Another Man's Words

As arguably one of Australia's most acclaimed yet perhaps most underrated troubadours, Jordie Lane has been tirelessly slogging the hard yards for years now. He's toured around the country as both aheadliner and as support for the likes of The Moody Blues, Billy Bragg and Ruthie Foster and released a pair of well-received full-length albums. So while releasing an EP at this point in his trajectory could be deemed odd, Lane still defends the album format wholeheartedly.

“I think an album is a great thing to do, you know – take people on a journey – and I hope it sticks around,” Lane says. “Obviously, the singles thing has come in as being really popular, probably more in the pop industry. I've heard people starting to release stuff on cassette tape again, which is really funny, and I always wanted to release Blood Thinner on that because I recorded it on cassette, but I know people don't want to waste physical materials and stuff. It's cool that stuff is out there on digital but that will all just get lost in computers falling apart, so yeah, let's hope the physical release sticks around.”

Which leads us to Not Built To Last, five tracks recorded during his recent journey overseas where he settled in Los Angeles for a couple of months.

“The inside of it is I went in with an album worth of tracks but I had two different producers I wanted to work with – one in LA and one in Nashville – so I broke it in half,” Lane explains. “We were thinking about putting them together but it was always going to be only if the songs wanted to go together. So we ended up deciding to leave them separate and get this EP out straightaway. Hopefully, there will be another one around the corner.”

Flicking through the credits on the EP, the physical copy no less, it becomes quickly apparent that this is no typical affair for Lane. Well, the songwriting side of him at least.

“It was a back and forth. The first track [Here She Comes] was a collaboration with a poet named Benjamin Wild who features on the front cover of my Sleeping Patterns album with dynamite strapped to his chest. He's been sending me these poems for years and I finally had a look through them about an hour after a flight from LA early this year and I just started singing a melody and recorded it on my iPhone. That song came out like that and was a totally different way for me, using someone's lyrics. Showing it to him when it was all done was cool.

“The second track [Dead Of Light] was co-written with [Brisbane's] Clare Reynolds in Nashville in the week before recording. Lost In You I had five years ago or something that didn't feel right at the time. I showed it to Skylar Wilson, the producer, and finished that one in Nashville as well. That final track, Think I Always Thought, was written and recorded by Brendan Welch from Melbourne; he did an album with Paul Dempsey. That song was always my favourite and it really spoke to me. It was the first time I felt a cover song was made for me to sing and it worked with a country band in the studio, so that one had to go on there.”

Touring can be hard at the best of times, any band will testify to that. But Lane not only indulges in the exercise a lot, but he does it alone.

“To be honest, I'm getting lonely,” he laughs, almost shyly. “I'm getting lonely on the road. During that last tour in Canada my SIM card wouldn't work. So that was isolating – no Facebook, no checking out Instagram or Facebook likes or anything. It was strangely one of the most disconnecting, confronting times in my life. It was scary, I was thinking about things that I've been trying to put away – those deep, dark feelings you don't want to think about. But the sad thing was, I'd find myself looking for places each day with wi-fi and then be posting the shit out of, like, ten photos at once. But it was a good experience and I think everybody should put their phone down for a week and try and deal with some things that are going on deep down. Things I really don't want to talk about right now.”