'It’s Hard To Push Back The Fear': Jay Watson Steps Into The Light As GUM

GUM

On his seventh album as GUM, Jay Watson is finally learning to embrace mistakes.

Rather than cleaning up the quirks of his self-recording process with handy digital trickery, Blue Gum Way finds the POND multi-hyphenate and Tame Impala touring member resisting that urge.

“Using Ableton or Pro Tools, it’s really tempting to just edit forever,” says Watson over Zoom from his home studio outside of Fremantle.

“This is probably the one I’ve done that’s the most unedited. There’ll be a whole take where the drums go out for a bit and, instead of being bothered by it, it became my favourite part.”

This newfound approach came partly from Watson listening to a lot of jazz while working on the record, which inspired him to use more live and organic takes. He performed, produced and mixed the album in the same studio where he’s chatting from, with some mixing and production assistance from POND bandmate James Ireland.

He also tapped frequent POND collaborator Jesse Kotansky for string arrangements, as well as James Richardson for horns. Both of those guests wrote and recorded their gorgeous parts remotely from their homes in New York.

A More Personal Approach

Otherwise, everything we hear on the record comes courtesy of Watson – including some very different-sounding vocals on a few tracks.

Utilising a boxy little piece of gear recommended by Kiwi maestro Connan Mockasin, he pitched up his backing vocals on It Happens Almost Every Day and pitched down his delivery on Man Alive and Phosphene Scream, amongst other tracks.

“I was just getting sick of hearing my own voice,” Watson confesses. “The singing is a necessary evil, but it’s like watching a video of yourself. It’s not your favourite part of the process. So I had heaps of fun with this [gear], just pitching it up and down.”

Despite taking some liberties with his voice, Watson made sure that his lyrics were actually clearer than ever before. For someone who has spent decades stacking up disorienting vocal effects and layers of cosmic synths, that’s no small thing. But it’s a crucial element to the more personal and emotional feel of Blue Gum Way.

“It’s hard to push back the fear,” he explains. “I tried to mix the vocals louder than usual, [after] years of burying them and covering them with delay. As the lyrics have gotten better – well, I feel better about them – you’re more confident in putting them up [in the mix].

“And if they are genuine and earnest, even if it’s not Bob Dylan, you feel confident putting them up. Because that’s my writing; that’s what I thought of.”

And while heady whorls of synth have always been key to GUM’s sonic ecosystem, this album notably places more focus on other keyboard instruments. Watson plays a model of electric piano called a Pianet to open the record, and other tracks feature his humble household piano, which once belonged to his wife’s grandmother.

“I don’t really use synthesisers to play chords any more,” Watson confirms. “I’ll do wormy lead lines or bass lines, but if something’s going to be filling space in the mix, I’d rather it be more organic. At the moment, anyway.

“The piano was never tuned properly and it’s kind of ratty sounding. And the Pianet, you can hear the keys clicking. All of that stuff adds up when you’re trying to make music feel alive, I think.”

Juggling Act

After drawing inspiration from becoming a father on 2023’s GUM outing Saturnia, Watson juggled the release of POND’s 10th album Stung! and his collaborative LP with Ambrose Kenny-Smith (King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, The Murlocs) within a month of each other in mid-2024.

 Of course, Watson is no stranger to juggling. He’s been playing in the live version of Tame Impala for almost two decades now, eventually graduating from drums to synths and guitar.

That means he’ll be hitting arenas in Australia and beyond this year to tour behind Tame’s 2025 album Deadbeat, as well as working toward some new music (and gigs) on the POND front.

“It’s always tricky to get all the timing right,” says Watson. “Sometimes you get a good chance to really flog [your own music], and other times you’re just sneaking moments here and there to tour.”

He did carve out some time in February for a spontaneous jam session in Perth with Kenny-Smith, Tame Impala leader Kevin Parker, POND colleagues Ireland and Nick Allbrook and three members from Brooklyn “it” band Geese: guitarist Emily Green, drummer Max Bassin and touring keyboardist Sam Revaz.

Given Geese’s ultra-buzzy status, a brief clip of the session set the internet chattering about a potential supergroup.

