Check Out The Ocean Party's Super Honest Track-By-Track About 'Light Weight'

Released just a couple of weeks ago, the Wagga Wagga boys in The Ocean Party have put together a detailed little track-by-track for their newest release, Light Weight, now that you guys have had more of a chance to dig into the new music. With that...

Black Blood

Black Blood was one of the first songs to come together for the album. It is half based around the first half of John Steinbeck's Red Pony. As a whole, the book was really crap. Musically, this song introduces Mark to the band with him playing a little solo.

Light Weight

Light Weight came together pretty quickly. It was an amalgamation of a few ideas I'd been trying to find a place for on the piano. If you are looking for them, you can hear a couple of chords that are gluing ideas together, but maybe that's just my ears. The demo went through a number of shapes before everything settled and I started writing the words. Somehow a time and place came to mind and it was easy to write from there. Nothing I had experienced exactly, but a collage of places and events that jigsawed into the story of the song. An alternate past of unrequited adventure. You have to find excuses for yourself when you're afraid to make the leap - like a trophy boat that you can float on the sad old river once or twice a year. All of a sudden, the feeling that something great is coming for you becomes the fear of having missed it.

Phone Sex

The music for Phone Sex was written and demoed very early on, based around some bass riffs Curtis wrote, very un-Ocean Party in sound. We joked that it could be the soundtrack to cruising down the highway on a sweet hog. Lyrically the song began as a description of a particular version of a morbid recurring dream I had been having. I had become a bit obsessed with the passage of time, feeling like it had sped up out of my control and that I was powerless against it.

This song details an imagined future version of myself swept away into insignificance, its working title was "Future Fantasy Call Centre Suicide Sex Pact 2016". This song like all of mine from the album were written, in part, during a 10-night stay in hospital doing medical trials for cash. My only view of the outside world was out at the high-rise offices of Melbourne which inspired the story and imagery.

Guess Work

You wouldn't know it from the final version but I think I was trying to rip off New Order when I wrote Guess Work, it ended up sounding more like Springsteen.

As cheesy as it sounds, lyrically Guess Work is a fuck you to the the powers that be. At the time of writing it I think my eyes were being opened to the atrocities of the US war on pretty much any part of the world that doesn't agree with their fucked up ideals. Lucky for us we don't get a say on the war crimes committed on our behalf which means we are protected by our American allies.

Greedy

Greedy started as a drum beat that Zac had written and a late contribution. Lachlan helped me write lyrics and on the same day we rehearsed it and played it live that night and it's been a staple in the set since then.

Dirty Money

A darker, minor-key track based around a drums and percussion recording that Zac sent through to me one day. I was given some perfume for my birthday years and years ago that I barely used, but on the rare occasion that I did, the familiar smell would trigger all sorts of good and bad memories from the past five or so years. I had been spending a lot of time just hanging out in my room at my new house not feeling very comfortable or “at home” at the time, making myself work on music but going in circles.

Anything

I was living with my sister and her husband when I wrote this song. The Ocean Party had just gotten back from the U.S.A. and we were all homeless (we moved out of our house to save some money for the trip). The depression of returning to normal life after our tour was setting in and we were all feeling it. A relationship fell apart for me and I did a lot of walking and drinking. Because of the ensuing haze I can't really recall where the music for Anything came from. I only had one keyboard at my sister's place, so I know I was limited (and limitation is usually a good thing for me). In my wandering, I realised that I was fixated on my "enemies" — people who hated me, people who I hated. Sitting on the steps of St. Anthony's school in Fairfield (a school I worked at a few years ago) I remembered a time when I couldn't have applied that term to anyone. It really becomes a designation in your mind that you can't see past and I decided I didn't want any part in it.

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Aircon

One of the more avert pop songs on the record this song is all about the horns.

I'm sure we've all had someone older than us talk about how much harder life was back in their day. I've seen the way some of these people live, and their denial that their lifestyle affects anyone else when it come to the luxuries that they have now earned from the hard life they have lived. Be it our consumption of slave-made products from the third world or our excessive use of electricity and unwillingness to make any concessions when it comes to moving towards renewable energy, we have a lot to answer for.

Real Life

As the first song I brought to the band, Real Life will always be really special for me. I grew up with the rest of the OP boys but went away to Uni in Wollongong when they were all moving to Melbourne. I was one of the many many (12?) fill-in bassists they played with over the years. I did all of the big album tours since Social Clubs so actually properly joining the band felt fairly natural, just an extension of what we'd been doing already. But bringing a song in felt pretty different. It's a delicate and fraught process 'joining a band' and that was on my mind a bit going into writing this song. But once we'd all worked on it all of these worries seemed silly, it came together easily one afternoon in Aaron's garage in Stanwell Park, it felt good and it felt like an OP song.

Lyrically, Real Life is about something Loc and I have talked about a fair bit, buying a property outside of the city, building a house and trying to be sustainable. It's a nice idea but you also feel a bit phoney and privileged thinking about it. Like, is that going to make any real difference? This song sort of pisstakes that fantasy. More power to the people actually doing it though. I think the rock out at the end where everyone sings 'my head is wearing out' is weirdly uplifting and that suits the confused headspace the whole issue of positive political action puts me in. There's a line in there about wanking, too.

Grow Up

When I was younger I tried to distance myself from my family and my country upbringing in order to create my own person. I don't think that is totally a bad thing but when mortality comes into play, you realise just how important family can be. This song is something of an apology to my parents for not realising how important they are earlier but also a rejoice that I at least still have the time to make it up.

I think musically it suits the lyrics and Zac ripped out some great pedal steel.

Heatwave

This song took months for me to work out. It was one of those projects that I initially took in the wrong direction and lost the thread. I was staying with my parents outside of Launceston and only had the old piano and their desktop to work with. I made do with phone recordings and MIDI to demo the idea, trying to manage the wonkiness of it was probably what sent me down the wrong road. The lyrics went through a handfull of substantial rewrites, so when I listen to it I always feel relieved that I finally got there. It's about anti-nostalgia - returning to something special to find that you aren't stirred by it at all anymore.

Bringing it to the band revived the song for sure. I was able to hold back on the more clunky chordal accompaniment and let Curtis' guitar substitute it melodically. The sparseness lends a gravity to the words that I was overlooking before we worked on the song as a band.

Negative Effect

The last track on the album was the first one that I demoed. The idea was to start with simple chords and structure that we could flesh out together as one of our more guitar-centric, layered tracks. Classic.