Goin’ About His Business

Jordie Lane is plumb tuckered out, stretching back in bed as he enjoys a rare three days off while pondering the events of 2012.

“The last year's been crazy, just like heaps of touring around Australia and I've been to the States and Canada, and I'm heading to New Zealand and getting back the day before I get up to do the Brisbane show, so yeah it's pretty nuts,” he says wearily. Lane also squeezed in his theatrical debut as Gram Parsons, a role he more than willingly reprised in duet form on several occasions with none other than Billy Bragg while supporting the British legend's recent Australian dates.

Getting a jump-start on 2013 with the release of new single Fool For Love, Lane very clearly articulates why the first taste of his “tough, hard, fucking third album” is a departure from his folk roots.

“It's been really good, like it was a little bit daunting at first because it's kind of a very different sounding song for me to bring out compared to my previous records; [they're] more kind of stripped back and traditional sounding in like blues or folk music, whereas this is leading a bit more to a kind of harder hitting sort of rock song with different elements like the gospel choir and trippy guitars and stuff,” Lane says of Fool For Love, which gained iTunes' single of the week in both Australia and New Zealand. “That line 'Fool for love/slave for fear' kept going around for over a year or something and I never did anything with it. I probably didn't think at the time, but when something does keep coming back to you like that it kind of shows that it has some weight to it. So I actually finally wrote verses and we recorded it; it's kind of like a blues song really, it's a 12-bar blues sort of guitar riff and that was how I started in music playin' just like little blues songs. So it felt kind of normal and natural for me but for the production we did want to make it a bigger – not anthemic – but a much bigger sound than what I've had on previous albums because I don't really want to get bored of my own voice and [be] repeating myself.”

Recorded in LA with Grammy Award winning producer Tom Billing (Kanye West, Beck, Fiona Apple), who also worked on Lane's 2011 album Blood Thinner, the chugging, cheerful alt-rock song was lent the skills of a legendary drummer.

“Definitely Matt Chamberlin was a big part in the sound of it because he just got out all these different percussion instruments and a huge big South American drum called a tous drum – this massive hollow tree log that gets eaten out by termites and then they put a pig skin around it and call it a taos drum,” Lane tells. “It's like a huge big marching drum basically, and we hit that in the room – he had like 20 or so drum kits stacked up on the shelves in the room – and every drum skin and the walls felt like they just shook from this drum. And it turned out that it was not a drum that you could tune but the actual note that was ringing from hitting that drum was the exact same as the key note of Fool For Love. So it was ringing in a real low F and so I'm like, 'Well, we got to use that on the song!' How often do you get a pig-skin, tree-trunk drum to shake a room in the same key?

“It was just like a friend of a friend thing; it wasn't like I was looking for him or looking for some famous drummer or anything like that,” says Lane, who has built an impressive network of American contacts from six trips in three years. “I'd met him before in a bar in LA a couple of times and he was really nice, he was keen on the music and he had a studio himself – he'd recently bought the room off a guy from Death Cab For Cutie and it was in the same building called Sound City where Nirvana did Nevermind and Tom Petty did – oh, I forget which album there. So there's like all this history everywhere you go in America and so it feels amazing as a little Aussie goin' over there and recording with someone who's recorded with Tori Amos and Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Nicks – it's crazy. And like in the same building that Nirvana did Nevermind –  I was listening to that when I first took a drag of a joint when I was a teenager! And yeah, it's crazy but over there when you're in those places of course you're gonna run into those people or record in the same buildings that other people have 'cause that's just people goin' about their business.”

Lane gets a real kick out of America's rich musical history, though his visits are as much to do with the opportunities afforded artists of his genre.

“Well, I think it's definitely both of those things. Also, personally it's like a weight lifts off my shoulders and I get an extra sense of freedom and even a boost in confidence or self-esteem when I land on American land – it's really weird. There's something like what a lot of travellers say, they get that freedom from responsibility and history… I think it's because I spent so much of my life in the same suburb in Melbourne growing up and kind of only ever moving five minutes away from my family home – going to America is like finally leaving the nest,” he chuckles.

Midway through an Australasian tour celebrating the release of Fool For Love, Lane is looking forward to bringing his full band to Brisbane for only the second time ever. And then it's back to LA after Christmas to finish off the new record, one that is already shaping up brilliantly if Fool For Love is a good indicator.

“It's definitely got clues as to the rest of the songs, but a lot of the other songs are more in the songwriting style of some previous stuff,” Lane reveals. “[I'm] making the production and the instrumentation a lot bigger in some songs – that's definitely representative of Fool For Love and that's where we're goin' with it. It's just trying to get that middle ground so that it's not losing the weight of what I've done for so long, which is just singing and playing guitar with one voice. So you're trying to get that kind of power across, which can sometimes be lost with too many other instruments, so yeah that's the challenge.”

Jordie Lane plays the following shows:

Wednesday 12 December – Black Bear Lodge, Brisbane
Thursday 13 December – Drill Hall, Mullumbimby
Friday 14 December – Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle
Saturday 15 December – Notes Live, Sydney
Sunday 16 December – Clarendon Guesthouse, Katoomba