Features
Love Connection: ‘The Whole Record Was Choking Me Up’
By Doug Wallen
Love Connection co-conspirator Michael Caterer talks to DOUG WALLEN about the song on the band’s new album that makes him emotional, the fact he doesn’t indentify with being a “musician” and his plans to release another album this year. Photos by KARL SCULLIN.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
Dubbed nothing less than “cosmic enlightenment” in the press kit, the second album from Melbourne quartet Love Connection doesn’t fall shy of that. Bookended by instrumentals that include a 20-minute ambient title track, Euphoria finds bliss in both rippling guitar-pop and oceanic drones. Like their self-titled 2010 debut, it teems with wordless open spaces. Featuring the Pets with Pets team-up ‘Home on the Wave’, the album was self-produced with Robin Mai (James Reyne, Birthday Party) and boasts an eye-catching cover image by Karl Scullin (KES).
Despite those collaborations and the pliable work of bassist Nathan Burgess and drummer Dean Noble, Love Connection remains centred around the creative core of singer-guitarist Michael Caterer and keyboardist Kobi Simpson. It’s them on the cover, it’s them producing and – more often than not – it’s Caterer who births the songs. In fact, those instrumentals were played entirely by him, and he’s already been working on a third Love Connection record all by himself.
After launching Euphoria, Love Connection will do a second stint in New York City, following a visit there last year. Below, Caterer talks meditation tapes, “musicianship” and other topics with his characteristic daydream-y intelligence.
I really like ‘Day to Day’. That’s the pop single.
That’s the last one we did, actually. The very last song.
So you wanted to be sure to get it on there?
Yeah, well, I’ve been moving into a different songwriting life. You just move into other things. I guess my ambient influences weren’t so direct [on that]. With the songs now [since Euphoria], they’re shorter and more pop-based but they have the qualities or the instruments that capture them in ambient way, like old meditation tapes. So that’s the difference now. I’m enjoying the challenge of writing pop songs again.
‘Nature’s Vice’ and ‘Forest’ have an outdoorsy, meditative vibe to them.
It was natural the way it came together, including the titles. With creativity, there’s a sense of clairvoyance that arrives in anything. Things start to fall in place and you just accept them and go with it. I listening to a lot of Glenn Branca: his Lesson No. 1 in electric guitar. It’s funny, because the first Love Connection album was starting with songs and riffs and verses and choruses and then stretching it out with all the jams. And this one started with all the periphery and worked its way in. Strange.
So there’s not these duelling impulses to either write “songs” or jam out?
It might just be embedded within me.
But they’re not at odds with each other?
Nah. I never thought about it that way.
A big talking point for Euphoria is the title track. How did it get to 20 minutes?
Like I was saying, I was really influenced by a lot of long pieces. There’s a guy out there called Joel Vandroogenbroeck, from a German group called Brainticket. I got given his record by a friend, Meditations Vol. I. It was just so good. I loved it. So I started collecting cheesy meditation cassettes. I really wanted to do this thing where I get musicians I knew who don’t really make meditation music and have a blog where they improvise a 20-minute piece. At first it was going to be a cassette, like 20 minutes each side. But I had no money. So I kept the 20-minute idea [for the blog] and decided to have a go at it myself.
It was a hazy afternoon, really nice and quiet. I ran a Casio through a bunch of pedals: it was so loud. Then I just picked up keyboards and that was it. I did it once and didn’t go back. It was one thing. The guys came over [because Love Connection had a rehearsal] and they were standing out the front like, “C’mon, c’mon!” I was playing those melodies on the headphones and talking to the guys: “Five more minutes, I’m almost there.” So I just clicked it off. A lot of what happens with me is I approach something and then come back. [Later] I was listening to it going to bed, and it had such a humanised gesture to it. I just really enjoyed it.
I watched Dean [Noble] at the airport once; we were doing a tour. He was like, “Play me that song you were talking about.” We were tired and he was sitting there and he listened to it and he literally fell asleep. Just drifted off. And then right at the end where it all comes back together, I was watching him and he just sat up and it just got him. To me that meant a lot. That was exactly what I envisaged to do. I really loved it from that point on.
So it’s just you on the finished song?
Yeah.
Is that something you would ever try to do live?
Yeah. The keyboard that I did the melodies and the arpeggiation on got stolen when my car got broken into shortly after. I’ve got sampled bits and pieces of it, but I also play the melody on guitar. I’m looking to do that and some of the other instrumentals. Yeah, the instrumentals are just me sitting at home. I recorded them and Robin [Mai] mixed them. Track one [‘Piezoelectric’], track 10 [‘Forest’] and track 11 [‘Euphoria’] were done at what I call “my studio.” [Laughs]
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
It looks like the album was self-produced with Robin’s help.
Yeah, yeah. It’s like the first record: I had it all in pieces. Not all of it, but I had it in pieces and then it came to fruition that we could record. To me, that was hard letting go because the demos have all the inspiration and they feel right. But now I was gonna redo it. I was a bit too precious, so I was like, “No, we won’t capture this instrument and this instrument the way they marry up together.” I would ask Robin to open up my [pre-existing] session [instead], and we’d build upon it.
The new songs are already being mixed by Robin into another album that’s coming out later this year. This time I’m just doing it at home, just myself, and recording the drums and everything on it. If we’ve got the ability – the finance and all the rest of it – we do it in the studio. But if we don’t, we just do it like this. That’s where some portion of Somewhere Nice Studios is: just in my own gear and my own space. And for those magic parts that I wouldn’t change because they just wouldn’t be the song – that moment or those hours or that clairvoyance that brings those parts together or gives you that feeling that’s important – that’s why I keep those.
