Group Desire

We did all the recording for the album in less than three weeks which is awesome,” Steward recalls. “We recorded every day, full days, and it was really great. It might sound cliché but the creative juices were flowing, everyone was really on it, everyone was putting in the work and coming up with good stuff.”

When the juices are flowing with Tim Steward, you know the results are going to be tasty. Formed originally to flesh out his solo material, We All Want To has become a musical entity unto its own, the band mixing fuzz, grit and affecting lyrical charges with fun, inviting hooks with routinely fantastic results. With the Brisbane band morphing through a variety of line-ups to find itself in its current form, Steward acknowledges the lengthy process that has gone about creating this record.

“In a way this album's a bit like cleaning out the house,” he explains. “There are a lot of songs and a lot of them are quite long. Then the mixes took time for each song. We sent some mixes over to a guy in New Zealand, this guy called Dale Cotton – he works over in Dunedin. He did some stuff on the Grand Atlantic album [Constellations] and he works with a lot of Flying Nun bands. There was a lot of back and forth going on [with him and others], so it's just been a long process trying to work out each song. But we didn't worry about it. When we were playing them they just felt right.”

Although some of these new songs have been kicking around since as early as 2007, this second album didn't find traction until August of last year when Steward called on the sound expertise of another Brisbane stalwart. The English-born musician expands on the three-week recording session the band undertook last winter.

“We did it at a studio that belongs to Darek Mudge [Screamfeeder, Intercooler],” he informs. “He's got an awesome studio in Albion; it's amazing and fully decked out, and he's the new wonder engineer in Brisbane, he's just so on it. He makes his own electronic gear and he's just an amazing producer to work with because he's got endless patience – he's got really good ears. He can just be sitting there and it's like two in the morning and you're nodding off and he'll go, 'Oh hang on, that drum beat is a little out of time, that guitar is such and such' – he's just incredible.”

But as much as Steward can recall the physical labours of recording this as yet unnamed second release, he can't seem to recollect what inspirations were actually guiding his subliminal through the event. Strangely, this is commonplace for the prolific songwriter, lending him with a blank mental canvas to cover over time, helping the music to not only transcend the audience, but himself as well.

“I've always thought, like, 'This song sounds good but it's not about anything',” he professes. “Then it gets months, years down the track and I'll be singing it and just think, 'Holy shit, that's actually totally related to that thing that happened in my life back then'. It's so bizarre, it happens to almost every song way down the track, I can almost mine some kind of new meaning out of it. Either by that or me coming at the song as an audience member rather than a band member, and finding new meaning in that song.”