Slow Cookin' With The Yearlings

It's been four years since The Yearlings delivered their last album, Sweet Runaway, but they're finally back with their fourth, All The Wandering, another subtly sublime collection of alt-country/folk-based observations on life. “We try to create a bit of space in the lyrics as well as the music,” explains singer, songwriter and guitarist Chris Parkinson, his singer/songwriter/guitarist life partner Robyn Chalklen the other half of The Yearlings.

“We actually recorded the whole album in winter last year as a duo, just Robyn and I, and I guess we probably had close to 45 songs that we thought were, a) good enough, and b) finished enough as well, and so we whittled it down and whittled it down, and during the process of recording at home in our studio we kind of realised that we were both hearing different things and bigger things and more of it. That's when we started thinking about a horn section for this record, which is new for us, and a female choir, and also bringing in Harry Brus on bass, who's an old mate of mine from the old Sydney days.”

Parkinson met Brus, who's been around since the '60s and played with pretty much everyone, in the early '80s, and the juxtaposition of a rock/funk bass player with a country drummer, BJ Barker, from Kasey Chambers' band, gives the new album a little twist.

Another important element in the making of the album was Adelaide-based engineer/producer Mick Wordley, who recorded and produced all three previous Yearlings albums. “He's been there right from the start. His involvement with this one was probably a bit more intensive. We'd get together with him on Wednesday nights and over a bottle of red we'd whittle down and edit and just try to put things in a tidier form where arrangement-wise they just worked. So it was good to work with him in that way too, we hadn't done that before, and he has some really good ideas.”

Four albums and 12 years into a musical career together and Chalklen and Parkinson are yet to sit in the same room together and co-write a song from scratch. “Every now and then we'll come up with ideas together, like when we're just playing together and working on songs or whatever, but I guess we never really sit down together and say, 'Let's write a story about, you know, X,' and start from scratch. Why that doesn't happen I don't know. That's just how it works for us. What I love about writing songs with Rob is when it's really in the formative stages. That's when we often get our best ideas. So I've not heard anything of hers, we'll always record that version. We'll often find there'll be a little guitar lick or a vocal thing that we do which we just carry on because that'll be that little gold nugget that you sometimes find in a song. Then we'll actually have to work at that part.”