So you’re doing another album this year?
That’s what I’m working on. It’s kind of like post-record blues but without the blues. We went to New York [last year] and we were just organising all the business side to it. And I enjoy the business side of all this stuff. I mean, I could always sit at home and write songs, and I’ve been doing that for a long time. But you’ve got to enjoy the challenge of it and get over the problems of the business side if you want to enjoy playing to different groups of people. You’ve got to put yourself in a place where you’re a bit more well known. I mean, there are bands that just go, “Oh, here’s our stuff” and somebody’s like, “I’ll do everything,” but it’s never happened to me. We work hard for it, and I’m not ashamed to say I find that a quality.
But I was just like, “Far out. End of the year, I’ve been working fulltime, making a record, touring so much. I love these songs but I’m sick of hearing them. I could listen to them but I just don’t want to because I’ve got other feelings.” I know there’s something there, so every day I’d just go home over the summer period and Christmas – when we were taking it easy and putting together the photos for [Euphoria] – [and] spend my time making these songs that I had. But I didn’t even have them: I’d just sit down and start them all on a basis of classical guitar. Just as big and arranged as the other stuff, but it was just a totally new approach.
I was like, “Ah, this’ll be a solo thing maybe.” Then Karl Scullin, who took the photo [for Euphoria], was like, “What’s the point of doing it solo? If it’s your name and your songs for the other stuff anyway?” But none of the other guys are on these songs at the moment. I’m doing the bass and the drums. That’s why I kept in mind for it to be solo, but everyone’s keen for it to be the [third] Love Connection record.
You and Kobi are the core of the band, but the rest of the line-up is pretty set, right?
Yeah. [Kobi and I] do a lot of the business side. Dean’s got a lot with uni and Nathan [Burgess] has his band [Great Outdoors] and he does a lot too. Their personalities add a huge deal as well. But [Kobi and I do] all the grants and writing the stuff. We tried incorporating other people’s songs, but it became just kind of a loose-ended jam band and the ideas weren’t strong and confident. It didn’t take off. It didn’t really feel right. So we settled with our roles. They’re my songs so I’m out the front, and Kobi really supports that with her belief in them.
And the guys just really enjoy putting in their solid abilities. They’ve grown so much in their abilities. I’ll bring a song and Nathan will do a bass line and it’s so good that we’ll go back and revisit [it around] that part. Those guys help build it. Both guys are quite open. When I show those guys a song, they go, “Oh, that’s good.” But when I show Kobi a song, she’s like, “That one’s shit.” And I’ll be like, “You’re right. That’s shit. That’s me and my ego, not me and my intuition.”
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
How did that cover image of you two come together?
Kobi was working on a shoot for somebody else. She was asked to be on a cover for a Lehmann B Smith record. He’s a good friend. Karl Scullin was doing the photo and she said, “He’s a really nice guy. You’d get along with him.” We wanted to steer clear of the twee vibe of the last record [cover]. We love the cover and it suited that record, but [this one is] a more conceptual album. We met up with Karl a couple of times and then organised a photo shoot. It was pretty wild. It just goes on and on, and fatigue sets in. And you just start doing weird things. [Laughs] There’s just a thousand photos of different things.
Was there an idea to make the cover image tie into the album title?
Totally. We had ideas and we were going for things [but] it was the last two hours of probably 16 hours of photo shoots. We were like, “I don’t know if we’re going to get anything.” And Karl was like, “No, we’re so close” and keeps clicking and clicking and clicking. He was like, “Look, we can always organise another one, but I think we got something.” Casually, as Karl is. Then I saw the thumbnail of it [later]. When I saw the thumbnail, I was like, “What’s that!?” It looked like a troll or a goat or something, with the hair down. But it had that clean, stylised beauty to it. So we were kind of winging it, and we put a lot of trust in Karl.
“I don’t think it’s worth calling myself a musician. It feels a little bit strange. I just say I play in a band.”
During our last interview you said, “We’re not musicians in any way.” Do you still feel that way?
I mean, our abilities have grown and our knowledge has grown. So you feel like, “Yeah, you are.” But I have feelings to make an expression [with] and I have a connection to music and it just so happens that I have the ability to use a guitar. I don’t know what happens next, but the one thing I could do is just sit and record stuff. Just create it. It’s all connected with these feelings to express. They all come together in this point where … the turning point for me of thinking about my abilities was when I listened to the master of ‘Piezoelectric’. I was like, “That’s the most beautiful song I’ll ever make.” That song makes me feel – it sounds corny – really emotional. There was a period where I couldn’t really listen to the whole record because it was choking me up.
Is it that you might deny yourself a lot of interesting ideas if you started thinking like a “musician”?
Yeah. I’ve been turned off by “gigs” and “muso” and all those terms. I don’t want to be categorised. It’s almost moved to something that’s so abstract, and then it moves back. I feel like, just for the sake of identification, I don’t think it’s worth calling myself a musician. It feels a little bit strange. I just say I play in a band.
Maybe someone who thought of themselves as a musician would decide they have to write songs as a band and then go into a studio with a producer to make an album, like that’s the only option. Obviously you’re not doing things that way.
No. I don’t even know the 12-bar blues stuff. It’s more like there’s chords and you hear something and it just feels good and you set up the mic and four hours later you think you might have something you’re enjoying. And then two days later you’ve got it. That’s just abilities and the way it feels. The connection with sound and the connection with feeling.
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