Storytellers: Gotye

ANDREW MCMILLEN revisits our occasional “Storytellers” series, whose premise is simple: one song by one artist, discussed at length. This week it’s Gotye, the Lana Del Rey of M+N, but not for the song you might expect.

It feels a little strange to revisit what was once Gotye’s biggest hit in light of the monster that is ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’, the Melbourne-based songwriter’s 2011 collaboration with Kimbra which topped the Hottest 100 and has since clocked up more than 63-million views on YouTube since being posted last July.

Yet without that track’s runaway success, Wally de Backer might not have felt as comfortable in discussing ‘Hearts A Mess’, the third track from his 2006 album Like Drawing Blood.

When I first approached de Backer via email in May 2010 to raise the possibility of a Storytellers feature about this song, he declined, stating that, “I've talked about that song a lot, and I'm working on new stuff, trying not to look back at the moment.” I picked up the thread again in September 2011 and found him in a place where he seems more than happy to look back.

Between overseas trips and a 10-date Australian tour, we spoke at length over the phone about the track that charted at #77 on triple j’s Hottest 100 Of All Time countdown in 2009.

Gotye on ‘Hearts A Mess’

‘Hearts A Mess’, with apostrophe, not without, correct?
[Laughs] To be honest, I think the lack of an apostrophe was just an oversight. Which, for me – someone who’s fairly fastidious with grammar – it’s quite hilarious. It was an oversight at first, then I just decided to leave it.

Does that mean your high school English teachers are cursing your name for making such a simple mistake?
[Laughs] It’s funny. I’m actually in touch with my Year 9 high school English teacher reasonably regularly. He sends me [album] covers to sign for his friends in random places like Scotland and South Africa. He’s never mentioned that before. [Laughs]

Do you feel like you’re in a good place to reflect on this song now, after it’s been superseded by a bigger hit?
I guess so, yeah. I guess the songs are kind of related; the place in the track list on the respective records, the kind of emotional terrain, my own possible scruples while putting together this record [Like Drawing Blood], wondering whether the song ‘Hearts A Mess’ was the high watermark of what I want to achieve with my music – at least in terms of the response from people, the connection with it. So that’s been interesting to see [‘Somebody’] take off and eclipse it, from one perspective.

I believe ‘Hearts A Mess’ was two years in the making. Is that correct?
Yeah. It’s like a macro example of my whole process. It spanned the whole making of the last record.

Where do you start, with a song like that? The final product is so smooth and seemingly effortless, but I know there are so many layers going on underneath.
Well, quite specifically, I started with laboriously editing multiple snippets of Harry Belafonte’s ‘Banana Boat’ song into a coherent, one-bar loop of music. That was an interesting process in itself. I’ve never edited bits out of a track so extensively, to then reconstitute them into such a small amount of music; that one bar. For whatever reason, when I heard the possibility of chopping around Belafonte’s vocals to get into the backing track of that recording, and turn that into a loop to underpin a possible track … I don’t know. Right from the start, that loping groove had something for me that felt – how can I describe it? Like it had something special about it. I felt the desire to keep that specialness right to whatever the end product, whatever the song would become. That pulled me forward through the pretty extreme length of finishing the song.

It’s almost like I committed myself; in that regard, I feel like ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ is quite similar, to a lesser extent, because the little two-note guitar lines from the Brazilian guitarist Luiz Bonfá that I sampled [in ‘Somebody’] also started that song off. It didn’t necessarily have as much of a hypnotic pull for me as that bar loop that underpins ‘Hearts A Mess’. It still felt the same thing. I was like, “This has an aura about it that I can’t quite describe, and I just need to not fuck that up. And anything I add feels like it has to enhance that and feel like it stays with that initial aura that I sense, whatever it is”. In both instances, that would lead me through to the final song.

How much live instrumentation was recorded?
For ‘Hearts A Mess’? None. Oh, not true. The shakers are played by me. [Laughs]

At what point did you begin introducing lyrics to the equation?
I can’t remember whether it was before or after I had some of the “hook” figure, like the Hammond line that’s in there. I think it might have been before. I basically had that kind of loop from the ‘Banana Boat’ song, and I had some textural things like the lofty string bits that provided a sense of the chord progression over that loop. Then I started bits of the verse, and found bits of strings that would give some of the descending chord progression the turnarounds throughout the song … There’s an interim bit in the song with the lyric, “Love ain’t fair/So there you are/My love.” I had that penned as an anti-chorus for the song. The chorus was written quite late, and I had it penned as a textural piece that just had these little drops, that functioned as anti-choruses for probably the good first six months to a year of it sitting around, as a piece.

In the second verse there’s a bit of call-and-response going on between your vocals. What was the intention there? Was that the narrator arguing with himself?
Yeah, as it usually is. Possibly even more so on tracks from the new record [Making Mirrors]. There’s kind of multi-voice conversations happening in a few songs, which I think usually represents the various internal dialogues that sometimes can go on in my head, or the discussions that you sometimes have with yourself: second-guessing yourself, playing devil’s advocate.

