(Pic by Marty Williams)

Forget what you know about Dan Brodie: the pedal steel, the outlaw aura, the smouldering country-rock of his first two albums with the Broken Arrows. His new album Beautiful Crimes is a pop record of the most lush and potent kind. Joe Matera goes in to investigate.

Was the rockier musical direction taken on Beautiful Crimes a conscious decision on your behalf?

DB: I think it was just more of a natural progression and maturing. And something to keep myself amused I suppose. (laughs) I made a decision to try something different and take more of a melodic route. And because I moved around a lot and moved house a lot, I had access to a lot of people’s record collections. And I think the album is an amalgamation of all those different record collections.

What was the writing like for this record?

DB: It was written over a period of a year and a half and usually in my stop and start fashion of whenever the songs came out of me. I kept recording demos and initially had about 30 to 40 songs demoed but they were all in the similar vein as my last two records. I wanted to hear myself try to write a bit more differently but still remain consistent. The majority of the record was written on the top of a shop front situated next door to a pub where I lived for six weeks. And the songs were inspired from the going ons down below in the St.Kilda street. I was privacy to a lot of different conversations going on and that kind of thing. So I sat down every day in that period and wrote songs inspired by all of that.

The album was recorded in three different studios around Melbourne, Hothouse in St.Kilda, Sing Sing in Richmond, where we spent three weeks, and producer Barry Palmer’s studios in Fitzroy where we did all the post-production work and where we added some other things to the mix.

Did you also take a different approach to the recording of the this album compared to your other two?

DB: For this record I let the musicians that were playing on the record just do their own thing. Sometimes I wouldn’t even come in to the studio as I trusted Barry in knowing what I wanted for the songs. This was remarkably different to my previous records where I was there for like 12 to 14 hours monitoring everything that was going down in the studio.

I hear you had a bit of trouble with amplifiers blowing up?

DB: Yeah that was an interesting situation because my brother Chris, who plays in my band, went through five different amps and each one just blew up! And it became this on going thing with every single one just literally blowing up on us. To this day we still don’t know why that happened. Eventually we settled on a 1970s JMP Marshall 100watt and cab which managed to hold itself together. But we were playing incredibly loud in the studio and we couldn’t stand in the same room as the amps.

On some songs we also used a Fender Deville. Guitar wise we had the choice of about a dozen guitars but the main one was a 1960s Fender Jazzmaster which belonged to Barry Palmer and my brother Chris played a 1979 25th anniversary Fender Stratocaster. We also used an early 1980s Gibson ES-335 and a ’79 gold top Les Paul, both of which are sprinkled on various tracks on the album.

Any acoustic guitar you hear is a Maton.

We also spent a lot of time experimenting with different keys on songs just to find the best sounds that were suited to my voice.

A lot of the songs were actually tuned down a semi-tone to a tone to get a droning kind of sound happening on the guitars, something which works really well for my voice. We also tried the songs at different tempos to help find the kind of mood for the songs too.

What has this year got in store for you?

DB: It would be nice to do more things overseas, as we’re going to Paris, France this year. Chris and I went there last year and did some shows there and have two of our records already released there. We’ve got a national Australian tour happening in April and afterwards I’d like to go to New York and do a solo tour. My goal is to keep making records that I’m satisfied with and keep building an audience and have the ability to tour majority of the year. And keep exploring new lyrical and musical ideas.