Taking Her Chances
"As loose as my writing style may appear, my roots are firmly placed in my admin past. I had appointments set up with Spencer, Matt Walker, Greeny and Tim, who I wrote with. All my lyric ideas were typed up, in folders and labelled."
It was an Arts Victoria grant in 2009 that allowed Crystal Thomas to record her second album, A Chance In Hell. “The plan was to hunker down and write fifteen songs as quickly as I could, without rushing them so much that the quality was compromised,” she explains. Her first album, Crystal Thomas and The Flowers of Evil, was recorded in spasms over a three-year period, a production practice she wanted to avoid this time around. “I set aside five weeks to write fifteen or as many songs as I could. With the first album, I was working at a call centre and had saved $150 to get the engineer out to Matt Walker's studio. I'd record two drum tracks, pack down, go back to the call centre, save up for another few weeks, get the engineer out and so on. This time around I wanted more of a raw thing, coming from a place of emotion rather than any particular precision feel.”
Crystal also wanted her second album to be more of a collaborative effort. She assembled some respected Melbourne players - Spencer P Jones, Matt Walker, Matt Green, Tim McCormack and Phil Collings - to both write and record with. She even had lyrical contributions from her mother and grandfather. For an album possessing so much raw rock emotion, loud, swaggering guitar sounds and sometimes sordid subject matter, the method in which Crystal wrote the songs was comparatively conservative.
“As loose as my writing style may appear, my roots are firmly placed in my admin past. I had appointments set up with Spencer, Matt Walker, Greeny and Tim, who I wrote with. All my lyric ideas were typed up, in folders and labelled. I'd be there with my pen and paper and folders going, okay, I'm ready to rock now! It was hilarious. I very much research and plan songs like it is a day job. I have drafts of my lyrics saved on my computer and I write them independently of the music.”
The songs on the album are quite diverse in style, which isn't surprising considering the different writing collaborations, but also the style in which Crystal sings from track to track is varied. I wondered who her vocal influences were and who she borrows from. “Yeah, there are probably different personas of me on the album,” she suggests. “I guess it depends on the song but Spencer converted me to Amy Winehouse. I was never really a fan but then again, I'd never paid much attention to her. So I guess the song I Could Die Right Now is kind of a tribute; obviously this was before she died. The song itself is actually about addiction, not to drugs or alcohol. The lyrics are shrouded in metaphors to do with drug and alcohol addiction but it is actually exploring the idea that you can be addicted to a person. Also that you can be addicted to music or chasing the dream and that it can be just as much of a rollercoaster ride with euphoric highs and devastating lows and scrounging together a gig. It plays out the same way.”
Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter
An artist's second album is often referred to as the 'difficult' one, and for good reason. For Crystal though, it wasn't an issue. “I had a pretty tangible set of emotions to work off. Some pretty traumatic things had just happened. Life was my muse. I guess the second album was written primarily from experiences which happened during that year. There were still some of the old themes filtering back through. I am very much in the vein of confessional lyricists. I guess it's dark because I am trying to write music which is cathartic. When I first listened to Nick Cave's The Good Son on cassette when I was fifteen, it transported me to this alternative world. It was such an amazing experience to feel. I was at a girls' school and it was all a bit nice and boring. So I put on this cassette and was transported to this dark and dangerous world. I wanted to do for others what that cassette had done for me.”
Crystal, who has just completed a diploma of professional writing and editing, chose to record the album with her band in performance mode as opposed to doing separate vocal takes. However, she wasn't in the same room as the band when tape rolled, the vocal booth which Matt Walker had set up at his home studio being in his toilet.
“It was very reverb drenched. It had a concrete floor and wooden walls. Matt's studio had recently been refurbished so the toilet was the vocal booth. It actually had a little glass window. We set up some curtains and various bits and pieces. At one point I wanted to get all atmospheric and set up a whole bunch of tea lights. Everyone freaked out and came running saying you can't have tea lights next to cloth and electrics. I just wanted a vibe. I had to either sing in the dark or with the toilet light on. It is important that the album represents an emotion or experience.
“The first album was melancholy and pretty and poetic. The second was, I dunno, sexy, angry, playful. I'm not sure what the emotion will be for the next one but Ben (Bunting, her stage guitarist) and I were talking about it being more narrative driven.”
More From Our Network
