Wolfmother"We are so close to having this record completed. It's been about 15 months of on-and-off recording in about four or five different locations… We've mixed and mastered about eight of the tracks, and there's probably going to be about 12 tracks that end up on there.”
The sense of anticipation in the Wolfmother camp is building up to a fever pitch right now. Cosmic Egg is three years behind the band and things are settling down after the mid-year line-up reshuffle that saw Stockdale include a dedicated keyboard player and rhythm guitarist into the band. Then there's the work on album number three, which has been keeping Stockdale and his gang of collaborators and co-conspirators busy. The new record, which Stockdale reckons will be out by March next year, has been consuming Wolfmother while they have laid relatively low in 2012. You can hear the quivers of excitement in the frontman's voice as he talks about the band's new material; he's even happy to let slip album titles – the only true sign that an LP is almost ready for release.
The scope of the forthcoming record, tentatively titled Gatherings (“We're looking at Gatherings as a possible title. That's probably the best we've got so far.”) has made 2012 a quiet year for the band. The record they've been working away at is the biggest undertaking of Stockdale's career, “I self-produced it and I've funded the whole project as well, which has been… interesting.” And if that wasn't enough pressure on the frontman, Stockdale has set himself a pretty damn lofty goal for the music as well.
“I've been around long enough now, and had enough opportunity to be involved in music and doing this style of Wolfmother, that I really should be able to make a pretty good record. Like, if you don't like it then that's probably just because you don't like Wolfmother, because, essentially, I don't have an excuse at this point to put out a crap record… I'm lining myself up for criticism there, but that's just the way that I look at it, I should be able to do the best that I can do at this point.”
Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter
The recording process for the new record has seen Stockdale utilise the knowledge he garnered working on the band's massively successful 2005 self-titled debut and 2009's Cosmic Egg to create something that matched his vision for what Wolfmother should, and could, be. Something that didn't suffer under the weight of compromise and represented his vision of the band.
“Sometimes making a big record, y'know where you're going in with a big budget, big producer, it's a bit intimidating and you find yourself making a lot of compromises for the greater good. You get put in these spots where you're like, 'Maybe I should just let this happen so everyone will be happy'. And what I've found after doing those records is that I find myself in these situations where it's like, 'I never did like the guitar tone on that record. I kept my mouth shut about it and then three years later I still don't like that guitar tone'.
“What I've learnt is that you've got to be happy with what you do in the studio because if you're not, you're still going to be unhappy with it in three, four years time. So this time I'm just trying to make a record that I like, which sounds simple, but it's a lot of work when there's so many different components to the record.”
As with just about any discussion of Wolfmother's music, our conversation with Stockdale turns towards what some of the new stuff sounds like. This is, after all, where the band have been blessed/cursed with people applauding/criticising how they chose to interpret their influences for pretty much all of their career. But all of that talk, the relentless Zeppelin, Hendrix or Sabbath comparisons, hasn't tempered Stockdale's passion for proudly waving the flag for the bands that have inspired him. The guitarist is happy to talk about what Wolfmother fans expect on album number three.
“One of the songs has a total Southern rock Texas boogie ZZ Top-kinda vibe, then there's others that have a Danzig kinda-metal epic element and then there's another song that has a sort of Stones-y blues feel and then there's another one that's kind of like a full-on Devandra Banhart folk-style song… I'm throwing out other artists as a reference point but essentially I have morphed this album into this very unique thing, my own thing.
“I'm aiming for a record full of songs that trigger off your imagination and you drift off with the record, as opposed to the kind of record that's exciting for one or two songs or after one or two listens you get that feeling that there's nothing left to explore there… I want to make an album, y'know, because if there are only three songs on the thing that people can bear then it should be a five-song EP.”
Though 2012 has primarily been a year for Wolfmother to focus on album number three and writing the songs that meet Stockdale's high standards for the band, they've played a handful of high-profile gigs around the world, keeping up their live chops and figuring out what to do with the band's newly expanded line-up. When the conversation turns towards the band's plans to welcome in the New Year at the Eatons Hill Hotel, Stockdale explains what his newly born incarnation of Wolfmother is capable of.
“At the moment we've got Elliot Hammond from The Delta Riggs in the band and he's playing a lot of congas, bongos, percussion and harp so we've started bringing songs like Love Train back into the set, and with all the instrumentation it's just a total trip. We've never played that live with the conga intro that's on the record and it's just such a wild thing to hear that intro live and then to have the crowd just go nuts straight off…”
That's the kind of a metaphor of how we're playing live now – we can go through the first two records and say to each other, 'Let's find the overdubs and the little bits here and there that now we've got more people we can actually do. Let's do all of this stuff!' In the past it's been like, 'Don't worry about that backing vocal, don't worry about that part there. Can you sing? No, you can't? Okay, we don't need that part there then'. You kind of make all these compromises when you're playing live and now we're like, 'Let's stretch it out, get the full panoramic view of these records and make them live'. And that's really refreshing for the set.”
It's clear talking to Stockdale that after the hard, quiet year of work, the band diligently chipping away in 2012, the Wolfmother that is preparing to enter 2013 is feeling as refreshed as the current live show. And as the frontman gets ready to bring in the New Year with a bang, or at least a banging rock'n'roll show, it seems he's destined for a big, successful 12 months.
Wolfmother will be playing the following dates:
Monday 31 December - Eatons Hill Hotel, Brisbane QLD
