Dallas FrascaWe met him at the Folk, Rhythm & Life Festival two years [ago],” Dallas Frasca recalls of her first meeting with producer Andy Baldwin. “We'd just finished a show and I'd just walked off stage and there was this beautiful-souled man looking at me with this scruffy hair and he said, 'Hello, I'm Andy,'” she chuckles at the thought. “So I said, 'Hello, I'm Dallas,' and I had two drinks in my hand and I gave him one and we hung out all weekend.
“And it wasn't until after that weekend when I looked Andy up to catch up and have a beer, 'cause I knew he was [living] in New York, on Facebook of all places, and I was, like, 'Oh my God! He's a producer, and he's produced all these incredible bands!' It's human-being connections at the end of the day regardless of their CVs, so there was no question in our mind after we'd met Andy that we wanted to work with him on the album.”
That album is the band's second album, Sound Painter, and that CV cites the Melbourne-born-and-raised engineer-producer Baldwin as working with artists as diverse as Bjork and Chrissy Amphlett, The Living End and The Cat Empire. Before they took themselves off to New York, however, Frasca and the boys – fellow guitarist Jeff Curran and drummer Peter McDonald (no bass player!) – had to get a bit more serious about their songwriting.
“We'd always been really focused on our stagecraft and improving the live show and once the lightbulb went on we thought, 'Hang on, why don't we put all that energy into songs?' Songwriting is the core most important thing out of everything, so we took the time off and spent four and a half months rehearsing pretty much every night.
“Of course, going two suburbs across to record at a studio in Melbourne was nowhere near as enticing as it was to fly internationally and record in Andy's environment with all these vintage instruments… We made the right decision; Sound Painter is the work we're most proud of to date.
“And we wanted to make a record of an event. It is what it is in that moment, and all the great albums… Led Zeppelin, I'm such a great fan of Led Zeppelin, and you know, the tempos speed up and they slow down, and they do on our album as well. It's not about being right or being particularly on time; it's about capturing the right expression, and having that foundation musically underneath doing that exact same thing.”
This conversation takes place shortly after the band finished a three-hour Skype meeting with their European tour promoters, Frasca's signature on the dotted line in a deal with French label Verycord imminent. “We went over there in 2008,” Frasca remembers, “and we had such an incredible response, and we've just been building the foundations of a really great team over the last few years… Coming third in the International Songwriters Comp [with first single, All My Love] really opened some big doors for us over there. So we can't wait! We're gonna be doing some dates in the UK and France and Switzerland, and possibly Belgium and Germany at this stage.”
There are also two trips to Canada pencilled in, with the possibility of a trip to New York City to maybe record the next album, again with Baldwin, with whom they were catching up that coming weekend, back in Melbourne. But that's a whole other story.
Dallas Frasca will be playing the following dates:
Friday 28 to Sunday 30 December - Woodford Folk Festival, Woodfordia QLD
Tuesday 1 January - Lookout Bowls Club, North Stradbroke Island QLD
Thursday 3 January - Yamba Bowling Club, Yamba NSW
Friday 4 January - The Brewery, Byron Bay NSW
Sunday 6 January - Blues & Grooves Fest, Beachcomber Hotel, Toukley NSW
