How To Record The 'Poverty-Stricken Way'

Holy Holy's Tim Carroll extends his hand across the table for a hand shake as he takes a seat diagonally opposite. He sports a burgundy v-neck and has his hair pulled back, which accentuates a stellar example of bushy outlaw beard. His bandmate Oscar Dawson arrives shortly afterwards with long hair flowing free against the sheepskin collar of his denim jacket. Dawson orders a wrap, mentioning he feels as if he's approaching the blood-sugar precipice — perhaps he's prone to 'hangry' outbursts?

The pair first met as volunteer English teachers in Southeast Asia during their gap years. Carroll reminisces about carefree afternoons spent playing "six-a-side soccer on this basketball court" with the locals before they "moved around and went right up to the north": "We were staying at a Buddhist monastery both meditating with monks at, like, 4am." Dawson interjects, "That only lasted for me for a coupla days," blaming his lack of flexibility and "the wooden floor" for his brief attendance at these sessions.

"Not only can I not find them, but I haven't even looked for them. Where the hell did all my CDs go?"

"There was one funny technological relic that we made use of over there, which was the mini-disc," Dawson informs. "Our old friend who we were travelling with, Marcus, had this mini-disc [player] and he had a microphone so we could record onto mini-disc. And so we had a couple of guitars and we recorded a few songs whilst we were over there, which, I don't know where those mini-discs would be now, but they're definitely not Holy Holy songs and I don't think that we'd ever want them to see the light of day." Carroll laughs nervously.

Dawson "had a Discman still" around that time and recalls, "I built up quite a big CD collection just 'cause that's what people listened to music on and I've got no idea where it is in the world. And it's just a sign of how defunct that listening medium is that not only can I not find them, but I haven't even looked for them. Where the hell did all my CDs go?" Carroll laughs then Dawson concludes, "I think MP3s are just such a powerful medium; they're so convenient and convenience really wins the day, I think."

This outfit relies heavily on the wonders of modern technology for their songwriting because they're based in different states: Dawson lives in Melbourne and Carroll has moved to Tasmania. "In terms of our pre-production, we'll quite often do a thing where I record a sketchy little idea just straight onto an iPhone — just with, like, one verse and a chorus idea — and then I'll send it to Oz [Dawson] and then maybe about two weeks later will come Ozzie's reply, and that will be multi-tracked with guitars and bass. And then I'll kinda have a think about that, and then go back and adjust it or put vocals on it. And then we'll send it to our drummer in Brisbane and then he'll add drums to it and we can get to a pretty nice position within that process.

"I think there's something to be said for writing in one room, but there's something nice about writing separately and having that real moment to kind of work on something before you then present it back to the group. It can be pretty exciting when I get the reply from Oz. I remember when I got the House Of Cards email, I clicked open on it and in the opening few bars I knew that it was something special. And he just sent me another one recently and I was like, 'Oh, here it is!' And put the cans on and was just sort of sitting there; there was one moment in particular, I was like, 'Oh, that's gonna be great.'"

Dawson believes that "the poverty-stricken way" they initially record tracks "actually works out best for the music". "We do a take and if we decide we're gonna do another one, we just record directly over it," he explains. Carroll elaborates, "We'd be recording over Ball Park Music and, like, Emma Louise records, which was kinda funny 'cause you'd be hearing these songs and you'd go, 'Oh, yeah, just erase that now we're going on top.' And sometimes we'd be like, 'Oh, we've got this much left on the tape,' and it would be influencing how long we could play for — how long the songs could be. Looking back on it now it's kinda funny, 'cause I'm sure if we asked Sony for some more tape they would allow us to record a bit longer."

"There's something nice about writing separately and having that real moment to kind of work on something before you then present it back to the group."

You've gotta act on inspiration when it strikes and Carroll gives us some background to their song History. "I was doing a solo country drive late at night, and I just started working on the lyrics and got the first couple of verses out in the car. I remember pulling over to the side of the road and finding a pen and writing it and then keeping going and pulling over again 'cause, you know, it can be quite rare to, like, get a run on some lyrics." Carroll didn't have any music playing, instead preferring to sing. "I will just sing and/or whistle all the time and people around me find it annoying, like, even when I was in school and stuff. And oftentimes I won't know that I'm doing it. If I've been out, I'll come home and my wife is asleep, and I'll just be whistling around the kitchen or something. And she'll be like, 'Stop whistling,' and I'll be like, 'I really didn't realise I was doing it.'"

Carroll's wife is from Sweden so he's "been going back and forth from there for the last eight years [they've] been together". "I lived there for a year at one point and I just got back from there," he clarifies. Gotta love having a European passport! "I had one already," he says. "I had an Irish one from my parents."

Dawson has a British passport and lived in Berlin for a year with his previous band Dukes Of Windsor. He reckons a lot of Australians choose to live in Berlin because "it's really cheap and there's great big apartments you can live [in] and write your album or paint or draw". "But what we found happened eventually was that we could write and record demos, and we did that, which was great, but it got to a point where we found it was really hard to get things off the ground, and it's hard to get a recording project off the ground and hard to get your music out into the world; it's hard to play gigs, actually. Melbourne's got a — I would say — better live music scene than Berlin and so we kind of found that this thing happens where the city itself doesn't give you a kick up the arse.

"You find that your alarm clock starts switching off and you start getting up later and a lot of people lose a lot of days. There's a really good article that a Melbourne-based musician and journalist, called Robbie Coleman, wrote and it got placed in The New York Times, and he writes about the experience of a musician moving to Berlin for a few months. And he's quite funny and quite accurate, actually. So check that out, it's really interesting. It's kinda saying how you go over there with these dreams of making a big album and three months later you find that you've spent most of the time partying, and on drugs, and you've barely written a thing and then the band breaks up or something like that."