Troy, you'd
have to be happy with the album?
Yes, I'm stoked. We had such a great time making the thing and
everything just went to plan . Things went a bit overtime as they
do, but just getting those players together and getting sounds out
of old amps, and Garth (Porter) made it so much fun and took all
the pretence off it for me.
How long
did it take to record?
It was a six week project and I had about 8 songs already written
and completed and we worked on a few more and ended up with 18.
So it was very hard to cull it down to 14.
What stage
are your songs usually at when you get to the studio?
Most are finished. We got to Garth's studio and hung around
with different writers and just spent a bit of time refining things,
you know honing a chorus that wasn't quite right. I didn't want
to be finishing a song just as we were hitting the red button, so
we wanted to make sure everything was pretty much completed. We
had about 16 songs and I dragged a couple out of the woodwork that
I really wanted to do, so those were last minute things. We'd finish
a whole day of tracking with the band and I'd look around and we'd
still feel like playing. So I'd say "you blokes, I've got this
other song, why don't we just bang it down for good luck" and
some of those songs actually ended up on the album.
I see you
have used the country music mafia...Gillard. McCormack, Punch and
co, they play so well together it gives the album a real band sound?
It does and what I was going for was more of what we do live.
I invited Garth along to a couple of live shows and he really enjoyed
what went on. He said if we can just capture what you do in your
show then we are on our way to making an album for Troy instead
of having to worry about anything else. I have to give credit to
Garth because he wanted nothing but for it to sound like mine. He
made me play all the acoustic guitars, and I'm a bit of a lazy bugger
when it comes to that , so I had to drag out a lot of my favourite
acoustics to do a lot of the tracks. We had some that had to be
one-take vocals, which were the two acoustic tracks at the end,
so I had a little Takamine that I used. The engineer was great,
he was really conscious about sound and positioning of the acoustic
to the mike, I was very impressed with the way they did everything.
In your record
company biography you speak about a new guitar you play on the duet
"Time To Say Goodbye" that you do with Gina Jeffreys,
tell me about the guitar...
I had this beautiful Guild guitar, which I originally acquired
from Fender. I was so moved by it. I played it on 'Hey Hey, It's
Saturday" recently and took it back to the motel, and you know
you just can't get it out of the case quick enough. I dragged it
out and kept playing it and had the capo on this certain position
that was really ringing beautifully, and out came this song. I started
writing the lyrics, I already had this little melody established
for it and next thing it just came out on paper. We were looking
at the lyrics and thought maybe this could be a duet. It just came
out looking like you needed a male and female answer question type
of vibe. Having Gina deliver that emotional thing that we had to
get from the girl... I couldn't use my wife to sing on it because
the song was just tragic that track, just so sad, so I thought I'd
get someone who was a friend who could give it that emotional input
and she did a great job.
How do you
document your ideas?
I normally just have this dictaphone and I just have it on me
all the time and no matter where I am, if I'm sitting in a motel
and have this hook in mind I just bang it on that and work on it
when I'm really inspired. Sometimes I'll leave it for a while. I
flick through these old tapes all the time and just see what state
of mind I was in at whatever motel I was in and sometimes you have
some great little secrets hidden away that you'd forgotten you'd
instigated. But I'm not really as good at documenting things as
I should be.
I recently
spoke to Tony Joe White
about his songwriting process which is basically build a campfire
and sit down with a six pack of beer, what are the ideal conditions
for you to write?
I do a similar
sort of thing. I had a bit of time in between touring in March when
I was looking to go and start the album. I wanted to dig right back
into the past and maybe touch base with the influences from the
first album. I really enjoyed the fact that they were such earthy
kind of influences and I wanted to get back to that. I had done
the Nashville route which had come out silvery smooth. It really
wasn't me. In the end you want to be the sort of character you portray
to everyone else and nobody knew me as a slick American style country
artist, so I took a couple of trips back to where I grew up. I drove
my EH which I have just restored, it just brought all these things
back. I don't know whether you get a second youth when you do things
like that but it just gave me a lot of inspiration to write about
things that are passionate to me.
Read on: Playing live, instruments
and heroes >>
