I think people more and more want an authentic or spontaneous live experience, but at the same time when you’re exploring sonic palettes, it’s hard to stretch out like that.

I still like to spend the time to set up a section—I don’t know what you call it, where the drums are triggering the keyboard, instruments totally interact with each other—synchronicity? There’s a few things called auto-prog that we do.

While we’re on the theme of improvisation and psychedelic, in the US, the Grateful Dead is the band most synonymous with that type of music. Is that something you ever came across in Perth when you were growing up, or was it something only when you came here to play festivals and the Deadheads showed up?

Yeah. We were into a lot of that kind of thing when were getting into that kind of way of life. I never listened to the Grateful Dead, but we were totally those pot-smoking dropouts, listening to Jefferson Airplane, The Doors. The Doors had a big impact on me when I was about 22-23—that idea of these stretches of time where the music is totally unpremeditated. But there always had to be the connection between members. Like, I hate seeing psych jamming where there’s no relationship. Like the drummer’s doing his own thing, the guitar—that’s shit. But when you can see that they’re feeding off each others’ dynamic, that’s when it’s like, “Ah, I’m in this moment.” Like the guitarist is kind of playing dark, soft like the drums and then builds up intensity, then it’s like this real moment. That does it for me.

When they’re having a conversation, really.

Exactly. I still love that, but as I say, we don’t get any time to do it.

Another band that you’ve collaborated with is the Flaming Lips. Can you talk a bit about that experience and what you took away from them? I think I read that they were a band that did directly influence you.

For sure, big influence, yeah. That was quite quick—literally off the back of me mixing Lonerism. They were coming in the next day to keep recording, and Wayne [Coyne] said, “Hey, we should get Kevin on the album.” So it was literally the morning of me leaving. Wayne was at the front, telling the taxi driver to wait, and I was doing this guitar part and doing vocals. I mean, that was a fantasy come true.

Can you talk about the recording process of the songs on the new album? How do they start, with you on guitar or you on drums, or is it more you on the computer, getting ideas together?

It can be anything—literally anything. I almost always have the idea in my head before I put my hands on an instrument. For me, I can’t write a song if I’m just sitting down with a guitar, saying “Let’s write a song.” It’s like me giving you a piece of paper and saying “draw a picture.” Like, what do you want me to draw a picture of? If the motivation for doing something is doing something—it’s gotta come from somewhere else, for me. So I’ll have ideas for songs backed up, or even on my Dictaphone or phone or computer or whatever, where I’ve just had the idea and quickly recorded a demo of it. One of the songs, “Yes I’m Changing,” I found the demo on my computer, and I have no idea when I recorded it or where I was. I’m pretty sure I was on tour, because it was a crappy demo where I just sort of padded out the chords on the computer keyboard and sang the vocal hook into the MacBook mic. So I had that, and I was like, oh, this is actually pretty good. I don’t know, maybe I was drunk, but I forgot about it. I guess I could check the date that it was created.

It’s kind of cool, though, like it comes from the ether, an idea you had that kind of floated back into consciousness.

Oh, for me, that’s the best way. That’s how I know that it’s organic,—that’s how I know that it comes from a deeper place, rather than just wanting to make a song to go on an album to sell to people. I mean, people do it and it’s okay. It doesn’t have that validation for me. Because If I did it out of wanting to do it, then I’ll feel like it’s a bit of a sellout, you know?

Do you foresee a time when you would act more like a producer for your own album and bring in either various session musicians or live musicians?

I don’t know, I guess so. Put it this way: by the end of every album that I do, I’m like, this is it, the last fucking album I’m gonna make. Because I’m almost dead. My brain is empty, I have milked every inspiration for lyrics, I’ve done every drum fill I know how to do, I’ve played every chord sequence that is in me—I’m like an empty sack. Usually right at the end, I’m done. It takes about—not very long. All it takes is to hear it again and think about it being released. And I think to myself, “Oh, I could’ve done something else better.” And then it starts again. Then my brain starts thinking of new ideas. Or I’ll experience an emotion that isn’t on the album. I’ll be like, “Oh, I didn’t express that, this situation wasn’t covered.” Then it all starts again. So who knows at this point. Maybe one day I’ll be out of ideas.

