Track By Track: Ainslie Wills

Melbourne singer-songwriter AINSLIE WILLS and collaborator/co-producer LAWRENCE FOLVIG revisit the indecision and triumphs behind making the debut album ‘You Go Your Way, I’ll Go Mine’.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

‘Mary’ (A. Wills)

A post-apocalyptic beach setting and a female character that loosely references the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene (have I lost you yet?).

‘Mary’ was one of the newest songs for us at the time of recording. Given we hadn’t played the song much as a band before tracking, our approach felt very organic and fresh, a feeling that is definitely favoured when you are in studio mode, albeit a converted beach-house studio. The organ intro, done with an acoustic guitar through a Hog pedal, was done just before mixdown and seemed to work well as the opening track.

‘Lemon Japan/Reprise’ (A. Wills / L. Folvig)

A big old white house where a young lady with her ‘hanky full of gems and stones’ sits and contemplates the odyssey ahead of her.

This song was a bit of a battle recording – wise as we wanted to have a live, fluid kind of energy to the song as well as wanting ‘slick’ production. It turns out that this can be a bit tricky when you’re working within the limitations of your ramshackle homemade studio. We worked with this challenge and came up with something that strikes a good balance between what we desired and what was realistic.

‘Fighting Kind’ (A. Wills / L. Folvig)

To leave an old life behind where you were an imposter in your own body and liberate yourself into truth.

This song had a lot of weight on its shoulders. We had played it a few times before recording and it very quickly got pinned as ‘the single’, which can be a problematic attitude to have when recording a song but is sometimes hard to avoid. Appropriately, this was definitely a song we battled with; whilst in the process of mixdown, we had a change of heart and felt like it shouldn’t make it to the album. Thankfully, we managed to create the sonic environment desirable for it to exist as we wanted it to.

‘Stop Pulling the String’ (A. Wills / L. Folvig)

The song takes place amidst a tropical plantation; buildings that contain ghosts from one’s past are crumbling to the ground and, in the end, the ocean white-wash-cleanses the destruction.

On a lighter note, this was a fun song to record. We tracked most of the instruments separately and the recording of it was done in the middle of the process, meaning that most of the technical/sound issues we had early on had been ironed out by that stage, plus Lawrence got to guitar-nerd out with lots of pedals for the instrumental section at the end of the song.

‘This is What I Write’ (A. Wills / L. Folvig)

A last goodbye that, although sad, signals change and new beginnings.

This song, being one of the oldest on the record, had a bit of history. I [Lawrence] remember the day I wrote the guitar part and afterward being compelled to go and buy a tambourine – my first ever, in fact – as I wanted to go nuts with percussion and you can’t go past the jangly treasure that is the tambourine. We actually began recording this one at home well before we decided to go to the beach and record. After trying to recreate the original home demo recording at the beach, we decided to keep the original guitar and percussion tracks recorded in our bathroom as we felt they had more ‘vibe’. We then added strings, recorded in the sweltering summer of 2012 at the Northcote church hall which added a whole new dimension to the song.

‘Ocean’ (A. Wills / L. Folvig)

‘Swimming in an ocean of whoa, swimming in an ocean of woe’.

This is a song that was introduced to the band whilst we were at the beach but had actually been in the back of my mind for a couple of years. We set up to record this one live, we discussed and ran through the form of the song, hit record and played it. There’s always something special about playing a song with a band for the first time: all the musicians are listening and reacting intently and it gives the music a momentum and energy that can be difficult to achieve otherwise.

‘Satellite’ (A. Wills / L. Folvig)

An elderly widow laments her love lost.

This song took a last-minute turn with its arrangement. It was originally going to have a more electric sound, with drums, electric bass and electric guitar. Midway into the tracking session we were totally missing the mark emotionally and not really evoking the story of the song with that particular instrumentation. It nearly got tossed from the album but we tried a softer and stripped-back version with acoustic guitar, bass and vocals; this seemed to serve to song straightaway. I wrote a string arrangement for it to help magnify the dynamics and texture of the song.

‘Liquid Paper’ (A. Wills)

If only we could cover up our faults with a human equivalent of what Liquid Paper is to pen mistakes.

From the beginning we thought ‘Liquid Paper’ was asking for lo-fi treatment; it needed to be raw yet subtle. This song was recorded live with vocals, bass, drums and guitar in a Northcote church hall with guitar and vox overdubbed later. The guitar part that enters after the first chorus took me [Ainslie] at least 150 attempts to get down, as I am not an accomplished guitarist. Perhaps I just should have left it to the guitar expert Lawrence to smash it out. Needless to say, I now know that part like the back of my hand.

‘Weighing the Promises’ (A. Wills)

A shorter demo version of this song had been made for a short film called Perforation, made by Laura Woodward and Jem Selig Freeman. We thought stylistically that it didn’t fit on the album, but something that both Lawrence and I have come to realise more and more through this process – and something that is easy to forget – is that when you are at the point of creation and/or recording mode, THERE ARE NO RULES! In this particular scenario we didn’t really need to be thinking about whether the songs were going to have cohesion or not; they would even if we didn’t try, due to the fact that we wrote the parts and played the instruments. What is important is to stay true to the sound that you desire. Fuck everything else that gets in the way of that.

‘Early Morning Light’ (A. Wills)

A song about liberation. ‘Early morning light, each step I say goodbye’.

One of my [Lawrence’s] favourite songs from the album and by far the most difficult to perform, record and mix, ‘Early Morning Light’ ended up having about 80 individual tracks that we had to mix. When you have a song that you’re really into, you are trying so hard to do it justice but can then fall into the trap of thinking that what you’re giving to the song is never quite good enough. We all had a little bit of that way of thinking with this song at some point or another. As a result I think it has a great spirit about it.

‘Something I Prepared Earlier’ (A. Wills)

Oh boy, do I [Ainslie] think about some negative, weird and pointless shit, especially at night, and I know I’m not alone there. The song’s mantra: ‘There is nothing you can erase, there is nothing to erase.’

This seemed a poignant song to end with. As much as you try and perfect the sound you are looking for whilst recording, there are always going to be things you do differently the next time around. It doesn’t make what you have made any less important. Here’s to “Allowing yourself to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

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‘You Go Your Way, I’ll Go Mine’ is out now independently. Tour dates below.

Sat, April 13 – The Golden Vine, Bendigo, VIC
Wed, April 17 – The Front Bar, Canberra, ACT
Thurs, April 18 – FBi Social, Sydney, NSW
Sat, April 20 – The Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle, NSW
Wed, April 24 – Northcote Social Club, Melbourne, VIC
Fri, April 26 – The Grand Poobah, Hobart, TAS
Fri, May 3 – The Hotel Metropolitan, Adelaide, SA
Sat, May 11 – Railway Friendly Bar, Byron Bay, NSW 
[free]
Sun, May 12 – Black Bear Lodge, Brisbane, QLD