HalfwayBack in 2014 Brisbane eight-piece rock troupe Halfway turned heads with their fourth album Any Old Love — a gorgeous family narrative set in rural Queensland — and now they've parlayed that success into stunning follow-up The Golden Halfway Record.
Recorded in Nashville by esteemed producer Mark Nevers (Lambchop, Lou Barlow, Howe Gelb), Halfway's fifth finds them steering away from any past country influences and focusing on the rock'n'roll side of the band.
"We wanted to deal with memory but not nostalgia, remembering but without that schmaltzy fucking obviousness of, 'When I was a kid it was great.' "
"It wasn't something that I can remember sitting around discussing, it just started to musically kick back against the last album — in a good way," offers bassist Ben Johnson. "The acoustic got put down and the electric guitar got picked up, and there were a couple of songs floating around towards the end of Any Old Love that made it onto this that changed pretty dramatically in the way that they played them over that time."
"People always talk about Any Old Love being a country record but I don't really think of it like that," continues co-frontman/songwriter John Busby. "I wanted it to have an AM sound, a classic radio sound like Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers or something, because that sort of stuff was what was on the radio all the time when I was a kid [up in Rockhampton] and what I was really into had a lot of that shit in it, but I guess a bit of it came out quite country."
And the pair explain that while the new album may not have a narrative it certainly has a theme.
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"After the Any Old Love thing it took me a little while to figure out what we were going to do next writing-wise, I was concerned about that," Busby admits. "We write themed albums a lot, and when that one went to that end where half-a-dozen songs were part of the same narrative, it was good to get away from that.
"We wanted to deal with memory but not nostalgia, remembering but without that schmaltzy fucking obviousness of, 'When I was a kid it was great.' That can get a bit hammy, so it was nice to deal with it in a broad strokes kinda way. All of these songs deal with time — we talked about themes of time a lot when we were writing it. A lot of these songs are looking back, and they're about how you can have these huge turning points in your life but they can just be the tiniest little thing."
"It's like there's these points that exist just after something's finished but before it's changed to the next thing," Johnson continues, "these snap moments which you won't recognise at the time, but which later take on different meaning."
"Later you realise, 'Oh, that's over now, that's done,'" Busby muses, "which is kind of what this album is about — points in time, and just the fucking relentlessness of it. It just goes on and on and fucking on, it's merciless."
