A Song Is A City Revisited

Reaching #2 in the ARIA charts, A Song Is A City put Fremantle’s Eskimo Joe on the national map, selling double platinum plus – more than 140,000 copies. It also saw the trio and their co-producer/engineer Paul McKercher take home Producer and Engineer of the Year gongs at the 2004 ARIA Awards, while the single Older Than You earned them the Best Group ARIA the following year. 

Come Down

The story of this album is a lot to do with a really incredible point in time with bands in Fremantle collaborating with each other. Again, there was that meeting of skills and innocence. Everyone was going down to the Newport Hotel in Fremantle on a Wednesday and getting drunk on $2 beers and then working on each other’s songs. So you had bands like The Sleepy Jackson, End Of Fashion, Little Birdy and Gyroscope all forming and we were working on each other’s stuff. So we had this fantastic jam room in this house on Baker Street, where a lot of this record was demoed – lots of really great songs came out of that house – but before that we were on Hampton Road in Fremantle, just around the corner, and Rodney Aravena, who ended up playing in End Of Fashion, the Sleepies and everything, he was my housemate for years and we had this jam room and I remember kind of waking up one morning and him feeling pretty down and this song I think was that moment of, ‘Come on buddy, pick yourself up – we can do this.’

And it was also a reflection of… I started talking about him and then of course, as always, ended up talking about myself, just talking about the wear and tear of the realisation of what the kind of lifestyle I was leading ends with, which is it’s kind of harsh on your body. Everyone romanticises it a lot, but like Tim Rogers said, “There ain’t nothin’ romantic about the hours I keep.” You spend a lot of days on the road and a lot of time not sleeping in tiny cars driving long distances and that sort of stuff. I think I’d just got back from touring [previous album] Girl for probably two years solid and my body was feeling [like] it was about to fall to pieces basically!

From The Sea

This is such a typical story with a lot of people’s records, but it was the last song to come along. We had the album basically written and I’d actually given the song to two friends of mine, one of them who went off and formed Little Birdy and the other, Andy, who had a band at that time who continued the name of our studio in Baker Street. But towards the end of recording A Song Is A City, we were like, “We kind of need one more song,” and I was, like, “Well I’ve got this song,” and we jammed it in the jam room after we’d pretty much demoed the whole record and we were like, “Yes, we’re keeping that song!”

I’ve always been a massive Police fan so there was a bit of that going on but really, thematically, as a song, like, it really captured that whole album because it’s about that oncoming anxiety, like you feel a tidal wave of something is about to hit you and you can feel it coming towards you, and I would do this walk into Fremantle every day and I would see these big storm clouds that would be pushed in across the ocean and then the storms would hit, and I always felt that was this great kind of metaphor for how it feels as the shit storm’s approaching you [chuckles].

Life Is Better With You

Obviously I may have been listening to a little bit of Neil Young at the time [laughs]. So it’s basically got that Down By The River jam going on. That came from a night where I was just sitting around with my friends taking stock of what had happened the night before, and then it was kind of an appreciation of my friends, because for four or five years I’d been on the road, I worked really, really hard every time I came home to keep those connections with my good friends in Fremantle and I think anyone who works in a band will tell you they draw a lot of strength from that, coming back and having your mates and being able to reconnect in that really normal way. But we were all, like, 23, 24 at the time, so we were all still going out and getting into trouble at night, as you do.

Older Than You

I know this sounds like a weird thing to reflect on but the whole Girl [album] for me was, like, a falling in love record and it was my first big, proper relationship in my life, and basically A Song Is A City was the break-up record – a lot of it documents that – and Older Than You was this kind of me feeling I was so much older [laughs] than, I’m so much more evolved than my poor girlfriend at the time who I’d just basically broken up with…

A Song Is A City

And then I just pretty much put it out there – “Yeah, I may have been with somebody else.” With that song, you come across a song once or twice a year if you’re really lucky that reminds you why you write music – you press play and you’re so completely transported. I don’t know how it is for other people but when I hear a great song I feel like it was on the tip of my tongue but somebody else did it first, you know? It’s like, ‘Ah, I get that.’ And it reminds me that if I keep digging I will get that song.

After one of our Newport Hotel missions of drinking $2 beers all night, I was up watching Rage and I was like, ‘One more song, just one more song,’ and I’m glad I stayed up because a video clip of Bill Withers on The Old Grey Whistle Test came on singing Ain’t No Sunshine, and we all know that song, it’s such a standard, you go to any shitty pub in the world and there’ll be some douchebag doing a cover of it, but the song itself is fucking amazing, and he would have just written it and he’s got this shit-hot band behind him, playing it live, and it’s mind-blowing, and I woke up the next day and I did my walk into Fremantle – as I say in the song I’m like walking in the park and I’m thinking about all these kind of things that I’ve got to face up to – and then I came home and just started putting that song together, and Joel [Quatermain] was in the jam room working on a friend of ours Steve Parkin’s first record, and I’m, like, “I’ve got this really great song and you’ve got to listen to this song,” and played him that and that night we all got together and started jamming it and that was the song.

