Made His New Record Sound Like A 'Factory'

"I've wanted for a long time to remove myself from that process," Shane Nicholson admits of relinquishing the producer role to Matt Fell on his latest album, Hell Breaks Loose. "I've always been heavily involved in the structural side of my records, producing them from the ground up, and I've always found that it's somehow dilutes the albums for me. Being maybe there for the scientific aspects of making the records somehow takes a little bit of the shine off it for me. So for a long time I've wanted to make a record where I can remove myself — I've always enjoyed the process but I wanted to see if I could enjoy the result more, you know?

"It's not that I haven't liked records I've made but I just wanted to try this idea of not being heavily involved. But I haven't really worked with anybody or nobody has come into my field of vision that made me feel confident enough to do that until Matt and I started working together. He's kind of like looking in the mirror for me. He plays a lot of instruments, the same instruments; he listens to a lot of the same music and he works day-to-day doing what I do. We've been talking a long time about producing together — we didn't know whether it would be producing someone else together, as a joint project, or a record for me or for him — then this came up and it seemed to come at the right time. And the exercise did work, because now I listen to the record and I love it, and I discover things in it because it wasn't all me doing it. It was so relaxed I kind of didn't want it to end."

Spending three weeks recording Hell Breaks Loose was "changing up" the process for Nicholson, whose last solo album, 2011's Bad Machines, and two duet albums with former partner Kasey Chambers had been recorded live in the studio in three or four days. "I spent 12 months recording [2006's] Faith & Science," he chuckles, "and I won't ever do that again. That was insanity.

"With this record, I didn't have any preconceived ideas. We didn't even have a concept for the 'sound'; it was just song-by-song. Irons And Chains, the song about Detroit, is a perfect example. We were sitting there going, 'We need this to sound like a factory — we need industrial noises.' So we were bashing all sorts of industrial things to kind of simulate that. We had really good fun exploring the songs like that, and they came together really cohesively, and thematically it kind of has — not a theme, it's certainly not a concept record. What I really like about the album is that, unintentionally, it's a little bit of a career round-up."