The John Steel Singers: ‘It’s Very Evenly Split’

Brimming with ideas, Brisbane troupe The John Steel Singers have returned with a jammy second album that toughens up their hummable pop. DOUG WALLEN checks in with singer-guitarist Tim Morrissey.

The sheer likeability of The John Steel Singers’ 2010 debut Tangalooma went a long way. But most convincing of all was the Brisbane band’s touring behind that Robert Forster-produced record, where their squirrely indie pop bulked up and bridged out into layered, well-oiled, Krautrock-shaded jams.

That turns out to have been a reliable forecast of their second album, the self-produced Everything’s a Thread. Its pop heart is beating as soundly as ever – check out the ABBA-ish new single ‘Common Thread’ – but there are a lot of more elements at play. There’s falsetto funk (‘MJ’s On Fire Again’), wild guitar solos (‘TGI Tuesdays’), spacey lushness a la Air (‘The AC’) and droll social commentary lodged in fuzzy ’60s homage (the Kinks-y ‘Never Read Tolstoy’). Recorded on the Sunshine Coast with gear both borrowed and random, and later mixed by Nicolas Vernhes (Deerhunter, Dirty Projectors), it’s a thrumming, wide-ranging document of a band whose many intertwined impulses befit the album title.

Ahead of the album’s national launch tour, contributing singer and songwriter Tim Morrissey tells us about the influence of jamming and finding a balance between five members – any of whom are likely to bring a song to life these days.

The first thing I want to talk about, with this record, is bringing the breathy, guitar-pop side of the band together with the jamming, rhythmic, Krautrock side of the band, and how that happened.
I think it’s been happening for us for quite some time. With the last album, due to everything that went on with all the delays, it came out almost two years after the songs had finished being written. And then, obviously, this one has had a long gestation period as well. So we were already well and truly moving into that direction. For example, one of the later tracks off the last album was ‘Sleep’, and that was a bit more of a jammy, rhythmic type song. I guess we went through that phase that every mid-20s guy seems to go through: the Krautrock phase.

Are you still in that phase, or coming out the other end now?
Well, we’re still definitely in a jamming phase. A lot of songs we’re writing at the moment are coming out of jamming and then we’re expanding on them. But there’s still definitely some other influences creeping in there as well.

Is that jamming coming through live as well? Are you stretching out the songs and playing around with them live?
Definitely. We’re having some fun doing stuff like that. We’re down to a five-piece – we’d previously been a six-piece – so we’re a little bit more concise. It’s the core five people who’ve been in the band from the start, and we are getting to a pretty good place where we know what everybody else is doing and not stepping on everyone else’s toes. It’s making it a lot easier to stretch it out live and have fun with it.

“There was a strong focus on bass … that trebly, Sly Stone-type feel.”

What had the sixth person been doing?
The sixth person [Conan Thorogood] was playing bass. We’d been through four or five bass players. Once we lost our original bass player, it was hard to get a replacement who sort of fit. Then eventually we decided it’s just easier for one of us to play bass. It turns out Scott [Bromiley] from our band is a really good bass player. He’s got a really good feel for it, so that turned out well. You can hear his bass parts all over the album; it’s a pretty strong core part of the group now, because often a jam will start with him jamming on the bass.

Yeah, I thought there was a real emphasis on bass lines in the mix of the record. I was going to ask if that was a priority when you were mixing.
There was a strong focus on bass on this record. Also, we’d been listening to a lot of There’s a Riot Goin’ On [by Sly & The Family Stone] and stuff like that. Just really wanting to get that more trebly, Sly Stone-type feel on the album, where the bass is quite a prominent instrument.

Was it trickier to do that stuff when you were recording yourselves, or was it easier because you could nerd out a bit?
In some ways I found it easier because we could kind of just stumble onto the sounds we were after. When we did go up to the coast to do the six-odd weeks of recording, we had a friend who is an engineer [Miro Mackie] come up. That helped a lot because he brought some gear with him and helped us with outboard compressors and that sort of thing, which we didn’t already have. With the knowledge I have now, I know that the outboard compression is a big part of what can make that bass sound like it does.

Do you think you’ll try to do the next record yourselves as well?
Yeah, well, we were actually lucky enough to get a sync deal. We had a warehouse that we rented and, because we got the sync deal at around the same time, our plans escalated and we’ve actually built a studio in Brisbane called The Plutonium. So we’ll definitely be recording it there, because the name of the studio is based around a song from the next album.

Is it tricky when you’re ahead of yourselves that way? With the first record, you were touring songs that were two or three years old. And obviously now you’re going to be really touring this record but having newer songs as well.
Well, I think this time around there wasn’t such a long wait. Because we finished most of the tracking in like April. There was the mixing over a couple months, so a lot of it’s still pretty fresh. A lot of it was written this year and is coming out this year. That’s a big change for us.

Also, now we’ve had to stop anything new and learn how to play all these songs live, so we’ll come back to them in a few months. But I guess that’s probably the same with any band; they’re always looking for the next thing.

