Releasing An Accidental Collaborative Thing

The journey to Daniel Johns’ solo album begins with his currently on hiatus band, Silverchair. Yeah, you probably know them. Five #1 albums in Australia, sell out concerts, a record number of ARIA Awards, guaranteed a place in Australian rock history. For all intents and purposes, it seemed like things were heading down a well-worn path in 2009 and the band was on its way to recording album number six. There were studio updates posted on their website and positive messages about how good the new stuff was sounding. A run of shows in 2010 on the Groovin The Moo and BASSINTHEGRASS Festivals saw the band even debut a couple of new tracks in 16 and Machina Collecta. Then a year later, the band issued a statement they had entered “indefinite hibernation” and wouldn’t be making music or playing shows in the foreseeable future.

Looking back now, Johns explains the circumstances in the lead up to this decision. “There was a lot of jamming, I had a lot of song ideas and we’d been recording for a while,” Johns says. “It sounded good and the last Silverchair shows were the Groovin The Moo tour we did to get some cash to go back into the studio and it was after that I was really trying to incorporate a lot more electronic stuff and I guess a more un-rock’n’roll stuff into the music. I started to feel like what I wanted wasn’t adding anything to what we had and then when we tried to incorporate kind of band elements into what I wanted, it started to feel like a camel is a horse designed by committee – that kind of thing. All these compromises and neither of the two options felt right and when we tried to bring them together it felt compromised and I guess it was around that point I was like it’s not doing for me and I had to make a call. It wasn’t going to decide itself…

"It’s pretty hard to release a band record when you delete the band"

“Over the course of the recording when we were doing the supposed Silverchair record I was quite happy with where it was going, because I had an endgame in mind, like I knew what I wanted it to come together like, but then when I started incorporating the things that I had in my head into what we’d been doing, that’s what I mean when by it started to feel like too many things competing with each other – the vision didn’t seem really clear. It just felt like a bit of a mess to me and, because I was producing, I just felt like the bits that I thought weren’t working were the guitar, the bass and the drums. So it’s pretty hard to release a band record when you delete the band [laughs]. I just had to make a call and art’s always been my first priority. I had something else in mind and it’s not going to work in a band environment.”

Once the decision was made to put Silverchair up on the blocks, Johns then… pretty much disappeared. While when other bands decide to go on hiatus you’ve barely digested the news before you hear about individual members pursuing other musical projects, Johns kept a low profile, at least publicly.

“I just wanted to get away from being famous and just the spotlight and just put my head down and hone my craft a bit more. So I bought a bunch of toys and sat at home and experimented for a couple of years on and off, just writing bits and pieces. Travelling down to Tasmania, my friend has a little shack studio in the mountains there, just going in there intermittently and writing stuff and playing the drum machines and vocoders and doing lots of noisy electronic stuff,” Johns outlines. “Then once I felt like I had a better vision, once I knew it wasn’t going to be a Silverchair record, then the doors were blown wide open – it can be anything I want. So once I’d exhausted all of the things that I wanted to try, I kind of got serious about doing my record and started calling up producers and people to come to my house and start writing and started to get an album together.”

Those joining Johns on his new album Talk come from all walks of life. Previous collaborator Julian Hamilton from The Presets returns (he and Johns wrote four tracks on Silverchair’s last album, 2007’s Young Modern, including the behemoth Straight Lines), but from here eyebrows might be raised at the names you’d probably never expect to see musically alongside Johns. Hip hop’s Styalz Fuego and M-Phazes appear alongside writer/producer Louis Schoorl (5 Seconds Of Summer, Guy Sebastian), electro hip hop up and comers Damn Moroda and writer/producer Joel Little (Broods, Lorde). Turns out most of these were enabled by Johns’ publishing links, either via his own or thanks to his brother, who is Universal Music Publishing Australia Director of A&R.

“The Joel Little collaboration came about when my publisher actually had heard the first Lorde EP before she was huge. I don’t think it was even out yet and he’d signed Joel as a writer, and he said, ‘Would you be interested in working with the guy that’s produced this stuff?’ and I thought it sounded amazing, fuck yeah. So he hooked that up and we got in the studio and instantly got on and during our work together, Lorde just exploded, so I got in at the right time,” Johns laughs. 

"Everything had to be moulded and made to sound like it was from the one artist"

“Other stuff, like Damn Moroda, my brother showed me a demo of theirs, like beats and stuff they were making, and I immediately said, ‘Fuck it, I’ve got to work with these guys’ – it just sounded so incredible. Same with M-Phazes, just hearing the stuff that he’d done. I knew my brother was looking after him, I was like, ‘Can I have a session with him?’ And Styalz, he was another guy I’d heard a lot of his stuff and realised he was through my publisher. My publisher called me and said, ‘Do you want to work with this guy?’ and I said, ‘I’ve actually just been listening to his stuff, I’d love to.’ And Louis Schoorl was another guy who I worked with who I accidentally came about working with when I was doing a movie score and the guy who was originally going to engineer that session had to pull out at the last minute and Louis came in as the replacement and was a godsend and we’ve remained friends and worked together from then on.”

