Track By Track: The Darling Downs

From iPhone demos to drone chords and waltzes, the mighty KIM SALMON takes us through ‘In the Days When the World Was Wide’, his first Darling Downs record with Ron S Peno since 2007.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

‘Saved’

I wanted to write a singer’s melody without referring to an instrument for inspiration. What I came up with put me more in mind of Harry Nilsson or Burt Bacharach than The Darling Downs. It needed to be presented appropriately, so I taught myself to play it on the banjo to bring it into our realm and showed it to Ron. He immediately loved it but felt, as I did, that it needed another section, as what I had was essentially a verse and a bridge.

Ron worked for about a month till he finally came up with the chorus. He’d ring me up night after night with something that he’s come up with but the one we did use needed to be transposed as he’d not had a recording to refer to. Doing that was the hardest thing of all for some reason.

This song for me demonstrates that sometimes you can labour over an idea and the audience will still be none the wiser.

‘Forever Night’

The ‘Silent Night’ references in the chorus of this one are simply one of those instances when the singer grabs whatever song comes to mind to flesh out the melody they happen to be in the process of creating.

‘Down to the River’

This is my personal favourite but I don’t have a story for it – other than we just wrote it one afternoon round Ron’s place and it just seemed to happen like most of the other songs.

‘Wish You Were Her’

Ron rang me up drunk one evening and sang a ‘song’ at me. He had the title ‘I Wish You Were Her’ and a lot of the lines.

I ordered him to get off the phone so I could actually figure out how to play the tune on my guitar before the conversation rambled on and the tune was forgotten, as these kind of ideas usually are.

Also, as with a lot of these often very simple ‘sung’ ideas, this song required a lot of working to figure out how to render it on the guitar.

‘There Were Tears’

Soon after [2007’s] From One to Another Ron insisted he had an idea for the banjo. It was so rudimentary that I couldn’t bring myself to play it, so I added some crude picking to the way I executed it. Once again we promptly forgot it. Luckily I had it somewhere on my old Dictaphone. We resurrected it for this album and added some other very rudimentary parts to it. The end result is definitely more than the sum of those parts.

‘I Don’t Care’

I had a banjo-picking pattern that I showed Ron soon after making our last album. He sang a melody over the top and it sounded a bit like something Mike Nesmith might have done.

We revived it with this new batch of songs but decided to slow it down and play it on the guitar, as that brought out its beautiful (we think) melancholic character.

‘Between the Forest and the Trees’

We wanted something more upbeat than our usual thing. We were actually thinking of Simon & Garfunkel. Ron sang something, I came up with some chords and then added the guitar riff. It’s all really just something to hang that one-note riff on, ha ha.

‘Higher When They Fall’

Ron came over to my place and sang me a guitar lick idea he had and then the verses under which I had to find a part to play. We just jammed the song out while I had my iPhone memo [function] recording. We pretty much left the song ‘as is’ musically from then on. We did, however, go through all of the gobbledegook that Ron had sang in the first instance and translated it into real lyrics. It was a very interesting process of us going, “What does that sound like he’s saying?” and “What could we make it that he’s saying?”

It was a great starting point and all of the lyrics on the album were done by the both of us this way.

‘Light of the World’

Ron was thinking of ‘Memory of a Free Festival’ by David Bowie and started singing, “I am the light of the world, I am the light of the world.” To me it sounded as much like “I am the lie to the world,” which in a funny way gave us a license to sing something as audacious as the former line.

‘Like Desire’

Another song that came shortly after From One to Another. Ron was singing a waltz melody (he always write waltzes in The DDs). I had my banjo handy and played that. We nearly forgot it and he completely forgot it. When we were coming up with songs for this album, I said to him, “What about this tune?”

As he’d forgotten it, he sang a whole new melody over it. Generally all the other parts seem to just suggest themselves once we get going and this was no exception.

‘Your Face’

Ron sang me a bass line that he’d had in mind, to which I added a ‘drone’ chord. We played it and there was the song. It did go through our lyrical translation process though.

A story common to all of these songs is that once we had the tune worked out and I’d got it recorded it on my iPhone, we only listened to it to write the lyrics. I certainly hadn’t bothered to learn any song before we went into the studio. The only preparation was for me to ask Mike Stranges if he was up for playing extra instrumentation on any of the tracks if it seemed they needed something. When it came time to track, I’d go to the song on my phone and quickly learn it. The take you hear was essentially me getting the song right for the first time. Vocals were done in pretty much the same fashion.

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‘In the Days When the World Was Wide’ is out now independently through Fuse. Read Aaron Curran’s review. The Darling Downs play tonight (Aug 21) at The Annandale in Sydney.