“I’m doing my best to not talk about what we’re working on next.”

Yeah, sometimes when I talk to bands they’re less enthused about the album they’re putting out and more about what they’re working on now.
Yeah, that’s it. So I’m doing my best to not talk about what we’re working on next. Particularly our record label has tried to make us not talk about that stuff.

Do you guys have other bands or solo projects that you do on the side?
Not really. Luke [McDonald] has done some score work for films and documentaries, and I’ve produced and recorded a couple of bands. I’ve done Dune Rats and Major Leagues. But no one really has that much in the way of side projects.

Did you work on the Little Scout record?
Scott [Bromiley] helped produce their first album [2011’s Take Your Light], and he also co-wrote the first single off their most recent album, ‘Go Quietly’.

I read that Robert Forster named this record – or at least named the song that became the title track. How did that happen?
Well, Robert stays in contact with us quite frequently. One day Scott and I were working on the track ‘Everything’s a Thread’ and Robert happened to give us a call. I was like, “What should we call this song we’re working on?” and he said, “‘Everything’s a Thread’. I was thinking about using that for one of mine, but you can have it.” It was just lucky that it fit the melody we’d written. Then eventually, we [decided] it was a great name for the album as well.

It seems to symbolically tie together the different impulses on the record.
Oh cool, thank you.

How many people in the band sing lead or write songs on this record?
It’s very evenly split, because a lot of the songs are coming from jams. So really anyone at the moment is starting a song. In the past there was [more] tracks where Scott and I would [each] bring in tracks more fully formed and worked on them. Even when that does happen now, the band gets their mitts into it a lot more, and often it will completely change form.

As for vocal leads, a lot of it is more a group-type thing. There’s a couple tracks where I sing lead, like ‘State of Unrest’ and ‘Common Thread’. I might sing lead in some of the verses, but there’s not really any lead vocalist. It’s all pretty, yeah, evenly balanced.

Who wrote the lyrics for ‘Never Read Tolstoy’? It cites Brunswick and Brisbane…
That’s Scott’s song, so he wrote the lyrics. That’s one that came pretty much [developed]: he had the chords and the lyrics, and then we just jammed it all out over one night and recorded it in one night. That’s the [version] on the album.

“We always tend to over-clutter songs with a million ideas.”

Who’s MJ from ‘MJ’s On Fire Again’?
It’s Michael Jackson. It’s maybe lazy song naming on our part because we had a jam and thought it sounded a little bit like a Michael Jackson song. You record it on your phone and you need a short name. It was called ‘MJ’ for ages and then, when we needed to name it properly for the album, you don’t want to call the track ‘Let’s Start a Fire Again’ because that’s also pretty silly. We just thought we’d take the MJ thing and kind of relate it to the lyrics [but also] to the Pepsi commercial where Michael Jackson’s hair caught on fire.

It’s an interesting track. It’s very funky and has the falsetto, so I can see the connection to Michael Jackson.
It’s a little bit different to how we originally jammed it when we first put it down, but does definitely have more of that funk element.

Working with Nicolas Vernhes, what was he able to do in the mixing process that you guys hadn’t been able to do on your own?
One of the great things Nicolas did straightaway was say, “I’m gonna fuck with this.” Which he did do. It’s hard to explain unless I played you the rough mixes. One thing we unfortunately always tend to do is over-clutter songs with a million ideas and parts, so he did really pare that back. But then the parts that he left in, he would often add crazy effects to. Stuff like that. Also, create some space in the tracks as well, where there hadn’t necessarily been before.

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‘Everything’s a Thread’ comes out this Friday (Nov 8) through Dew Process/Universal Music Australia. Launch tour dates below.

Fri, Nov 8 – Ding Dong, Melbourne, VIC [w/Go Violets + Neighbourhood Youth]
Sat, Nov 9 – Karova, Ballarat, VIC [w/Go Violets + The Ocean Party]
Wed, Nov 13 – Beach Road Hotel, Bondi, NSW [free, w/Go Violets]
Thurs, Nov 14 – The Den, Wollongong, NSW [w/Go Violets + Donny Benet]
Fri, Nov 15 – Small Ballroom, Newcastle, NSW [w/Go Violets, Donny Benet + Goldsmith]
Sat, Nov 16 – Oxford Art Factory, Sydney, NSW [w/Go Violets + Donny Benet]
Fri, Nov 22 – Jive, Adelaide, SA [w/Go Violets + Jesse Davidson]
Thurs, Nov 28 – Spotted Cow, Toowoomba, QLD [w/Go Violets + The Worriers]
Fri, Nov 29 – The Zoo, Brisbane, QLD [w/Go Violets + The Worriers]
Sat, Nov 30 – SOL Bar, Maroochydore, QLD [w/Go Violets + The Worriers]
Sat, Dec 7 – Slanted & Enchanted festival, Perth, WA