Track By Track: Seja

Brisbane’s synth-collecting SEJA VOGEL recorded her second album ‘All Our Wires’ with her brother Mirko and collaborated with Robert Forster, Wally De Backer and members of Cut Copy and Regurgitator. She reveals the various backstories behind her heavenly pop tunes.

‘Like Fireflies’

[Written by Seja. Produced by Mirko Vogel. All instruments by Seja and Mirko except bass by Ben Ely.]
I wanted this song to have a really nice Stereolab-y groove in the bass and drums. I feel like Ben’s bouncy bass line really fits in with the upbeat squelchy synth sounds in the song. When I demoed this track it had a bizarre drum loop which was really syncopated, so when we were tracking the album it was important for me to incorporate some of this rhythmical strangeness, without alienating the listener too much.

Mirko and I had lots of fun programming all the synths and we took turns at trying to make the craziest noises we could on the Korg MS-20 for the intro and then laid them all on top of one another. The song is about new friendships, whether they be platonic or romantic; going through the motions of friending them, being shy during the initial stages, then shouting it off the rooftops, to togetherness, to compromise, to supporting one another in crisis, and all the other great things that happen when you love someone.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]LIKE FIREFLIES - by SEJA by Rice Is Nice

‘C’mon’

[Written by Seja. Produced by Mirko. All instruments by Seja and Mirko.]
I wanted this song to have a bit of a dreamy feel to it, which was ultimately created by synthesizers and Mellotron sounds mixed with the acoustic sounds of the drums and guitar. I was listening to a lot of Harry Nilsson when I wrote this song. I always liked how he made nonsense words and how it didn’t really matter what he was singing as long as it sounded interesting and made its own phonetic soundscape.

The message of this song is to get yourself up when you’re feeling low. When I was writing it, I remember wanting the melodies to be as beautiful as a Grandaddy song, and I think some of the harmonies and chord changes were definitely inspired by them.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]SEJA - C'MON (RADIO EDIT) by Rice Is Nice

‘When You Said You Were Mine’

[Written by Seja and Mirko. Produced by Mirko. All instruments by Seja and Mirko. Arrangement by Wally De Backer.]
This song about thinking of past loves and the future, and sort of writing a comforting and empowering letter to oneself, reassuring yourself that it’s all going to be OK. The lyrics tell a story about how sometimes one can’t tell if the feelings you are experiencing are love or hate because your mind is just in overdrive, either within a relationship or in the middle of the aftermath.

The song came about during a writing session Mirko and I had at his studio in Melbourne. We made a really simple drum loop and starting playing over it. Mirko had the initial chord progression for the choruses and then I worked around it for a few days until we came up with what it is today. When we tracked the song, we recorded Mirko playing two drum parts which were slightly different. They were then cut up and we recorded a thousand different percussion instruments (well, maybe about 12?) over them, which changed the whole feel of the song. We took it to Airlock Studios, where we recorded some Rhodes and piano and finished the rest of the instruments at my home studio.

The Wally arrangement came into it very last-minute when I gave him my album while I was visiting his studio at the beginning of the year. He had all these great arrangement ideas when he heard the song, and I was really curious how they would all sound. I feel like he added a lot more highs and lows, and shaped it into a much more dynamic and balanced song.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]WHEN YOU SAID YOU WERE MINE by Rice Is Nice

‘I Killed a Day’

[Written by Seja. Produced by Mirko. All instruments by Seja and Mirko.]
This was one of the first songs I wrote for the album. I wrote it on guitar which is rare, as I normally write on keys. The final song doesn’t really have all that much guitar in it, but I think you can tell that it’s written in a slightly different way to the rest of the album. The original demo used mostly vocals as instrumentation and although the final version has many other instruments, layered vocal harmonies play a large role in the second half of the song.

The piano and drums for this song were recorded at Airlock Studios. There is a beautiful grand piano at the studio and I felt so lucky to be able to use it. Even though the parts were far from technically amazing.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]I KILLED A DAY by Rice Is Nice

‘Imaginations in Hyperspace’

[Written by Seja. Produced by Mirko. All instruments by Seja and Mirko except guitars by Tim Hoey.]
I wanted this song to sound as epic as possible and I suppose I wanted the guitar sound to be a little My Bloody Valentine-esque. Tim Hoey (Cut Copy) played all the great noisy guitar on this track, which fit really well with the pitch-bended Farfisa organ and other synths going through a overdrive pedals.

