Paul Dempsey On "Our Best Album Yet"

After Desert Lights we put out The Murmur Years, the best of, we did a bunch of touring, so that all sort of finished up in 2008. And then it was solo record until we started writing Leave Your Soul To Science in 2011. Steph [Ashworth] and I moved to New York at the start of 2010 and we came back at the end of 2011 so it was almost two years.

After Desert Lights and after all the touring, when it sort of became time to consider new music again, basically Clint [Hyndman] and Steph were just not ready to go through… no one wanted to repeat that experience and I think there was possibly a bit of fear about what might happen so they basically just said, ‘You should make a solo record and we should have a break, we should just try everything separately.’ And at the same time we changed management, Desert Lights was our fifth album for Sony so it was the last in our contract, so suddenly we were out of a contract, we didn’t have management, so we were at a point where we could choose anything or decide anything or change everything if wanted to. The decision was made that I’d do a solo record and then throughout the process of writing that we moved to another label – we signed with Capitol Records – we got new management with Winterman & Goldstein, so everything was new again and I did a solo record and that was great and we lived overseas for a couple of years.

‘We’re not going to spend weeks at a time in our rehearsal space. Basically we’re going to get together once or twice a week and fuck around"

It was wonderful, the band had a really good break, we all did different things with our lives, we all started families, and so by the time we walked into a room together to write songs we were all incredibly refreshed and just revitalised but also so much had changed in our lives that Something For Kate wasn’t necessarily the centre of our universe anymore. So the decision to get back together and write, there was this newfound freedom, our lives didn’t depend on it or anything like that. We could really just sort of do what we wanted. Also with so much time apart we weren’t even sure that there was anybody out there waiting for a new Something For Kate record or whatever, we just felt really free. We just missed it so much, missed playing with each other so much; we’d all learned so much as well from doing all the other shit we were doing. I’d been in the States playing with heaps of different people, Clint had been playing in other bands, Steph had just been not playing, so when we got back together and just started playing again it just felt so good and the songs just came.

My solo record went really well and a lot of people were saying to me, ‘You’d be crazy to not just follow this up with another solo record,’ but it was really like the three of us wanted to be in Something For Kate again, we wanted to get back together and do that again. Not that we ever broke up, but we were just ready; we were ready to make another Something For Kate record. The other thing about it was because the realities of our lives had changed and there were kids in the picture and also because of what happened with Desert Lights, we imposed these rules on ourselves where we just said, ‘We’re not going to spend weeks at a time in our rehearsal space. Basically we’re going to get together once or twice a week and fuck around and see what happens and if it’s fun, it’s fun and if it’s not, we all leave. We’re not going to push ourselves.’ I’m very lucky that I have the bandmates that I have because I think their biggest concern was for me, ‘Don’t go back there, dude, we’re not going to let things get to that point,’ but luckily it wasn’t like that at all. We wrote the whole album in a couple of months of two-day-a-week rehearsals, just way quicker than we’d ever – like we used to spend that long on one song – and we wrote the whole album in a flash and we just went, ‘Right, let’s go record it.’

I’m probably always going to say this about our most recent record but I just think it’s the best record we’ve made yet. Our next record will be better. I love it. It’s really great and I love how fast we did it and then the recording of it with John Congleton in Dallas was just awesome as well and we got along so great with him. He just encouraged us so much – ‘Just fucking do it, don’t think about anything.’ Honestly we’d just go into the live room, pick up amps, lay down a couple of takes until we got one that we liked and then we wouldn’t put our instruments down and go into the control room and listen back to it. We’d just go, ‘Yeah that felt good, alright, next.’ We honestly recorded most of that album without going into the control room to check. If we knew we’d made a mistake or whatever, it was like, ‘Was it a big mistake? Does it matter? Fuck it.’ We just didn’t listen closely to anything, we just went, ‘If the whole thing feels good, then it doesn’t fucking matter if Clint dropped a stick or if someone played a slightly off note or whatever.’ We went for energy over accuracy.

It was also after what we went through with Desert Lights, with writing that record, my brain broke during the making of that album and will probably never be the same again. I feel like a different person. I don’t want to be dramatic or whatever, but I’m not the same person. I changed. And I don’t want to do that again. The three of us just decided that we weren’t going to spend that much time in a room doing that and it was really like, ‘We don’t have to do this,’ I could keep doing solo stuff and Clint has a couple of bars – we’ve arrived at a point in our life where we don’t have to do this. Something For Kate is just something we do out of the pure enjoyment of it.

"It was also after what we went through with Desert Lights, with writing that record, my brain broke during the making of that album and will probably never be the same again."

I haven’t listened to it in at least a year, but the last time I heard it I was happy with it. I love the songs. I think it’s our best record yet, but I’m always going to say that about our most recent record. It feels the freshest to me, so obviously I’m the most attached to it because it’s closer to where I’m at right now. I loved working with John Congleton – we all did. We love what he did with the sound and the attitude that he brought. I just really love the fact that for me it’s our weirdest record but also our strongest record. I should listen to it I guess, I don’t really listen to our records very much. Maybe I should give it a spin.