I know you’ve been asked this question a lot in various forms over the years, but how much of the song’s narration is derived from personal experience?
It’s pretty direct … Obviously, from the start I didn’t necessarily have one particular relationship or experience in mind, necessarily, because the lyrics in the song were written in stages, as well. But I feel like I was probably writing as much to someone from a certain relationship I was in, or had been in, as much as I was writing to myself, wondering about my own “state of the heart”.

What kind of feedback did you receive from past partners and lovers after the song was released?
Not a lot. I wasn’t with anybody when the record came out. I wasn’t negatively estranged, but I think I was attempting to … me and my ex-girlfriend at the time were attempting to not complicate our protracted break-up by seeing each other. I didn’t get to hear what she thought of it, or if she even listened to it, or if she has possibly avoided my music since then. I don’t really know. But I didn’t get any older ex-girlfriends calling me up going, “Is this about me?” That’d be funny! [Laughs] I haven’t dated any girls who I could imagine doing that.

Did you hesitate before wearing your heart on your sleeve, as far as the lyrics were concerned?
I’ve never written anything so directly that it’s about one person; effectively naming them in a song by being so direct. I always think there’s an element of openness or fiction or embellishment. Even though, I guess, there’s a lot of heart-on-sleeve with the stuff I do. I’m probably going to do more of that. On the new record, most things are much more personal, and if not necessarily specifically about personal experience, then at least things that I find personally interesting, rather than feeling like I’m creating characters on the first record [Boardface], and parts of Like Drawing Blood.

I remember seeing you at Laneway 2008 in Brisbane when you played solo as a headliner. You introduced this song by saying that it “doesn’t even feel like it’s mine anymore”. What did you mean by that?
[Laughs] It’s a weird feeling when a crowd at a festival is singing what’s a fairly personal song, or at least what feels like kind of an introspective song. Then it becomes something of an anthem and you have people screaming it back at you … Especially seeing as, like I said, it’s potentially written as much about myself, or wondering about my own situation with relationships at a particular time, as it was about anybody else. To then have a group of people screaming back at me, “Your heart's a mess!” It’s a weird experience. [Laughs]

Do you still feel that way; that comment about how the song doesn’t feel like it’s yours anymore?
Hmm. I don’t know. Maybe less so since … Now I feel more that way about ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’, especially because it’s been remixed and remixed so many ways unofficially, and not a huge amount of them [are] particularly inspiring to me. I guess when you even engage with the idea of millions of people having perused you half-naked, you start to go, “Hmm, that’s kind of odd. How do I feel about that?” Maybe I choose not to think about it too much. [Laughs] I don’t know about that.

I do feel like that generally about putting music out. I go through these periods where it’s all mine, or all my own expectations and ambitions and my own hope and creativity and fun, but more so my own kind of scruples and depression, and challenges and feelings of uncertainty. Then it becomes something that everybody else either shits on, or loves, or weaves into the tapestry of their life, or chooses to dismiss. That’s when, on a broader level, it feels completely disconnected from me making the music now, as an experience or as a process. It almost feels like a completely different thing. That’s the kind of level on which I mean it belongs to other people, now.

You’ve got a habit of playing ‘Hearts A Mess’ fairly differently live, which tends to keep the audience guessing. Why do you do this?
I don’t know. I struck on this arrangement that incorporated some of Joe Hardy’s remix of the track, which I really liked. I’ve stuck with that, but me and the guys in the band have been talking about whether we should switch back to playing something closer to the album arrangement, which I think maybe we’ll do next year [2012]. That’s the best I can offer, really, to keep it interesting for myself. I really like Joe Hardy’s remix and I thought it had some really lovely re-harmonisation under some of the melodies, so I was keen to mash it together with parts of the original.

I was looking at a few live versions earlier. I think your Live at the Wireless version from 2007 with a 13-piece orchestra is the best version that I’ve seen of the song. Was that a special moment for you in your career?
I don’t remember it so specifically. I’m generally not that into any of the stuff I’ve done live, whether it’s [taken on a] low-res camera phone or whether it’s a decent multi-track recording like Live at the Wireless. It’s usually so far away from… I’ll come across like a real production perfectionist here, but it never really has the vibe for me. Either I’m singing really shit, and I’m beating myself up, going, “Oh gosh, why was I singing so crap?” Or the mix just doesn’t have any aura of what the song, to me, is meant to have; the magic or dreamy quality, or the rock focus of different parts. I still feel pretty disappointed every time I see my Gotye stuff. (laughs) There’s more bits and pieces recently where I’m feeling better about parts of it, but for me that’s an ongoing challenge. It still feels almost like a completely different thing than the world of sound I try to end up creating on record.

