Here Comes The Night

Rest assured; Ross McLennan is trying. “I don't want to be all la-di-da,” the enigmatic songwriter assures us from his Melbourne home. “But I spend a lot of my time being negative. I'd like to have a lot more time feeling joy, and maybe even having faith in something. Though Lord knows what that would be.”

As a songwriter, McLennan has always been something of an enigma. Laying his roots in the '90s with the much adored but criminally underrated outfit Snout, the bedroom pop talisman has kept busy over the last decade cobbling together a collection of critically admired solo records. Starting with 2003 Hits From The Brittle Building and continuing with 2008's AMP shortlisted Sympathy For The New World – the wordy songsmith has established a back catalogue that represents a level of quality rarely rivalled in the Australian musical landscape. Back this year with his newest effort, The Night's Deeds Are Vapour, again recorded in and around his Melbourne abode, we find McLennan in a typically dry and contemplative mood as he considers the greater inspirations behind his latest collection of songs.

“I was supposed to go and do jury duty,” he explains, when asked how the writing process started for The Night's Deeds Are Vapour. “I didn't end up actually sitting on a jury – thank Christ – but the cases were quite ugly and I was writing songs to process that. I was just imagining if I was on a jury, what I'd be in for and how I'd handle it. The starting point for a lot of the songs was always pretty dastardly stuff – things I'd find in the newspaper. I have a fairly pessimistic view of things and I'm never disappointed. A lot of that is me really trying and failing to process that kind of stuff, but if I come out of it with a song at the end then I suppose it's worth something. A lot of the time when I listen back to those songs I end up in quite a tearful state – which is probably a good thing if it means I care. You know, when you're not coping with something you can get quite angry? I think I wanted to use the chemistry of music's softness to make things a bit easier.”

As far as recording these observations went, McLennan didn't stray too far from the homestead, tracking at home and at work. “It's mostly recorded at my house,” he explains. “There were a few bits done at the school where I work and some strings and voices were done in a church on the same school property. It's an old Uniting Church. I don't know how successful we were in getting that big reverb sound – you can fix everything in the mix to some degree. I think I could've done a better job with that, although things shouldn't sound too slick. If I had've got it too nice it was maybe in danger of sounding like a big romantic statement, so I suppose I avoided that.”

Launching The Night's Deeds Are Vapour at The Famous Spiegeltent, McLennan is aware that his forays into the world of live music have been all too rare of late. The problem seems to lie in the sheer numbers of band members he needs to corral in order to play – he performs with all the bells and whistles. “It's just very difficult to get these people in my band together,” he says. “So to get them on board for a show it needs to be a ceremony, a record coming out or a launch. The Spiegeltent is just a really good environment for that kind of thing. I'd like to play pubs a lot more this time around but it's just not that viable, so as a result of that we pick special things to do”

Ross McLennan will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 23 February - The Famous Spiegeltent, Melbourne VIC