Even though Johns has worked with all these different people, the album as a whole is still quite cohesive and is not a jarring leap from one track to the next. All the elements of electro, glitch and future soul and R&B flow together on Talk.

“I was overly conscious of having that many people there, so someone had to be in charge, so I was making sure that everything had a similar palette and making sure that it worked as a whole and not just ‘here’s a high fidelity radio pop song’ and ‘here’s an underground hip hop track’. Everything had to be moulded and made to sound like it was from the one artist,” Johns says.

This sense of collaboration to make a solo album is an interesting approach for Johns, as for the last few Silverchair albums, there wasn’t much work he did with other people.  There were the aforementioned tracks with Julian Hamilton on Young Modern, 2002’s Diorama was written entirely by Johns and Neon Ballroom (1999) featured only one co-write with Silverchair drummer Ben Gillies. So Johns underwent a change of focus going from Silverchair, which almost seemed like a solo project at times, to now officially doing a solo project, but working with lots of people.

“I can see how that’s kind of weird,” Johns laughs. “I’d been so used to working by myself for years and years, that’s kind of the only way I knew how to write. Except The Dissociatives record that I wrote with Paul [Mac]. Once I knew it was a solo record, it didn’t feel awkward to bring in collaborators. I guess the nature of the music I wanted to make, there’s a really blurry line as to what is producing and what is songwriting sometimes. I was trying to come up with a new way to write songs for me anyway, and a lot of that started with sitting down, writing a beat, write some chords, put a melody on it and the track would build and build and I’d take turns with producers adding stuff, so it just kind of became an accidental collaborative thing.

“So everyone’s kind of contributing moments and parts and like I said, there’s a fine line between songwriting and producing between this kind of stuff and it is what it is and I like working with new blood. It was nice getting new energy and learning a lot of stuff with the producers, like all of them worked completely different and all of them had something different to bring to the table. So I was as much as a student as I was the director of the thing.” 

While the work with the different collaborators was fruitful, some songs actually predate Silverchair’s hiatus. Going On 16 is in fact an update of 16, one of the aforementioned then new tracks Silverchair gave an airing on their last run of lives shows.

"Picking interesting people to write for and to write with was part of my figuring out what the fuck I was going to do"

“New York is the oldest track on the record. I wrote that for a movie that never ended up coming out and I’ve always loved that song but held onto it and held onto it until the right moment came up. And …16 was one from the Silverchair sessions that I’d written in Tasmania and always really liked it. And even when Silverchair performed it, it was unfinished. I didn’t have any lyrics or anything. So that whole live performance… I’m just talking gibberish. I only had the chorus lyric. That was one of the oldest tracks on the record and it was the last lyric that I finished. And I think Good Luck as well was from that session, but it was never a Silverchair song. I was just writing and thought it doesn’t really sound like a band track, but the rest were all pretty recent,” Johns says of the age of the tracks on the album.

“Like I had hundreds of tracks and I always thought it was going to be a double record, but then every time I went in to a session with another producer, then that song became my favourite and another one got shoved and then the next one became the favourite and then gradually all that stuff that I thought was the backbone of the record just dissipated.”

From the times Johns did pop his head up post Silverchair’s hiatus, it was obvious he was heading down a different musical path from the nature of projects he undertook. Variously Johns took part in The Ship Song Project (where a large cast of notable musicians performed Nick Cave’s The Ship Song, reinterpreted to pay tribute to the Sydney Opera House), created Atlas (a song for a QANTAS advertising campaign), a soundtrack to a film (My Mind’s Own Melody) and worked with Lisa Gerrard, Kimbra and 360. There was even stuff that didn’t see the light of day, like writing with The Veronicas and the long mentioned project with The Sleepy Jackson/Empire Of The Sun’s Luke Steele (“Yeah, that’s still going. That’s always going. That’s been going since we were 20 or something,” Johns smiles.)

“Like I said, when I knew it wasn’t going to be a Silverchair record anymore – not that it was restrictive at all – I just felt I’d exhausted the writing a song on piano or writing a song on guitar thing for now. I’ll probably go back to it at some stage, but I wanted to learn a new way to write music. So collaborating with a bunch of artists was a good start and picking interesting people to write for and to write with was part of my figuring out what the fuck I was going to do,” Johns laughs.

So in what ways did working with the likes of Kimbra or 360 get you to the finished product of the album?

“I guess they’re all different. Working with Kimbra was really good. It was interesting because I was leaving the Diorama, Young Modern-esque style of writing and she wanted to write with me and kept referencing Diorama [laughs]. I had to revisit that mindset for a little bit and she brought a lot of amazing stuff to the table, so it was good just being be able to concentrate on writing music and not be so concerned with the top line, which usually is my main job. With 360 it was really good because I got to sing a top line and not necessarily have to be the rock guy. I guess that’s where I was experimenting with the R&B, falsetto thing. With Lisa Gerrard it was a whole experience as well, especially after My Mind’s Own Melody where I’d been exploring really operatic vocals – and also the great thing about her is she doesn’t like to hear lyrics, she just wants to hear your soul resonate. All this stuff, if it was just one of those elements I probably wouldn’t have come up with the same record, but all of it together just somehow informed where I was going as an artist and while I was writing Talk, all of that stuff subconsciously was rattling around in my head.”

