Guitar Work Vs Audience Connection

A huge Midnight Oil fan, Kim Churchill’s dad was mightily impressed when the singer-songwriter told him that producer Warne Livesey had approached him about recording his third album.

As it happens, Livesey had picked up on Churchill through his interest in the work of late producer Todd Simko, who’d worked on Churchill’s 2012 album, Detail Of Distance. Though British, Livesey has lived in Toronto the past decade, so he checked Churchill, a frequent visitor to Canada, out when he next came through town.

Though renowned for his remarkable pyrotechnic acoustic guitar technique, Churchill will pull back on that on new album Silence/Win in favour of pursuing the song. “The producer probably brought out more of the guitar playing than I initially had,” Churchill admits. “In Backwards Head, he nurtured the body percussion and the tapping bits at the end, and Fear The Fire, the introductory melody is a tapping thing. But yeah, for me, it was probably a two-and-a-half year process of firstly just realising that the guitar pyrotechnics sort of side of things, for me, hits a pretty low ceiling in terms of my own emotional expression, and also the chance to connect with audiences.

"I started to feel a bit like, well, I can incorporate really fancy guitar playing and if I work really hard at it, drop people’s jaws for five or ten minutes, or I can really dedicate myself to the song, put melody and lyrical content above guitar technical abilities. So actually Warne encouraged me to do a bit more of that guitar stuff that I was probably a bit hesitant to move into, which was nice ‘cause he found a way to incorporate it though I was well and truly moving in another direction.”

While Churchill essentially left it to Livesey to choose which of the 40-odd songs he’d written would make the album, there’s a strong lyrical thread that runs through Silence/Win. “I’d reached a point where I was feeling incredibly free, incredibly liberated, partly because of Warne, because I was realising how much of a collaboration it was and how brilliant what he was bringing to the table was. But also partly in life I was reaching a stage where I was kind of lyrically and philosophically in a stage of rebirth.

"I don’t know if it’s like this for everybody, but every couple of years I get myself to a stage of personal joy where everything becomes so clear it’s amazing – it’s so exciting – and it happens for a few months before things start coming back in and I start becoming not so sure of myself and my beliefs, and I was just smack bang in the middle of this beautiful stage… I wanted to call the album Clarity, but unfortunately an electronic artist called Zedd had used that for an album title, but that’s how I was feeling. Everything felt so clear and that was sort of the idea behind the lyrics.”