Track By Track: Sweet Jean

Redemption and the lack thereof: Sweet Jean’s debut album ‘Dear Departure’ explores such classic themes with a gentle, caring touch. The folky duo’s SIME NUGENT and ALICE KEATH guide us through the happy, the sad and the ‘happy-sad’.

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‘Tomorrow Morning’

“We’ll be chasing down a vision like an ember in a boat”

‘Tomorrow Morning’ is a sunny two-step about wistful optimism, and it’s the closest we’ll ever get to writing a love song. It was the last track written for Dear Departure, and it acts as a kind of ‘prelude’ to the album – introducing a lot of the sounds, textures, themes and ideas that feature throughout. We’re not entirely sure how the two protagonists in the song got to where they are, but something big has happened along the way. Maybe it’s paradise after the fall.

We recorded the album with John Castle [Washington, The Bamboos]. He’s got a great musical brain and is one of our favourite human beings. Mostly it was just the three of us in the studio picking up whatever instruments were required. We had a lot of fun recording this song, throwing every sound we had at the introduction – including clarinet, autoharp, prepared piano, electric and acoustic guitars, strings and percussion. John has a real knack for layering sounds in the studio, and creating sonically rich and textured recordings that sound open and warm.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Tomorrow Morning by SweetJeanMusic

‘Hello Concrete’

“You look so bright, you move so slow. My dear departure…”

‘Hello Concrete’ snaps you out of the hazy pastoral optimism of the opening track, and onto the daily treadmill. The song is about the big realities that you didn’t actively choose, and the small things you do every day to find a spark. It has a nostalgic feel to it – the repetitive piano part is played on an old upright, and sits against Ross Irwin’s shimmering string arrangements. It helps create a ‘happy-sad’ feel that we spoke about a lot during our recording sessions.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Hello Concrete by SweetJeanMusic

‘Parachutes’

“A pretty coloured parachute direct to paradise”

This song was written in Room 6 at the Tamworth Hotel. We’d been playing ‘Parachutes’ live for a while before going into the studio, and we really liked how it was working as a duo. When it came time to record a definitive version for the album, we had to think long and hard about the best way to approach it. Lyrically, ‘Parachutes’ is set in a strange and desolate place, and there’s a sense of longing and beauty that we wanted to draw out in the music. Unison singing brings an unsettling quality to the song. We kept the delivery and arrangement pretty measured and let the strings do their evocative thing.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Parachutes by SweetJeanMusic

‘Rise and Fall’

“It’s rising, it’s rising steady. The fall is only the start.”

‘Rise and Fall’ is an upbeat song about losing it all and maintaining a kind of stubborn hopefulness. It started out as a gentle guitar picking song, but after mucking around with some loose strumming on John’s Canora acoustic guitar, we decided it sounded much more at home. We recorded several different guitar and vocal takes, but in the end we went with the original takes as they had a nice raw, directness that we wanted to keep.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Rise and Fall by SweetJeanMusic

‘Maureen’

“She landed like a tolling bell”

‘Maureen’ is an accidental-love-fuelled-rage-single-homicide-ballad. It’s a full-blown old-school folk-narrative-blood-and-guts story about murder, consequences and regret – told by the person who committed the crime. It does recall a ‘better time’, but there’s no chance of redemption here. It’s a song about the darkest hour. It’s a fall you won’t come back from. And you can’t have a murder ballad without a banjo, so Alice plays clawhammer on this track.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Maureen by SweetJeanMusic

‘Annabelle’

“Don’t let the season set, we’re so fast to forget”

‘Annabelle’ is a song that could have ended up in a few different places, and we’re really happy with where it landed. At its core, it’s a song about transitions (“innocence and experience”) that draws on ideas from people like Nabokov, Edgar Allan Poe, Neil Young, William Blake and Urge Overkill. We did a lot of redrafting to distil these ideas into a simple and direct song, and approached the production and arrangements in a similar way.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Annabelle by SweetJeanMusic

‘Angels Come Get You’

“Angels come and get you when you’re done. You can check in that skin and bone.”

Inspired by the Rev. Gary Davis song ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’, ‘Angels Come Get You’ is about some things being out of your control. These are not punitive or benevolent angels – they’re just getting on with things. They come from the same school as RGD’s ‘Death’, who doesn’t care where you live, who you are or how busy you might be.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Angels Come Get You by SweetJeanMusic

‘Shiver and Shake’

“As the twig is bent so grows the tree”

’Shiver and Shake’ was written and recorded very quickly, not long after we began playing together. We were having a jam one morning and decided to co-write a song based on the Brothers Grimm fairytale about a ‘simpleton’ who went out into the world to learn how to fear. He encounters all kinds of gory scenarios – people die, shit happens, he gets the girl, The End. In that typical Brothers Grimm way, there doesn’t seem to be a moral to the story. His only redemption is that, by sheer dumb luck, he’s the last man standing. The open guitar tunings and sing-song melodies seem to fit his happy-go-lucky naivety.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Shiver and Shake by SweetJeanMusic

‘Down into the Valley’

“Down in the weeds, back from the road, a burning thing we used to know”

This song is a Hawaiian slow-jam rumba about a ship that has clearly sailed. We kept most of the arrangement pretty sparse, to fit with the economy of the lyrics. We love the moment where the strings and drums arrive towards the end of the track. And Sime plays a mean elevator piano solo.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Down Into the Valley by SweetJeanMusic

‘Little Stream’

“It was something so benign. I had this little stream in my mind.”

‘Little Stream’ was written on the steering wheel of the car travelling at speed. It was the first song we wrote and sang together as a duo and we both have a lot of fondness for it. We wanted to keep it pretty intimate with the two voices at the centre of the song. The reflective nature of the Little Stream makes it a fitting end to Dear Departure.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Little Stream by SweetJeanMusic

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‘Dear Departure’ is out now through Fuse. Launch tour dates below.

Fri, July 12 – Caravan Music Club, Oakleigh, VIC
Sat, July 13 – Northcote Social Club, Northcote, VIC
Thurs, July 18 – The Newsagency, Marrickville, NSW
Fri, July 19 – Singing Gallery, McLaren, SA
Sat, July 20 – Barossa Regional Gallery, Tanunda, SA
Sun, July 21 – Wheatsheaf Hotel, Thebarton, SA