In Their Own Voice

“We sort of started just tinkering on our own,” The John Steel Singers' frontman Tim Morrissey says of beginning work on Everything's A Thread. Already known as a band with a great love of experimentation and musical adventure in the key of pop rock from a swag of EPs and their 2010 debut album, Tangalooma, this time it was about dissecting what truly lay at the crux of the sound their label Dew Process has deemed “a beautiful mess”.

“I bought some pretty basic recording gear and we'd go up to [guitarist] Luke [McDonald]'s parents' house in Coolum - up the coast, down in their basement - and demoed song things and we just kind of really enjoyed the sounds that we were getting… I don't think the label was ready to send us to a studio or anything yet so we were like, 'Stuff it, let's get some bits of recording gear and we'll go up to the coast for a few weeks and give it a crack at doing it ourselves.' We got a lot of it done in the first six weeks and over the next six months we added a bunch of stuff to it in our rehearsal space.”

As accomplished musicians that have always drawn from the vast palette accessible to multi-instrumentalists, a factor that has certainly added a joyful spontaneity to their shows. Morrissey and co. took great pleasure in building a cache of studio gear for the record.

“I didn't want to buy boring new stuff that people record with so I would just look at any old photo in the studio - Motown and Stax or like Sly & The Family Stone in the studio was a big one - sort of any older band studio pictures I could find. I'd go: 'What's that mic?' And try and find out what it was, and to be honest even without knowing what that mic sounds like I would get it. I read a lot of stuff of how the Motown drummer might tune his kick drum or something like that and then we flimsily attempted to recreate it… It was really fun and I think it gave us all a huge appreciation of working in the studio and that's probably one of our most favourite things to do now…”

In idyllic surrounds overlooking the beach, the Singers cooked meals together, played Todd Rungren and The Wipers records and took full advantage of their engineer Miro Mackie's other job as a wine rep as Everything's A Thread was stitched together. Bringing the lineup back to the founding five members following a rotating cast of bass players added a further element of cohesion and an unexpected bonus that instrumentally reiterates the album's title - a gift from Tangalooma producer and living legend of Australian music Robert Forster when he called just as the lads were stuck for a song name.

“I think that was good for a number of reasons, mostly because we found out that Scott [Bromiley] is an excellent bass player and there's a pretty strong focus on this album around the bass lines as well. Rather than Scott or someone else telling another bass player how the bass should go, obviously he's just getting a feel for it straight away.... A lot of the jams came after him starting to play bass lines, so it was pretty integral to the album. It's just a bit more concise having only the five people as well.”

Morrissey admits a feeling of agitation as he awaits the album's release date, though feels strongly that Everything's A Thread more accurately represents just what it means to be The John Steel Singers.

“I think with the first record it was, well for starters there was a few tracks on there that we were told to put on, that we had to put on, that we didn't necessarily want to have on there, from earlier times. Whereas after Tangalooma it was a completely fresh slate; all of the songs are on the album because we want them on the album. I think it's definitely a lot more groovier - it's a lot more interesting. If I think of… one of those more geeky, nutty music lovers hearing just the singles off our last album, they might not necessarily get into it that much and so they might not ever get the album and listen to the tracks on there that we were really a lot more proud of, like Sleep and the weirder, groovier sort of numbers. I feel like this album has a lot more of just the sort of tracks that we're interested in.”