Aural Artistes

“One afternoon, the band said, 'What if we were to really make this count, and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow will be that once we've finished the album, we'll fly to New York and record the whole thing live?'”

That's Melbourne singer Dallas Frasca's summary of why her band upped and off'd to New York for her second album Sound Painter: to record an album in just six days. In total, the group had been working on the record for two years, and before leaving for New York, they spent countless weeks in permanent, intensive rehearsal. In retrospect, the decision is one that appears as much like a reward for all their hard work, as it does a kind of purging.

“Yeah, before we went to New York, we spent every single night in a recording studio,” Frasca explains. “We were like, 'We're flying the fuck to New York – the songs had better be good, man!'”

In the six day span it took to record Sound Painter, Frasca recalls that its sound shifted from what the band had slavishly rehearsed, changing with its new environment. But this organic change was something the band expected, even embraced. It all became part of the mythos of the album's creation, and formed the artefact of the album in its finished state.

“We're all pretty self-determined, and passionate,” she explains, “so we really wanted to get it right first time, you know?”

But, of course, that never happens. It took the band many, many takes.

“We had this big sign on the wall that my drummer painted before we went into the studio that said, 'It Is What It Is,'” Frasca intones rather seriously. “It may not have turned out exactly how we wanted it at that particular moment,” – and here she's talking in more a matter of degrees – “but oh my god, we listen to it now, and we're very proud with what we achieved. It's just so far from what we were musically capable of, say two years ago.”

The challenge of recording something to sound live is quite a difficult thing, too. But, as Frasca explains, they've “always been quite a strong live band,” so this was sort of a natural fit.

“I had this moment at the beginning of the songwriting of the album where my guitarist was sitting across from me on the couch,” the singer recalls, explaining how she was struck by what a 'gifted musician' the man was. “I could just hear him constantly [while we were] playing. I felt like, in that [moment], that we were only offering maybe ten percent of what we were musically capable of. So the idea of the album was to capture everybody's strength in every single moment in every single song. That was our job.”

As to where that expansion leaves their music now, Fransca wistfully assures that the band, despite “firing on all cylinders” still has many new places to go.

“It's like an apprenticeship that goes for a number of years,” she smiles. “I feel like we've done our apprenticeship together as songwriters, and now we've begun writing our first real album.

“There's so much passion and love, and we all have the same vision, which is so hard to find, even in a friendship – in anything, you know? To have that in a band… I feel very blessed. Here's this big thing that we've achieved together, and I've written all the stuff I want to write. I think, when you go through crazy kind've moments like this, it can define the kind've person you are.”