Timothy Nelson & The Infidels Indie Focus

It obviously doesn't hurt that singer/songwriter Timothy Nelson is a multi-instrumentalist, as well as the co-producer of the debut album, I Know This Now, the Perth resident released last year with his band The Infidels. Then again, so determined was Nelson and co-producer James Newhouse to make the album not sound like a low budget indie release that they did all they could to ensure that happened, even if it meant taking two years to record. Take for example the album track that won Nelson last year's West Australian Music Industry Song of the Year Grand Prize, Speak The Truth In Love.

“My original demo had fake synthesised strings on it,” he laughs dismissively. “It had a charming quality but it was… When me and James were kind of knuckling down and recording every night, we had this commitment to sort of make everything as real as possible. If we wanted a harpsichord, we tracked down a real harpsichord as opposed to just using a sample, so things like that, trying to use as much analogue process as possible 'cause the records we were listening to while we were making the album were all, like, Beatles records or Bob Dylan records, where the sounds had a lot to do with how organic the instrumentation was. So when it came time to redo that song it was a no brainer to get a string section. It just meant more money really – we just saved our pennies and got it.”

Which is pretty much the modus operandi across the whole album. He'd pulled The Infidels together after a few years of gigging around Perth as a solo singer/songwriter so determined he was to get away from that sort of sound. Meanwhile back at the album…

“It was a case of picking songs that would work together on an album because I like the idea of you should be able to listen to something from the start to the finish and it all works together rather than just throw your latest favourite song on.”