Track By Track: Summer Flake

SXSW survivor STEPHANIE CRASE casts a self-deprecating yet ultimately fond eye across ‘You Can Have It All’, her debut album as Summer Flake, from the “soppy and uncool” to what resembles “drunk, atonal cats.”

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

‘Don’t Be Shy’

This is the first song I recorded for You Can Have It All. I started the album in January 2013, straight after the Where Do I Go? EP was finished, and would do a few hours of tracking or mixing per week around work and weekends, and then I sent it all to Andrew Beck for mastering in June. I did a pretty inconsistent job of the mix and ended up doing some back and forth with Andrew and remixing – I was a major pain and he was a pretty darn good sport about it considering the budget rates.

This song is about whether to live regretting the things you did, or regretting the things you didn’t. “It’s not dead and it’s not living, it’s just something short of indifference I’m trying out” is like living in a sort of self-imposed limbo of self-preservation where you can shrug off all your shambles as some sort of rehearsal that you intend to learn from and apply when you’re grown up or something.

‘Die Trying’

Ellen Carey (Raven Blue Winter), Nick Walton (Dried Up Leaf) and me (Summer Flake) performed this song in our band, Birth Glow, a handful of times in 2007 but never released it. I’m a terrible recycler of songs. I want them all to exist. I can’t bear to let them die. Even if they’re shit. I feel so stressed out knowing so many friends of mine have to walk around all day with a thousand discarded songs stored in their brains. I have about four album leftovers and they’re killing me.

When I wrote this for Birth Glow it was meant to be a sweet, naïve, endearing tale of having secret crush. Now I’m older and the arrangement is more rocktacular, the song comes off much grosser, tragic and sleazy, which also has its place.


‘Blue’

I wrote this years ago and it was one of the first songs that I really completed, with lyrics and all. I emailed my friend Debbie an acoustic version in a higher key and it’s pretty damn sincere. I thought I was channelling Lou Barlow. And this is my only song ever with keys. A few years ago I was teaching guitar to six-year-olds in schools and got thrown a couple of keyboard classes and, even though I strenuously objected because I’d never played and can’t read music, the company was like, “Nah you’ll be fine – here’s the books, you just have to stay one lesson ahead of the kids.” It was a disaster and I felt so guilty and stressed about doing these lovely kids such a disservice and quit the program.


‘Just Fine’

I brought this to a Batrider practice but it didn’t survive. It’s the first song I wrote around a bass line. I can never settle on lyrics so basically once I’ve got the gist of some words, I just give it three go’s with the mic and keep the best. It’s like really, really slow rap battles with myself. Recording cements some weird phrases that even I don’t know what they really mean, but if the words fit the music tone, that’s enough for me. I’ve been fortunate enough to be in bands with singers who write amazing, evocative, clever lyrics, and those kind of artists appeal to me so much as a listener, but that’s not really my strength. ‘Just Fine’ is loosely about procedures for protecting oneself, battening down the hatches as a shitstorm rolls in.

‘Naked or Nude’

I imagine teenage me would have loved playing through hours of possible guitar harmonies in this outro, deciding which pedals to hit. I threw in a swear word for teenage Steph too. ‘Naked or Nude’ didn’t get chorus vocals until I’d begun recorded it, and even though it’s loosely about seeing a light at the end the tunnel, I wanted something more about how weird and fragile even that can feel, and the fine line between feeling comfortable or exposed. It makes me cringe and grin.

‘How Long Will the Wind Blow’

That acoustic guitar is the first guitar I ever owned. It’s a small classical guitar with rusty old steel strings, a warped neck, and a heap of Stereolab stickers on it. And that electric guitar is my baby. I’ve been playing guitar since I was 11, lurking in music shops and stalking guitars online, but I’m no pro – I don’t speak tech, I can’t read music, I don’t get electronics – guitars are just so … good looking. I own a bunch but always go back to my 1965 Fender Jaguar that I have had for over 10 years. A lot of people think that musicians who go nuts for “gear” are lacking in talent. I couldn’t say.

‘How Long Will the Wind Blow’ contemplates those disturbing memories of childhood that you can’t be sure if you dreamt, or imagined, or saw in a movie, or if they really happened.

The title is from the Beach Boys’ song ‘Til I Die’, which I’ve loved/covered. I recorded the drums for this track last of all the instruments on the album, and it was really, really annoying. It was even more annoying than mixing the seven different double-tracked vocal parts on this song. It takes a couple of vocal doubles for me to sound like I’ve got one normal person’s voice. I just use an SM58, and could try a bit more compression and frequency stuff I guess...

‘Drag You Down’

This guitar phrase just fits perfectly in my hands; it’s a go-to noodle for me, like a nice doughy stress-ball to squeeze. But the original lyrics were yuck and it had no structure and I didn't think it would end up on the album. I emailed it to my pal Matt Banham to play with and he did such a great job with lyrics I absolutely relate to – almost like he read my diary. But I don’t keep a diary. The difference between his lyrical style and mine is that he fits a lot more words in a bar than me so I get all mouth garbled when I sing it.

In early August my buddy of 17 years, Dan Koerner, and I went down to Middleton, SA, and drank wine and read novels and compared favourite bands and he made a video clip for ‘Drag You Down’. When I recorded the song, I improvised a lot of the additional guitar stuff and I had to work it all out for the clip.

‘Forever Here and Now’

People say, “Don’t worry mate, you won’t feel like this forever” but I haven’t been proven wrong yet. This song is basically a shitty rip-off of ‘You Really Got a Hold on Me’ by Smokey Robinson. I wish. I also thought for a time that it sounded like Green Day and have Googled “voice dysmorphic disorder” more than once.

‘You Can Have It All’

This was an easy song to write and is a hard one to talk about. It’s unambiguous, has obvious stylistic influences, the tone is blatantly sentimental … what else? I studied art at uni and the course emphasised critical writing and arguing the validity of your work and its meaning, but even after years it still feels funny spelling out that stuff.

What do I know? I wrote it, it makes me happy, I perform it to whoever wants it. Writing bios, grants, interviews, or even asking someone to play in my band feels awkward and takes some false confidence. Not that I’m above getting self-indulgent from time to time. I’m totally comfortable boasting about a project that someone else is in charge of it. Batrider, Birth Glow, Fair Maiden, No Through Road – great bands. ‘You Can Have It All’ – it’s soppy and uncool and I really like it.

‘Dressed in Black’

This is my favourite song on the album, and I played slide guitar with a roundish perfume bottle so it sounds a bit wild and all over the place, like drunk, atonal cats. ‘Dressed in Black’ by The Shangri-La’s was the starting point for me writing this song (shameless/unashamed).

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‘You Can Have It All’ comes out today (Sept 6) through Rice is Nice. Launch dates below.

Fri, Oct 4 – The Hotel Metropolitan, Adelaide, SA [w/Divine Rip + Body Horror]
Fri, Oct 18 – Grace Darling, Melbourne, VIC [w/Old Mate, A New Death + Palm Springs]
Sat, Oct 19 – Brisbane Hotel, Hobart, TAS [w/Naked, Heart Beach + Catsuit]
Thurs, Oct 24 – Croatian Club, Newcastle, NSW [w/Day Ravies, Unity Floors + Sadfaces]
Fri, Oct 25 – The Square, Sydney, NSW [w/Parading, Mope City, The Friendsters + Weak Boys]
Sun, Oct 27 – The Beetle Bar, Brisbane, QLD [w/ Cannon, Cured Pink, Screaming Match + Thigh Master]