People shouldn’t have been surprised at the musical direction of Talk, as each Silverchair album was a quantum leap on the last, so it stood to reason that Johns’ next work would be vastly different again. “I think I’ve kind of trapped myself a little bit because everyone expects every record I do to be completely different. I guess that’s part of the reason after I knew Silverchair wasn’t going to do the record that we were expected to do, I had to go back to the drawing board and go, ‘Alright, I can’t just sound like a Silverchair record without Ben and Chris [Joannou, Silverchair bass player], it’s got to be a whole new kettle of fish,’” Johns states.

The last couple of Silverchair albums were big productions, with orchestras and additional players all over the place, while Talk is really stripped back comparatively. “That’s another thing that was a really conscious, deliberate decision to almost rebel against what people had come to expect, especially after the QANTAS thing as well. I think a lot of people were expecting this big, grandiose, take it to the next level kind of thing [laughs]. I wanted to really strip it back and really make it about having this beautiful, warm sonic palette and having the voice quite prominent, which I’d never really wanted before,” Johns states.

The voice is indeed prominent, with vocals mostly delivered in a croon or falsetto. The lyrics could be interpreted as both personal but also reflecting Johns’ musical transformation. Take for example Preach’s “Now I dance to my own beat”, Aerial Love’s “Gonna pull it together/Change my old ways” or Imagination’s “I just keep pushing forward until I fall off the edge”.

“No matter what the song was about, I found there’s a lot of references in tracks to my musical struggle as well. There’s no one track that’s about that, but there’s references littered throughout the record that kind of refer to me ploughing through and getting the job done,” Johns says.

"I wanted to really strip it back and really make it about having this beautiful, warm sonic palette"

The album’s title is derived from the expected reaction that people will talk about Johns’ new musical direction – and people are indeed talking, with opinion seemingly split between those excited and encouraged by him moving forward and others not getting it one bit and wishing for musical forays past. Most posts of his on various social channels are followed by comments ranging as such. Take for example the YouTube post of the first new track to emerge from Johns solo, that of Aerial Love. Comments ranged from outright dislike of the track (“This isn't evolution, this is extinction”), to accepting he’s undertaking a new musical direction, but not liking it (“I personally am not a big fan of Daniel Johns turn Justin Timberlake. That's my loss....certainly not the loss of Daniel Johns”) to utterly loving it (“This is AMAZING! Serously (sic), people need to understand that this is Daniel Johns and not Silverchair”).

“I’m used to that as well,” Johns says of the difference of opinion on his new material. “That happened with every Silverchair record. Like, literally every one, so I’m used to that as well. Every time we released a record there would be an uproar that they’ve changed and go back to Frogstomp, then released Neon Ballroom and then Diorama, go back to Neon Ballroom, Young Modern go back to Diorama. I guess that’s the price you pay for evolving. I say to those people if I get an opportunity, if you’d like Frogstomp, listen to Frogstomp. It still exists.”

Johns now has his first two proper gigs coming up as part of Vivid LIVE, with his official solo performances pretty much limited thus far to performing with Kimbra and Van Dyke Parks at the latter’s Adelaide Festival’s show in 2013, plus appearances earlier this year as part of triple j’s Beat The Drum 40th Anniversary concert and the APRA Awards Ceremony.

“I think it will be liberating. I haven’t even done a rehearsal as yet, it’s coming,” Johns says at the time of the interview about the impending shows. “I’m pretty excited about it. I’ve got a really good band together. It’s a whole new experience, it’s not guitars and bashing drums and bass, it’s a lot more techy and a lot of synths. If someone’s coming along to the show expecting a rock’n’roll extravaganza, they probably will be disappointed. But it will still hopefully have excitement and theatre and hopefully be a good representation of where I’m at.”

At the time of this chat, Johns wasn’t sure what material would make up his set and whether there will be anything from Silverchair or he’ll just focus on solo material. “We still don’t know to be honest,” Johns admits. “There’s still a possibility – we’ve entertained the idea of maybe doing a Dissociatives track or two or maybe doing a Silverchair track or two, but the main thing is doing Talk and it’s about Talk.”

And while you would assume Johns will follow up these first two gigs with more, he isn’t sure at this stage if he’s doing more performances as yet. “The Vivid thing was presented to me as an idea,” Johns explains. “Firstly given the timing, I thought it was amazing and secondly, of all places to preview your new, artier record it would be at an arts festival and also the Opera House, which after all these years I still have never played in. So all of that together, I’ve just got to say yes and see what happens.”