Features
Track By Track: Jimmy Tait
Contributions by Sara Retallick
Original page credit: Mess+Noise
Melbourne’s SARA RETALLICK fronts the haunting band Jimmy Tait, named for her grandfather. She revisits their expansive new second album, ‘Golden’.
‘What Is This For?’
This album was recorded in a spacious place, an off-the-map town in Northern Victoria. I wanted to start the record with a song that suggested that space almost as a tone or theme. This track is as slow and as sparse as we get. It reflects the recording environment perfectly. ‘What Is This For?’ was built over time. It needed to be simple and sparse yet interesting to the ear. We experimented with different instruments, with percussion. We added layers of synths, 20-foot pipe organs and guitars. We then stripped it back just enough to unveil that balance of sparse and excitement. The vocals are repetitive almost mantra-like. It’s a song about hope and hopelessness.
‘All My Friends’
Our guitar player Sunny Leunig wrote this song with his brother Gus in a band they used to play in together. Unfortunately that band broke up before their recording of the song was released. I heard it one day and it really stuck with me. On first listen I wanted to record a version with Jimmy Tait. I felt that it was a real shame that it might never see the light of day, so I asked Sunny if we could use the song. It ended up being our first single.
‘All My Friends’ is the first song we’ve done that I didn’t write. So making it our own was very important. This happened quite organically in the rehearsal room. Sam [Johnstone, drummer] came up with that laidback tom-based rhythm, which we built the other parts around. Adrian [Stoyles, guitarist/bassist] plays the acoustic guitar part on this song, which really solidified that intro. We had a lush selection of excellent guitar parts and layers that Sunny had written for the previous recording of ‘AMF’. He’s such a beautiful guitar player, it was hard to decide which ones to keep and which to abandon.
‘House With No Walls’
Essentially a love song, this track is about recognising what you have and holding on to it. Life is a cycle; all you can hope for is to learn each time something shit happens.
The sampled argument in the bridge of this song was supplied by Nick Huggins. He found it in an op shop in Perth on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. We don’t know what they are saying. We didn’t really want to find out. The tone in their voices is enough to suggest that they are two people in a relationship having a domestic dispute. To me tone is 90% of meaning in human interaction; a lot is said in the sound of a voice.
‘Eyes’
We had a difficult time in the production of ‘Eyes’. It was by far the most time-consuming song to record and mix. It should have been easy, as essentially it’s a rock song. But we’re not a rock band. So finding the right sound proved difficult. We thought this song needed to sound live and spontaneous, not too tight but punchy and energetic. We recorded the vocals a bunch of times using different mics. We found the best vocal tone using a 1960s intercom mic, of all things!
‘Give It Back to Me’
This song challenges me still. Short and poppy, this track is a bit of a loner on the album. We needed a bit of fun and light-heartedness to counteract the darkness in some of the other songs.
‘Golden’
On first listen to the rough mixes from our tracking session in the country, Nick and I both decided that this song was going to be our favourite on the record. Hence why we made it the title track. ‘Golden’ is a good example of how I like to write songs. I’ve never felt tied to the verse-chorus-verse approach to writing, nor have I ever considered Jimmy Tait a prog band. But I guess in a way this song is progressive in its structure. It’s almost like a two-act play. The first half is aggressive and one-dimensional, then the second act leads into an open-flowing spaciousness, a breath of fresh air.
Every time we play this song live, I just feel good. It’s a great representation of how this band communicates so well musically – Adrian’s gorgeous harmonies, Sunny’s jangly guitar, Sam’s thoughtful and solid drum beat, and Roshan [Khozouei]’s smooth and subtle keys just lift the outro of this song. Listening to this makes me happy!
‘Over Now’
I often describe this song as outrageous, with its overstated outro. But it’s an emotional song from an emotional woman. We used old instruments like Mellotron and autoharp to create a dark folk sound.
One of my all-time favourite songs in ‘Running Scared’ by Roy Orbison. My main interest in the song is the structure. I love the way it builds slowly to the crescendo without any real chorus. Every verse gathers intensity. I loosely based this song on the that idea. I wanted to start in a quiet place and build the intensity until there was nowhere left to go.
‘Rain’
I wrote this song quite a few years ago, when I first moved to Melbourne. I have recorded it a couple of times, including once in Berlin, but it never quite made it out until now. When you make that move from the country to the city, as inevitably most people from the town I grew up in do, you notice vast differences in life. The way it’s lived, the way it’s planned and the way it’s talked about.
Something that struck me as a big difference was that people in the city do not rely on the weather for their livelihood. I grew up in Northern Victoria in a very isolated farming area. It was drought-stricken for the majority of my childhood. There was a time when all people would talk about was the rain. Farmers and shop attendants alike. We just needed some bloody rain.
‘No Reason’
We originally tracked this song with the whole band, but scrapped it and decided to deconstruct it. ‘No Reason Why’ is definitely one of the more experimental tracks on the album. We had a lot of fun working it out. The a cappella intro replaced the original autoharp introduction. I invited my good friend Laura Jean into the studio to help me create a rhythmic vocal part to mimic the autoharp part. This vocal arrangement runs through the song, eventually being replaced by Adrian’s stepping piano. It was an honour to work with Laura; she is an inspiring musician and vocalist.
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