*When you listen back to your earlier albums, does it feel like a diary? Like, “I remember what I was listening to, or what I was feeling then.” Or does it feel like a disconnect from that at this point?

It does. I can hear what I was feeling, what I was into. But I don’t think I’ll ever truly appreciate it until I’m like 60 years old, listening back to my discography. Which is a scary thought. Even listening back to Innerspeaker, Lonerism, it’s still tainted with self-critique. It’s still impossible to just appreciate. I’ll never truly be able to listen to it for the first time—as someone listening to it for the first time. Which is kind of a bummer, but at the same time I should just get over it—get over myself.

Well it sounds like you’re becoming more confident in at least talking about your approach.

That’s true. I like to think I’m getting more of a clear perspective on what I’m doing, you know, hence being a good producer, but I’ve never been as fucking crazy—never felt like I’m going as insane as I was with this album. Or I’m just slowly falling off the edge. Like, finishing this album was the first time I realized why people become alcoholics. I was like, oh, now I get it. Just those times where I feel like I want to disappear into oblivion, you know? Until then, I never realized.

How’s the process been to try to translate these songs live, working them up for the summer and everything?

Uh, it’s a challenge, but we needed the challenge. The more adventurous I am in the studio, the more of a challenge it is in the rehearsal room. Because there’s, like, things that the bands don’t do, you know what I mean? So the more I blur the lines for my own live production, the more it’s like, we have to find some way, some method that no band has done before. Which I feel good about, but at the same time it’s scary, because it’s uncharted territory. How is this gonna sound in a venue? On “Let It Happen,” for example, there’s that filter sweep in the chorus where the whole band becomes muffled, sounds like it’s from another room. But the vocals are crystal clear. So how are we gonna make the entire band sound muffled? You can do it on the front desk, the guy at the sound desk, but then people at the front of the row are still gonna hear the drums unmuffled—how’s that gonna work? So that’s been a roller coaster. But I think we got it, and we nailed it.

I feel like, as you said, when you’re in an album mindset, you don’t think about how are we gonna bring this out into the world.

Yeah, and it’s important to not think about that, because that only stifles you.

Now that Perth has become synonymous with the psych rock scene, do you feel like there’s been a change in community, kind of like Seattle after Nirvana hit it big?

I think that people overstate the psychedelic scene—it’s not really a scene, it’s just us. It’s about fifteen people, which makes about seven bands. It’s not really a psychedelic scene. There’s a big music scene, but it’s a lot of different genres—it’s every genre you can imagine. And genres that don’t exist.

In terms of other things you’ve been listening to, I remember during Lonerism you surprised a lot of people by saying you were listening to Britney Spears and things like that. Is there anything now that we’d be surprised about?

I don’t listen to music, I don’t. Especially now. When you finish an album, everything you listen to sounds amazing and empty at the same time. Like, I’ll listen to, like in the elevator at the mastering place—elevator music, just this completely banal, doo-doo-da-doo. And I’m like, ugh, this sounds so much better than my album. You can’t help but compare everything, compare it in this amazing light. So for me, I hear anything—anything—background music, and sounds so much better than my shit. That happens every time. But at the same time, it sounds empty, because you don’t want to know about other music, because it just kind of clouds. You kind of have a critical ear. It’s always a long time after you finish an album that you want to listen to any music.

It’s interesting though, as styles cycle through and become popular again, people have no problem talking about them. You know, things were dirty terms—pop or soft rock—now those are things people look at fondly or nostalgically.

That’s the funny thing about nostalgia. When a type of music becomes old, it becomes romantic. It doesn’t matter how shit it was in the day. There is nothing that is 40-50 years old that isn’t considered gold these days. It doesn’t matter what it was. Even the naffest pop bands of the ‘80s now have this retro chic. Now it’s got this value, this sentimentality.

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