Experimenting With ‘Latin Tech-house’ & Teaching Riffs To The Killers

When we call Tim Rogers (Jack Ladder's birth name) from outside Hisense Arena before sound check, he's backstage and says he'll come out to collect us from near the box office. Tonight is the first of The Killers' three nights playing this venue with Jack Ladder & The Dreamlanders and Alex Cameron on support duty. 

It's usually just as hard to get out of a venue of this size as it is to get in and, after trying to exit through a few doors, Rogers calls back to explain he thinks he's finally found a way out and is about to come up a small flight of stairs. He emerges, scalp first with long shaggy hair falling down over a charcoal coat and navy crew-neck jumper - winter threads. 

We go back inside the arena and find an office that's suitable for the purpose of this interview. Rogers sits in front of the window. Behind him, leafy green trees can be seen in the foreground, the rain-soaked Melbourne city skyline shimmering in the distance. Last night, Cameron played a headline show at The Croxton and Rogers also plays guitar in his backing band. Cameron and Jack Ladder & The Dreamlanders have already supported The Killers in Brisbane and Sydney, and Rogers admits of opening for this huge international act, "They're weird shows".

"I mean, we only play for, like, 15, 20 minutes... We play about three new songs and we've kind of got a weird kinda half-band thing. It's just Laurence [Pike] and Neal [Sutherland], so there's drums and bass [respectively] - I play guitar."

So, apart from Rogers, are there any more Dreamlanders who are also in Cameron's band? "Laurence plays bongos in Alex's band," Rogers laughs. "So it's a bit of a family, travelling affair with Alex. Everyone's so kind, you know - like, The Killers are very accommodating of Alex and Alex is very accommodating of me - and so it has a nice sort of family element and a lot of mutual respect."

We discuss some of the "horror stories" we've heard from members of support bands touring with big international  headliners. "Don't make eye contact and those kind of things, and make sure the hallways are clear," Rogers contributes. "They have security do that before the band walk on stage. People start to take it very seriously, but, you know, there's a lot at stake when you're playing these stadium shows and there are 20,000 people there to see you. I mean, I guess if there was 20,000 people who had paid 150 bucks to see me, I would take it quite seriously."

The three new songs Rogers has included in these support slots are lifted from his latest set Blue Poles. "I wrote a lot of this on piano and it is kinda different for me," Rogers points out of the songwriting process for this album. 

"I went to LA to work with Alex on his record, Forced Witness, and then I came home," he recalls, "and I hadn't really had a huge amount of time off between touring [previous Jack Ladder & The Dreamlanders album] Playmates. I think I had a couple of months [off] and then I came home, and I was just charged after working with Alex, and it was like, 'I think I'm just gonna start writing at home'. And then I was just having a lot of fun doing it myself and I thought, 'You know what? I'm just gonna book some time at a studio and I might record five songs or something, and see how that goes.'  

"I remember hearing that Springsteen recorded Born In The USA in two different sessions or something," he laughs. "I was like, 'I'll record the first half of the record and then I'll edit that, and then I'll see how it all comes together and then I'll go back and record the next half.' Instead of going, you know, 'I've got ten, 15 songs - we'll focus on them' - it was, like, just little small bites. Then I sort of ended up having lots of different ideas and by the time the studio time that was booked came around we recorded 12 songs maybe in, like, four days, 'cause it was just happening. And then I was like, 'Oh, might have a record outta this!' But then it became a lot of work.

"I think there's just that initial energy blast that you get that is, like, the most important part of making a record," Rogers shares, "and then there's just the detailing... and I'm really aware of the balance of different elements. Initially, the record that I was making was much more open-ended. I was going into it thinking I was making some kind of Latin tech-house record [laughs]... There was just a lotta conga drums and I was really into this Moodymann record, and I thought that I would do this spoken word over this dance music, and I just could never get that together, really. And I started focusing on the melodic songs."

Fear not, Rogers has "tucked away" these Latin tech-house ideas to revisit later. "It just became obvious that I was making a much more sort of melodic record that was not gonna be icy, you know," he continues. "I was making, like, a warm record."

While creating Blue Poles, Rogers says he was willing "to go with the change". "I know that the worst decisions I've ever made are when I go into something and I've fought against the push and pull of what it wants to do, you know? And you try and control it and you're like, 'No, I have this very clear vision of - this is what it's gonna be,' and then at the end it's kinda boring. It's generally more exciting to just go with the way that it wants to go.

"I kind of pushed myself to do weird stuff on this that I wouldn't have done before. I mean, I have some sort of system to the way I write songs where I have repetitive ideas that I come back to in terms of just, you know, the intuitive way that I would do something. And then, I think, harmonically on this record, I wanted to be - there's some weird kind of tense elements. [On] a song like Tell It Like It Is, I started doing unusual sort of harmonies that I wouldn't have ever done before. And, you know, working on my phrasing so that it was not so - if you look at some of the songs on Hurtsville, in the lyric booklet they're just chunks, like, blocks [of text]... Whereas this record is kind of uneven and broken up into smaller bits, and it sort of comes in on itself. 

"It's more nooks and crannies than just a big box. I would describe [Blue Poles] definitely more as an older kinda house with secret rooms. The last record [Playmates], for me, was always very much like an art space, you know: very grand glass and concrete slabs sort of thing. But this one's got places to hide in it." 

Blue Poles is self-produced, which Rogers explains "was like compartmentalising things where it's like, 'Ok, I'm writing and now I'm producing and now I'm recording myself and now I'm like the studio assistant copying the drums together.' And then, you know, I worked on it at home for months and did a lot of the detailing that I would never have wanted to be responsible for before." Rather than finding this experience daunting, Rogers admits, "I felt like I could handle it at that point. I knew what I wanted.

"I also did a thing where I sort of booked in the mix halfway through the production of the record and so I had a deadline, and I think deadlines are always important. I haven't always had those before... Things just were moving in a very natural way and you just get stuff done; if you have a deadline, it just gets done. 

"I remember the weekend before I was flying to America to mix it, I'm sitting at home doing piano overdubs on my out-of-tune piano in my studio and the neighbours start doing some chainsaw - like, cutting down trees and stuff. And I was just like... [laughs]. It was just very, very bad timing but it got done and those things - [with] records, sometimes it's nice to have chaos elements, you know? I think that the last record was very controlled, it was very studio-oriented and it was very musical. And this record, I felt, was much more at home and more contained in terms of listening in a comfortable environment sort of with friends."

Perhaps Playmates was more an album to listen to through headphones, then? "Yeah, maybe it was a headphone thing," he allows. So does Rogers recommend that Blue Poles be consumed through speakers and in the company of mates? "Yeah, with a mid-priced bottle of wine," he laughs. "I don't think it's fussy and I think it's more representative of me as a person in terms of it being, like - I'm probably more approachable than people think. And I think it is kinda casual and I relate to it, yeah."

When asked how old he was when he wrote his first song, Rogers estimates, "20 or something", which means he's been writing songs for about 15 years. "So it's been a while," he acknowledges, before adding, "It definitely feels like I'm still at the beginning, you know?" 

When this scribe mentions her obsession with Hurtsville's lead  track, Cold Feet, Rogers reveals, "The Killers loved Cold Feet. Apparently Brandon [Flowers] listens to it before he goes on stage. I showed the guitar player Taylor [Milne], he wanted to learn the riff. When I heard him play it at the sound check it was funny," he laughs.