“It was about as casual as it could be,” Watson explains. “That was just one hour of improv jamming. We did one thing that’s not so good, and another thing that’s promising. So hopefully that will get worked into something and see the light of day.

“You have to work hard for that amount of press normally, so I’ll take it!”

As for the origin of the jam, it was simply because Geese were in WA to play Laneway, and Kenny-Smith was in town too. Watson is the one who actually proposed the musical mind-meld, thinking that a sequel to his Kenny-Smith collab Ill Times might derive from live jamming rather than file-sharing.

“The first one was made over Instagram DM,” he says. “We weren’t in the same room once. It’d be cool to do the opposite and do it all live, and edit jams into songs. So we did that for a couple of days.

“I think the Geese guys are about 10 years younger than us, so they grew up Tame and POND fans. Sam said we should bring Kevin and Nick in, so they came in for about an hour: Kevin played guitar and Nick played flute. And then Sam put it on the internet and it blew up.”

Keeping It Ambiguous

Blue Gum Way is the first GUM record to be released on King Gizzard’s p(doom) label, and while the “Gumbrose” album that Watson made with Kenny-Smith was intentionally steeped in the rich legacy of soul, funk, and blues, this solo outing is more disparate in origin.

“I wanted it to be more ambiguous, influence-wise,” Watson says. “Not just deliberately referencing things. Because I can rip things off till the cows come home and do a pretty good job of it, but it’s a lot harder to find your own voice and make a whole record out of it.

“I think this is the closest I’ve had to it.”

While its title is itself a sly reference to The Beatles’ 1967 track Blue Jay Way, Watson does pinpoint the influence of two other British acts who made quite different – yet equally mercurial – work in the previous century.

“I was really into Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden and One World- or Solid Air-era John Martyn,” he shares. “Especially the later Talk Talk records: I’ve listened to them for 10 years and didn’t really understand what the music was.

“Even though I like to think I have a fairly good grasp on music and genres … you could hear that [Mark Hollis] liked jazz and classical and folk music, but it deliberately doesn’t coalesce into something.”

Watson’s album achieves something similar. Besides the undercurrent of jazz influence, you may detect all manner of genres bleeding into one another – often within the space of a single song.

Expanding Blue sounds like soul and folk intermingling in the most mellow way, while the aptly named Outrider embarks on a raga-like psych voyage and Man Ray Bay takes a surprisingly pastoral approach to soft rock.

You might hear echoes of Peter Gabriel on In Life and Steely Dan on It Happens Almost Every Day, but those might not even be the same touchstones that Watson had in mind.

Most importantly, he wanted everything to have its own internal logic. “I wanted it to be less [about] putting stuff on because it amused me,” Watson says. “Which I’ve done in the past, and POND does a lot.

“Whereas lately, with me and with POND as well, I’ve tried to have it all sound like one thing. I didn’t put things on for the hell of it.”

Doin’ The Cockroach

After doing some scattered touring as GUM in recent years, Watson isn’t sure how Blue Gum Way might present in live form. It could be as a proper ensemble with strings and horns, or something more stripped-down over backing tracks.

Either way, he’s got his hands full with Tame and POND commitments right now. And after having thrived in those sibling bands since his formative years, he marvels that both are still flourishing.

“We feel like cockroaches in POND, because it’s never been enough to live off,” he says, pointing out that he and Ireland play live in Tame Impala, Joseph Ryan is a professional sound tech, and Allbrook was recently appointed Chair of Contemporary Music at UWA.

Somehow, the five members of POND (including Jamie Terry) have found enough outside work to continue on – and keep playing in the chameleonic ensemble that first started way back in 2008.

That extends to Watson and Ireland touring the world in much larger venues as part of the mega-popular Tame Impala.

“Sometimes we’ll see an old festival line-up, and almost none of the bands are left,” Watson reflects. “So we’re proud of that: being cockroaches. Also, the fact that we’re all still friends.

“There’s different amounts of income and fame, but we’ve managed to keep the egos in check across the board. Which I’m really proud of.”

GUM’s Blue Gum Way is out March 6th on p(doom) Records.

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This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body