Don’t Let It Fly

It’s a story about myself and Rodney and his partner Isabel, my housemates at the time, and I was kind of talking about just getting in trouble with Isabel all the time [laughs]. You know, when you live with a couple, you become the scapegoat, so I think this was me telling her to chill out in song form. But I also kind of wrote that song for somebody else – I wrote it as a real country song for a friend who I was working with who had this more acoustic country style – and then, as these things often go, I thought there might be something in this song, and it became what we like to call a really good bridging track on the record – it just kept the movement of the album going. We always do records thinking this is side A and this side B, and that was really like the end of side A.

"You come across a song once or twice a year if you’re really lucky that reminds you why you write music – you press play and you’re so completely transported"

I’m So Tired

This was a psychedelic jam that I’d worked on that I then brought to the dudes and I was, like, “I really like this idea,” and I always like the idea of songs on record that aren’t ‘song’ songs, if you know what I mean – they go on their own journey a bit – and that song we recorded in this kind of big old crazy massive limestone house up the top of Solomon Street in Fremantle, and we worked really hard on that song. That was the hardest song to get out because I wanted to be all ‘arty’ and super dooper all over the place and everybody else was probably… We were listening to a lot of Wilco and stuff at that time – that was like our favourite band – so everyone wanted to bring it back to that place, and the tension, but it ended up at that place and I love it. It’s one of my favourite songs on the record I have to say, because it just hints at something else and something a bit different.

Seven Veils

I’d just been reading about Mata Hari, the WWI double agent, and of course the Dance Of The Seven Veils, which she was very well known to have done, and the myth goes that Salome, the step-daughter of King Herod, did it and she drove him insane, and I think there’s a beautiful metaphor in that. But really, it’s just about that relationship/interplay/sex thing that couples have to go through and stuff, and, yeah… I think it’s pretty self-explanatory in the lyrics [laughs].

Smoke

I actually wrote Smoke at the end of Girl, and we kept jamming on it – it was just one of those songs that didn’t really go away. And it’s amazing, we still play that song live and even though it’s on A Song Is A City, it’s definitely the oldest song in our set. We don’t generally play any songs from Girl at all these days, but that song for me, I dunno, I love it because it really captured… A lot of the way that I write, I try not to make it too ‘Dear Diary’, but kind of do it almost journalistically – I’m reporting from this moment in time and I’m making a record of it – and I think Smoke is really one of those things. And again, the whole album is this real kind of me struggling with my relationship and trying to justify to myself why I want to leave this lovely girl who I’m with. That’s the weird thing about writing records is it gets preserved in history [chuckles] forever, so again Smoke is self-explanatory. Obviously I’ve got a bit of a cold when I’m writing the song and I’m prone to smoking the sneaky joint here and there, so I’ve obviously been smoking too much weed and I’m kind of, ‘Okay, if I don’t stop smoking then this cold’s never gonna go away,’ and then I launch into the storyline of those moments that you have with somebody else.

Carousel

At [the now defunct Sydney-based recording studio] Big Jesus Burger, there was this little wind-up carousel – it was really old and had that kind of “ding-bong-ding-bong-dong-gang” – and so we recorded that and had it on file and knew that we wanted to do something with it. So we worked out the chords and I wrote it as this kind of, I guess, a nursery rhyme. All of our partners at the time, we were pretty much on the road for like eight to nine months of the year, and it was a nursery rhyme to them just saying, you know, ‘Go to sleep and dream of your man there close because when you wake in the morning he’s gonna be gone and that’s it, that’s the life we lead.’

It’s funny ‘cause that’s the only song we never play live, and I’ve been rehearsing it for these shows and it’s really interesting to go back, and I keep thinking, ‘Man, I could have made this so much better [laughs] but I had to keep singing over the top of the carousel thing we’d recorded. My fondest memory of it is doing the guitar part out in our backyard – we thought it would be ‘really cool and crazy’ – and of course it didn’t actually sound very good, but if you listen to it you can hear birds cheeping and stuff in the background.

This Room

That was basically about our jam room. And there were a whole lot of other stories, my stories of course, going on about infidelity and all these kinds of things, but this jam room was great. By the end of A Song Is A City, we’d have [had] about five or six different bands… We had a bit of an open door policy; if anyone wants to come in and work on tunes, we’ll just get in there and we’ll do it together, and like I’ve said it was a really beautiful moment in time – everyone was doing demos and getting signed straight away, and that was kind of unheard of in Perth at that time, which was really exciting. But of course no one was cleaning up after themselves [laughs], so I’d come into my jam room and I’d have all my stuff set up and there’d just be shit everywhere and I just remember looking at it and thinking, ‘Whatever happened to this room?’ And that of course became the metaphor – the room was my relationship.

Car Crash

Again we were doing these tours – I don’t even know if you can do them anymore but at the time you could gig six nights a week and a lot of the time we would do these gigs and drive six hours in the rain to the next… We basically got on the road and went up and down the east coast between Adelaide and north Queensland continuously, and a lot of those late night trips I would just be… I didn’t get my license until I was 24, just before A Song Is A City came out, so I would always be in the passenger seat, and if you haven’t driven a car before your fear of it all going horribly wrong is pretty strong. So it was literally ‘I don’t really wanna die in a car crash tonight… with my bandmates.’