfelt expression in bringing these songs to life.
My old violin teacher always used to say to me: “Michael, you have got to play with more feeling!”. How very true.