The P Word

Melbourne musician Lehmann B Smith is certainly not one to rest on his laurels. Last year the former Queenslander released four well-received albums under his own name, as well as contributing to another lazy four records belonging to friends and musical acquaintances. This year he's only planning on releasing two albums, something of a dry spell for the DIY exponent, even if the songwriter attests that he should be busy writing because it's in his job description.

“I've been writing songs for ten years now so it's just kind of a cumulative thing, I guess,” he ponders of his busy release schedule. “I feel like I'm a songwriter so I should be constantly doing that, and the more you do it, the more albums you tend to make. It seems strange to me that my approach is so against the mould, because making albums is awesome fun and it just seems to be something that you should be doing whenever you can.

“One album, Girlfriends, that I released last year, I got a grant to do so I recorded that in proper studios and home studios, but most of the time I just do it myself which is good. I realised when I was making Girlfriends how long it takes when you have to go over to other people's houses – normally I'm just working on bits and pieces all through the day and you don't really notice how much you're working on something.”

Many of his albums such as Girlfriends, The Big Dry (2009) and Little Milk (2012) have been broadly conceptual in nature, a trait that Smith is drawn to when compiling a record.

“A lot of times I'll just get a few songs and then realise that there's something connecting them – some theme or something – and then I'll just kind of elaborate on those,” he tells. “But it helps me to do albums, having some sort of basic underlying theme to it, because it's easier to map out and work out what the album needs – it's more like a movie in my brain or something and I can see what scenes need to happen or something. I don't know, I like albums where it's just a dozen songs just thrown together and not really linked in any way as well, but when I go to do that I find a lot of the time it doesn't really get me excited. It's just like, 'Here's a bunch of songs', and I feel like you can make them all seem more important if every song is enlarging the songs around them.

“At the moment I'm doing one that's like a classic folk rock sort of deal – like [Neil Young's 1970 album] After The Gold Rush or something – but I haven't actually started doing that yet. I've got all the songs and I'm going to try and record it as live as possible at my friend's farm, even though I know that going into the hinterlands to record an album is a lame trope now. I'm just doing it for the chillaxing possibilities. I'm probably going to do two this year, and the other one's a synth album I've been working on for a while, like synth pop and videogame music, I'm not sure. Mixing it up keeps it fresh, and I like the idea of being a student of music and songwriting so I can't keep doing the same thing over and over or I'm not really learning anything. It's hard to tell if changing things up makes any difference to the core of what I'm doing, but it's fun to do and hear.”

Lehmann B Smith will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 9 February - The Waiting Room, Brisbane QLD