On Recording Kookaburras With "Evil-Sounding Laughs" & Baffling Bowie Lyrics

One of the fun things about this job is gaining access to advance copies of albums and getting excited in anticipation of how releases you're particularly frothing about will be received. Such is the case with Methyl Ethel's second long-player Everything Is Forgotten, which this scribe couldn't help but gush about to interview subject/the outfit's mastermind Jake Webb. Sweet Jesus, it's perfection! And our dancing feet can't wait to wear the soles out of our shoes while experiencing these beautifully crafted bangers in a live setting. "I'm glad that you like it," Webb says when told Everything Is Forgotten is a deadset masterpiece (told you we gushed). "It's gonna be fun to have it out there in the world, 'cause that's where it belongs — in other people's lounge rooms, not mine."

When asked whether he had a clear vision of where he wanted his music to take him in the early stages of Methyl Ethel, Webb admits, "There's still no clear vision; I just wanna serve the song, it's no greater than that. They live in their own world, and I love making them, and that's the golden zone." His relationship with live performance "has its ups and downs". "It can be great and it can be painful." Initially, one of Webb's "bucket list" items was "to play overseas". Tick. "I basically review what I've been doing on a yearly basis and think, 'Should I just bother anymore or not?' So, yeah! That would've been one of the goals, so it's nice to have achieved that." His band was booked to play Primavera Sound in Barcelona last year "which was pretty fun", Webb allows. "I dunno, I'm not really a festival lover... Now, I guess, I just want to play good shows; just build a good live show and, you know, we're working on it. And, yeah! The technical side of live performance is, I guess, what I'm into at the moment.

"We've come off a few years doing it as a three-piece and I think we really got to a point where we hit our stride, and we were a little bit — you sort of get to the freedom point when you can just feel it up there. And now we've come back and we thought, 'Okay, that's good. We sort of maxed-out as that and now we've sort of added another person, and rebuilt some of the songs, and it's just back to the grindstone and work on it until it hits that point again... I guess, just like a sport or something: you just wanna be getting to that personal best," he laughs. "I just think there's so many great artists out there and, you know, people who probably don't get the opportunity that we do, so why not make the most of it while we've got it."

"I just use my iPhone, mostly... It's pretty good having a little field recorder in your pocket 24/7."

On whether he's conscious of how songs will translate live while he's in the composing and recording stages, Webb informs, "I'd rather use the studio as as much of an instrument as anything else and just, like, build the song into what it kind of needs to be. And then reverse-engineer it when it comes to trying to play it live, which is fun in and of itself — and a good challenge, too." The discussion turns to how songs can keep growing, almost becoming their own individual entities through live performance, and Webb concurs, "Exactly. And I'm interested in, like, the creating of sounds themselves. So that means that you have to kind of figure out and maverick a way to produce it live then, I dunno, I guess that's just part of the fun of it."

Webb often incorporates field recordings into his creation process. "It's always good if I'm sort of feeling stuck for ideas to build some little ambient tracks," he divulges. So what does he use to record found sounds? "I just use my iPhone, mostly... It's pretty good having a little field recorder in your pocket 24/7," Webb acknowledges. When asked what we can listen out for on Everything Is Forgotten, the frontman enlightens, "There's some kookaburras in there somewhere. I was recording down at my parents' house and I came home from the beach, and the kookaburras just had the most evil-sounding laughs! Like, it sounded really quite evil. I had to put that in there. And I was alone, as well." Wow, that must've been freaky! "It was a good freaky," he chuckles. Listen out for these demonic-sounding terrestrial tree kingfishers on new album track Summer Moon.

Although Webb admits he "used to" enjoy creating at night, he explains, "But I do like to get up and go to work sort of with, you know, a bit of regularity: have a coffee, have a shower or whatever and get to work." Nick Cave famously sits in his office to write every day and Webb admits he heard this "when [he] was mixing the second EP" and decided to "just give it a go". "And it really did work," he enthuses. "It's because — especially when you work from home, it helps if you sort of feel as if you're actually working."

A lot of the lyrics on Everything Is Forgotten were "deciphered from stream of conscious vocal takes", Webb enlightens. "A lot of the time I would just launch into things to kind of put a bit of a foundation, and a bedrock, into the song and then almost translate it," he continues. "Sometimes at least kind of the vowel sounds — obviously they sort of seem to be coming from somewhere; they seem to fit best, yeah." We discuss songs by other artists where it seems jibberish has been left in, not replaced by actual lyrics and Webb laughingly offers, "I always think of that lyric from, I think it's called Sweet Thing, track two [actually three] on Diamond Dogs; he just randomly says "hamburgers" at one point!"