Onto the video now. In a similar vein to my earlier question about wearing your heart on the sleeve as far as lyrics are concerned, what about including your mug in the video? Did you hesitate before going for that?
I did think twice, because I wasn’t super into the way that Brendan [Cook, director] composited it into the characters. I was into the clip, and the animation, and the character designs, and the landscapes, all the time-lapse stuff he’d done. But I felt a bit like the video we did of my face was a bit … I feel like it had the “driver’s license” photo thing for me; that cross-eyed, looking at a point slightly below where you usually would at the camera. I look at the clip and go, “That’s weird”, when I’m looking at my face there. I don’t feel too self-conscious about it. I just think that’s one of the weakest elements of the clip: my performance, and the way my face is incorporated into that type of character in it.

I’m not certain, but I have a feeling that was the first time you’d really put your face, your image out there. Up until that point you’d been quite mysterious. Is that correct?
Not really. I did one clip with my friend Jacob Simkin from the Boardface record for the song ‘Out Here In The Cold’ and that’s basically me in a time-lapse, wondering around various locations in Melbourne, in a very baggy, ill-fitting suit.

The ‘Hearts A Mess’ video is directed and animated by Brendan Cook. Did he supply the treatment and you gave it a thumbs up, or was there a consultation process?
Pretty much the former. He had the idea. I can’t really remember – it’s been a few years – whether other people had pitched and I just wasn’t into any of their ideas. I’d seen a clip of his for the American band Smog, which I really loved, which was him animating a variety of watercolour paintings for the Smog song ‘Rock Bottom Riser’. It was just one of the most beautiful film clips I’d ever seen.

I looked him up online and was pleasantly surprised to discover that he was Australian. I dropped him a line and sent him the song and he was really into it, so I was quite excited. He pretty much sent back the treatment. He had most of it together; his friend Duncan [Irving] had done all the character designs. They had some reference shots for the time-lapse photography and I thought it was a fantastic treatment. I went from there. So really, it was all Brendan’s idea, that clip.

Do you have a favourite scene or moment in the video?
I really like the bracken scene in the middle, where there’s eyes hiding behind this waving, shimmering bracken, and the characters walk past in the foreground. That’s just got something for me.

The bit in the video where your character uses his megaphone to blow a few notes, what is that sample from?
The musical sample? That’s a Hammond organ from a pretty generic organ record from the ’60s. I have it still, but I don’t remember the song or the album. It’s two or three notes that I grabbed and then stretched and pitch-shifted to make that melody.

How many samples are in the whole song? Do you know that off the top of your head?
Not off the top of my head, but I could count on two hands, probably. Let’s see: that Hammond loop, strings and bells, the other strings, harp, jazz drums, funk drum solo, the guitar bit, strings … Yeah, I reckon we’d get up to between 15 and 20. Not a huge amount. Depends on what you think of as “a part”, I guess. There might be three or four layers of violin parts … [There’s] one I remember quite painstakingly chopping note-by-note out of random classical records.

When I was finishing the mix, I had that descending vocal part in the second chorus, but I knew I wanted it to be strings with vocals, and in the first chorus just be strings, before it kind of becomes [sings] “Whoa -oh-oh-oh-oh!” Before it becomes a soccer chant. I hadn’t really got it together by the time I was in studio with Frank [Tetaz] mixing the track. It was truly up until the night before, I was up to a hundred classical records and I was trawling them, looking for individual notes of violin or cello to cut out and make into this monsterised string sample. I managed to find that eventually. When you listen to them isolated, they’re super out of tune and really funky on the track. In the mix, they work really well.

“I managed to manipulate and arrange the sounds together to make something [that’s] much more than the sum of its sample-y parts.”

What do you think about when you play the song live nowadays?
I don’t know that I really think of anything specific. I try to get into the reflective mood. ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ is a bit similar and that it’s very much inward-looking, and introspective in terms of being low and softer in the verses, and then a bit more outward-directed [in the chorus], when it’s kind of high and screamy. Whether it’s at the audience, or whether it’s at the other person in the song, or maybe “the other me” that I might be singing to. If anything, I think I put myself in the headspace of going, “[I’m] by myself in the corner singing for the verses.” But for the chorus, maybe I’m picturing the sense of looking outwards as opposed to looking inwards. And for me that’s just a very generic [sense of being in] dual places to sing the song.

What does this song mean to you now with the benefit of hindsight?
I’m proud of it as a production, and as an arrangement. I think it’s got a really nice pull to it in terms of building attention, and waiting for the chorus quite late. I really like all the texture of the sounds that I sampled in it, and the way I managed to weave them together. As a song, I feel a bit like, on the one hand I’m quite into the directness of it, especially the line “Your heart's a mess.” On the other hand, I feel a bit self conscious about it, like it’s a bit hammy, or something. I feel a bit like, lyrically, I’m not sure I’m 100 percent with it. But I’m still very proud of it as a tune and as a recording that I made.

From that perspective it’s something I still would go back to and go, “Yeah, I did something pretty good there.” [It’s] like a reference for trying to do other stuff, for me. It’s still one of the moments I’m prouder of in terms of how I managed to manipulate and arrange the sounds together to make something [that’s] much more than the sum of its sample-y parts.