Whisper it softly, but Jack Ladder has made the album of his career. Andrew P Street pins down the man (real name Tim Rogers) to find out what’s brought him to Hurtsville
You’ve jumped from style to style quite dramatically across styles from record to record.
I take so long between the records; [Hurtsville] wasn’t supposed to take this long but I don’t really have a band. I’ve had musicians that you work with but its not like I have four people that get together that each bring their own thing to my songs.
The first album, Not Worth Waiting For [2007], was pretty much an alt.folk disc…
When I did my first record I was pretty young and I just generally work with the things that are around me and things that come into my past, things to collide and they make sense and you just sort of run with it. And I think the last record I did [Love is Gone, 2008] was a really strong reaction against what I’d been working on and I think that’s something that was: people come to their own conclusions about the visuals and what’s happening and suddenly I was some rock’n’roller and Teddy Boy 50s sort of rock and roll which wasn’t all really what it was about.
So Love is Gone wasn’t an attempt to go rock in some way?
No, I’m not trying to be retro or go for these sort of stylistic sort of things. You know, like when you see these people that try to say they’re soul singers and they just do it down to a tee: they copy the fashion and the hairstyles and people buy into this vision of retro because it’s an easy sell. People like nostalgia, it’s a proven thing. So it wasn’t like I was actually trying to be that.
So what was it about?
I was thinking about how very modern, forward-thinking songwriters like Bill Callaghan [Smog] and those sort of people would make something along those lines. It wasn’t necessarily a success, but that is what was going through my mind: I wasn’t just thinking ‘I want to be Elvis!’ or something.
And then when it came time to tour, what happened?
I broke my arm really badly so I couldn’t really play guitar. So we wanted to get another person playing because we were playing like a power trio and the record had piano and horns and stuff all over it so by chance Kirin Callinan [ex-Mercy Arms] was opening a show for me and I was like ‘that guy can play guitar, he makes a big sound and he can sort of do the piano and the horn arrangements’ and so I asked him to play.
How did that change your music?
He doesn’t play guitar in any sort of traditional sense. To play some sort of 12 bar blues wasn’t going to work with him and I wasn’t interested in doing that anyway so I was like ‘let’s just reinvent this and do it how we would all do it’ and it became much more of a collaborative band thing anyway. And that kind of freaked people out: sometimes just removed any sense of melody from it and so that kind put me in a hole.
Did that experimentation lead to the more electronic aspects of Hurtsville?
We were on tour and I started listening to lots of sort of primitive, early electronica: Cabaret Voltaire and Suicide and stuff. I really wanted to get a drum machine, something very old and that had a lot of limitations, and that I could work with and we found one on tour and I just started working with it. So then it’s just a series of tours and these constant changes.
Such as?
The musicians I work with are not always available: Laurence [Pike] plays in PVT, and he was on tour when we got asked to do this Wolfmother thing [2009 tour], and I was like ‘Kieran and I can just do it as a duo with the drum machine!’ and that continued to upset and confuse people.
Well, you do have a distinct style.
I have this range that’s pretty limited in that I use pretty simple musical ideas, but it’s just that I was much more open to experiment with sound again. This record I wasn’t fighting anything: I wasn’t going ‘I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do that.’ I want to use everything that’s within my realm that I can use to make the thing I want to make. So we ended up spending a lot of time making sounds and it came out pretty good.
So was the album easier to make than the last one?
No. The record was really, really hard to make and it took a long time. We recorded it in Yass, in this big mansion. We were in there for a month – it was supposed to take two weeks – and then we were like ‘we’ll finish it and mix it down here and that’ll take a month’ but by the end of it I wasn’t particularly happy with the way things had gone.
Ah.
I tried to re-record it all live, in a similar way that I did the previous record, and that didn’t work. So I went back and just started working on the original recording sessions and they didn’t really need that much tweaking to work.
So you just needed some perspective?
Maybe. And you know, because we spent longer than two weeks making the record there’s a lot more to get your head around and enjoy playing live.
The songs do sound like they’d be fun to play live.
That’s the thing that I’m most proud about it. Although there are similar kind of ideas and structures and melodies to the previous record, I spent a lot more time and there has been a lot more scope in them for performance. I think the tempos are much better now, and I think that suffered wit the last record. I tried to speed it up and put it in some sort of regular rock tempo, and I think with this one we spent a lot of time just getting the actual feel of the songs right. That’s such a huge part of what it is because it’s all written to tempo more so than melody.
Newsletter
RSS feed
Twitter
Facebook
Google+
Foursquare
iPhone App
Other Time Out cities
Magazine subscription
Print
Email