The song is sort of about an intergalactic chase but it also touches on elements of general paranoia and anxiety. I really like how the Roland JX-3P synth break in the middle stands out as all the other instruments cut out. It was supposed to have a big synth solo after that, but Mirko suggested a noisy guitar solo would be much more suited and he was so right.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]IMAGINATIONS IN HYPERSPACE by Rice Is Nice

‘Call Me Wrong’

[Written by Seja. Produced by Mirko. All instruments by Seja and Mirko except lap steel by Tim Curnick.]
This is the first song I’ve ever released that has absolutely no keyboards so I suppose it stands out on the album because of that. I think it worked out really well though and Tim’s lap steel really makes it sound special. The lyrics are mostly, but not exclusively, contrary. I wanted to write a song about that part in all of us that makes us want to do the opposite of what other people project onto us. But then every now again throw in something that is the same as what people expect.

I’ve been lucky enough to play this song live with a few special guest stars doing the other harmony party, including Sarah Kelly (Good Heavens), Tim Steward (Screamfeeder, We All Want To), Tim Morrissey (John Steel Singers) and Mel Tickle (Little Scout), and Dan Kelly. Well on my way to collecting all my favourite musicians in Australia and do a duet of this song with them.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]CALL ME WRONG by Rice Is Nice

‘Hearts Beat in Time’

[Written by Seja. Produced by Mirko. All instruments by Seja and Mirko.]
I love how this song progressed from my demos to the finished album version. It started as an acoustic-guitar finger-picked song and ended up as a synth-y arpeggiated dance song with four-on-the-floor-type drums. It has more tracks of keyboards than any other song on the album. I think there were about 20 tracks of different keyboards.

It’s also one of the only songs I've ever written that has a key change. When we were tracking the song, Mirko and I had a bit of a fight about whether or not the song needed bongos/congas in the key change. I was against it for days but eventually gave in and let him try it. Mirko was right. It needed congas. And now I’m sad they’re not as audible as I’d like them to be.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]HEARTS BEAT IN TIME by Rice Is Nice

‘All Our Wires’

[Written by Seja. Produced by Mirko. All instruments by Seja and Mirko.]
The reason this is the title track for the album is because I wrote this song about untangling all my wires in my life, trying to lead a healthy and uncomplicated existence and basically to cut a lot of the drama out. I thought it was a really nice sentiment and I believe most of the songs on the album have an element of this theme in them. Also, the cover of the record is a giant felt modular synthesiser with many wires, so it was kind of fitting.

This song started off as a very slow, tremolo-guitar-based song and I’ve played it live like that for a long time. I decided to change it because a lot of the songs on my album were all turning out to be at a similar slow tempo and I wanted each song to have its own home on the album rhythmically and sonically. So we changed it around a bit and added a middle eight, amongst other things. It is a completely different song now, but I like thinking back to where it came from and what it sounded like then. This song has been on a journey.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]ALL OUR WIRES by Rice Is Nice

‘I’d Do it Over’

[Written by Seja and Mirko. Produced by Mirko. All instruments by Seja and Mirko.]
Mirko and I wrote this song at one of our writing sessions in Melbourne. It was (obviously) inspired by ELO and Grandaddy chord progressions so we made the drums sound very ELO. Lots of the instrumentation for this song was recorded at Airlock, including grand piano. I spent many hours programming arpeggiators at home that ended up filling out the textures of the background. The song uses lots of Mellotron sounds as well and it’s generally supposed to be a fairly uplifting song lyrically.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]I'D DO IT OVER by Rice Is Nice

‘Die Wolken’

[Written by Seja. Produced by Mirko. All instruments by Seja and Mirko except vocal by Robert Forster.]
I never intended to write one German song per album, but this is the pattern I seem to have created now [following the first album’s ‘Wir Haben Geheimnisse’]. I sometimes like to write things down in German to challenge myself creatively. I moved here when I was seven, so English is naturally much easier for me these days.

So I wrote this song in German and kept thinking it would be really great to have a male voice singing with me in unison or harmony, and Robert was the first person who came to mind as someone who can speak German (we quite often chat in the language when we run into each other around Brisbane) and I was absolutely thrilled when he agreed to sing it with me.

I wrote the song after I figured out how to hammer-on on the acoustic guitar when I was playing around one day so it extremely hammer-on heavy. I’d been listening to a lot of Simon and Garfunkel when I wrote it and wanted a similar guitar vibe. Lyrically the song translated to ‘The Clouds’ and is about how the clouds always know how you feel. Sounds way cooler in German...

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]DIE WOLKEN by Rice Is Nice

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‘All Our Wires’ comes out this Friday (June 21) through Rice is Nice. Launch dates below.

Sun, June 23 – Black Bear Lodge, Brisbane, QLD [w/Scraps + Keep On Dancin’s]
Fri, July 5 – Brighton Up Bar, Sydney, NSW [w/The Wednesday Night]
Sat, July 6 – Grace Darling, Melbourne, VIC [w/Banoffee + Seagull]