We speak to Papa Vs. Pretty frontman Thomas Rawle about optigans, advertising and their debut LP, United In Isolation (purchase here).
What have you been up to today? Today I’ve been recording at home and finishing off this thing for our LP which is like an interactive album on iTunes. These developers from England are doing all the programming for us and I’m doing the designing at home and that’s going to be pretty cool hopefully.
Awesome and you guys recorded the majority of the album at BJB in Surry Hills… Yeah actually we’re here now, we recorded most of it at BJB then spent some time at Oceanic studios as well, which is owned by Jim Moginie who plays guitar in Midnight Oil. It was great because he has all this old gear we got to borrow like really, really old synthesizers, old Moogs and old drum machines so we spent a few days there just putting extra layers on things.
Does that stuff kind of make it on the album, the new gear that you were exposed to at Oceanic? Yeah the way we went about doing the album is we recorded a pretty complete demo version of the album as pre-production. Then we went to the studio we rehearse in which is near where I live and we demoed the whole thing and then I took it back home and recorded all the extra layers at home and made lists of what we had done with the players and we took them into BJB and smashed through the list, and added things and took things away but a lot of the keyboard based stuff we did at Oceanic anyway and it was kind of planned to be in the background anyway. I mean I’ve got synthesizers at home but none of them are as good as the stuff they had at Oceanic like really old Moogs, and they had an optigan which is an organ thing which uses these optical disks to generate sound so all sorts of crazy things like that.
Did the optigan find its way on the album? Imagine playing that live. It would be pretty insane, it’s on the album at the end of one of the songs. There was this crazy part at the end of a song called ‘Bitter Pill’ where it’s all these chopped up advertisements, and they say this crazy message thing. Basically I spent 7 hours a day for 3 or 4 days listening to TV ads and picking words out. I had this sentence, it was more than a sentence, it was a paragraph or so of words I needed to collect to string in order, and when it’s speaking it’s like the Neutrogena girl and the Mercedes Benz ad and all this stuff saying this message. And underneath it is the optigan. It has this tray where you put disks in and it speeds up to produce this Doppler effect, like a weeeeoooow.
When it comes to songwriting which process do you enjoy more and which one do you find more challenging? I only really do one, I write the music first which is usually the guitar part. I really love the way Elliot Smith writes music and he’s kind of got this way where his guitar parts, especially in the more acoustic songs, the vocal melodies kind of intertwine with the guitar parts. So generally I’ve learnt a lot of his melodies in the guitar parts and put the words in after.
What was kind of the biggest challenge with writing the album and the first big statement of who you guys are as a band? Did you guys think much about it, where you aware of that? I tried not to think about it too much, well I’m thinking about it now (laughs). But, when we were dong it I just wanted to make a record we were all happy with and that we would feel proud of rather than worrying about how much people are going to care because I don’t think you can control that aspect too much. So it’s just a record that I just really want, me Gus and Tom really enjoyed making it, there was no pressure really, I record albums at home but you know we’ve done EPs before and we’ve worked at BJB before so we were surrounded by friends. It was really nice and the producer Paul McKercher was amazing he really helped me form everything and let me do all my crazy ideas as well and put a million layers on everything… that was fantastic.
For you guys what was the biggest step up logistically, from recording an EP to recording an album, sustaining a mood and an idea over an entire LP? Nothing technically just because I’ve done albums at home. It was a lot of fun to spend so much time in the studio which was the best thing about it because obviously we’re not used to being in a studio for that long, I was very happy. I couldn’t think of any difficulties really it was kind of a smooth process and I hope the release of it is a smooth process as well. To be honest I’m more scared of that than making it, making it is what I love doing. The other side of it kind of freaks me out because there’s going to be reviews and things like that and not everyone’s going to love it, not everyone’s going to like it all the time and it’s kind of strange having things that you wrote…you know when write in your room by yourself, it’s quite an isolated environment, and then to have what you write scrutinized by the general public is slightly weird. It’s good, I just find that quite frightening.
And what’s the environment like when you’re writing at home, what’s the usual process, where is your starting point? I usually record everything that I write. I go about writing a song by recording it, I write the guitar part first and then I’ll record the bass and put all that kind of stuff down then I’ll take it to Gus and Tom and Gus will write the bassline and Tom will write the drum part. Gus and Tom basically form the song so it sounds better, because usually when I put demos down there’s usually a billion layers so Gus and Tom really really solidify everything they just make it really good.
You’ve mentioned that you write albums by yourself. When you write do decide “this is a Papa vs Pretty track” or does that come after you’ve written it? When I thought I was going to do an album I wrote the album in its entirety, rather than taking songs from different areas. So all the songs are new and are written with the intent of being on this record so anything else I write…I kind of write things on my iTunes, no one really hears it. Actually…with the pre-order you get an extra disk and it’s called ‘Memoirs of a Veteran’ and it’s basically just a set of songs from my archives of stuff. I plan to release all the stuff I’ve been recording over the years. I have a lot of albums backed up on my computer so they’re all getting released like that. But yeah, anything we do with the band we know is going to be for the band.
What’s your proudest moment on the record? The last song is my favourite. It’s just ridiculous – all these layers and all these guitars have been sped up and looped and it just sounds monstrous and that’s my favourite moment. There’s another song, cause the whole record’s pretty crazy in terms of layers, there’s one song called ‘I Felt Nothing’ which is really quiet and the guitar part was really hard for me to play and I had to do it over and over again and I eventually got it, and I’m really proud that – that I could actually do it. Sometimes I write things in my head that I can’t play with my fingers, like my fingers can’t follow my head, but when you eventually do it, you feel very good.
How’s the live show in support of this album shaping up? It’s easy, we rehearsed the whole album as a band and all the songs are written to work as a three piece plus all the other layer so when you take it out in a live setting it’s a bit more raw. We worked it so they translate in a live setting, and they worked in a live setting before we recorded them.
And what’s next for Papa Vs. Pretty? Well the album comes out on May 27 and after that we’re doing a national tour and hopefully that goes well. Then some video clips are coming out. There’s one for “One Of The Animals” and there’s gonna be two other videos as well. There’s also the interactive thing that comes out the same time as the album but I’m not too sure, I’m really excited about that because I spent a lot of time getting it ready. There’s a whole lot of stuff we’re going to do over the year, I’m excited. I just hope people like the album, that’s my biggest fret at the moment.
Title Provided by Papa Vs. Pretty
