Track By Track: Graveyard Train

Graveyard Train’s fourth album, ‘Takes One to Know One’, is a departure in that each band member dictated the production of their respective songs. Listen to it in full with commentary by NICK FINCH and BEAU SKOWRON.

‘Takes One to Know One’

Beau: It should come as no surprise to anyone that knows me that I like a lot of pot. So one night I found myself high trying to explain to my girlfriend the meaning of sitting ‘on the beat’, ‘behind the beat’, etc. as a rhythm guitarist. She instantly jumped on it and told me to go, “Meet the beat at the library on Sunday. Now do the dishes.” So in essence, the song is ONLY about that weird extra dimension that comes with music that you can disappear into where pretty much time means nothing ... and while you’re there, nothing means anything anymore. Bompabompabomp. Now go smoke your joint and do the dishes.

Nick: Yeah – what he said.

‘Close the Book’

Nick: I wrote this song the day after a very good friend was suddenly and stupidly killed earlier this year. It fucking sucked beyond description. She was really close mates with a bunch of us in the band. I was actually down at the beach for the week when somebody called to tell me. I’d been mucking around down there with a fingerpicking progression on a crappy nylon guitar that was missing a string; once I got the awful news, the lyrics for ‘Close the Book’ all came out really quickly. I couldn’t sing it well enough to do it justice – made the whole thing sound like a lame Dylan impersonation – so hand-balled it to Beau, who nailed it on the first take in the studio.

The band did a great job of keeping it really restrained and pretty, which are both pretty un-Graveyard Train things to do. It feels kinda weird talking about our mate’s death in the context of promoting a record (or whatever this is) – I really don’t want to talk about it in order to tug on heartstrings or anything like that ... but this is a Track by Track and her death is where this particular song came from. Hopefully she would have liked it. Hopefully her friends like it.

‘The Parasite’

Nick: This could be a love song about a psychopath who preys on somebody with insecurities by trying to infiltrate their mind and dictate their life ... but to me it’s about religion cooing sweet nothings to the religious. It was written on that same shithouse guitar as ‘Close the Book’ – it was still missing that same string, so this tune is based around a different five-string fingerpicked thingy. (I had a baby last year and had to start fingerpicking so I could write songs without waking her up all the time.) We smashed through making this record in a weekend and I’m actually really happy with the character that our very limited time constraint gave to each the songs. I don’t really consider it to be an album or even an EP – it’s more just a bunch of songs we put down one weekend. It is what it is.

This one was just me singing in front of a couple of mics while playing Fraser Gorman’s fancy old guitar he lent me while Josh played some wacky lap steel in the distance. We moved on after one take – the fret noise and chair creaks kind of suit the tune.

‘The Creep’

Nick: We call this ‘Josh’s Opus’. He [Josh Crawley]’s obviously been watching too many HBO shows. Me and Beau helped with a couple of lines here and there, but he wrote and really ran the show on ‘The Creep’ and played heaps of the stuff on it himself: banjo, dobro, lap steel, guitar, I think even the harp. There are lots of layers on it – everything atmospheric was him. We mixed the album at his house, so I think it got a bit of extra tracking in the wee hours.

It kind of sums up the approach we took as a band doing this record: because most of these songs were written by individual band members during our downtime, when it came time to record them we all really backed off and let the song’s songwriter dictate the production. Beau did have a kind of Summadayze trance-music type interpretation for ‘The Creep’ that he kept hinting to Josh – which we might have done if we could afford decent drugs – but luckily the dark country sound won in the end. The world doesn’t need another ‘Cotton Eyed Joe’ anyway.

‘She Likes to Eat the Skin’

Beau: I highly recommend anyone who picks up the banjo for the first time to tune it to DDGBD, go get a cabin in a field and sit there and play this on the porch and fall in love with a girl who really likes chicken skin. Ads [Adam Johansen] is a crafty man on this on the harmonica too, so you might need to invite him. On the whole, this song is pretty much just a rip-off of The Shining. Nothing literal – I just find it moving with songs like ‘Auld Lang Syne’ that you can sing and play them alone and yet somewhere in your head a thousand dead voices still want to sing along.

‘The Chrysalid’

Nick: It’s about a man who starts eating dirt. He keeps eating the dirt, wriggling further down into the earth mouth-first till he’s deep underground. As his body begins to shut down in the darkness, he hears the universe blowing its mighty trumpet and undergoes a metamorphosis. He rises up into the air reborn with beautiful wings and flies up to the heavens. He is The Chrysalid Born.

When the band all went to shit and we stopped playing together for a year, Josh, [Matt] Chow and Fran [Keaney] still occasionally got together to indulge themselves in these epic ‘space jams’ that I was very glad not to be a part of. The music for ‘The Chrysalid’ was apparently the result of one of those stupid jams. They sent me a shitty demo that they recorded on a phone and I wrote the vocals late one night at home over that recording. Months later, when we finally played it together as a band, I sang it to them for the first time and received a whole bunch of raised eyebrows ... I don’t think faux-David Byrne-esque vocals singing a stupid butterfly metaphor was what they had in mind for such tough-guy music, and I can’t help but feel that I may have wrecked their song.

‘The Widow’

Beau: Graveyard Train sometimes can’t help themselves when it comes to a love of “songs.” Each and every member of the team suffers from it without a doubt, and every now and then out pops a song that – while at first might seem a little ‘out of the vein’ of our typical styling – if you find yourself still whistling the song drunk, two hours later, at the urinal with your shoo-shoo in your hands, it’s a good thing! There seems to be no use fighting it in this band. Apart from the possible four or five hooks running around in that song – That slide hook, huh? What? You can’t argue with how good that is – I also love the fact that Finch has somehow got another song about both his love for his missus and his ultimate demise onto another GT recording. A bit rustic in the recording, but I was still whistling it two hours later with my dick in my hands after doing a shit demo in Crawley’s kitchen. In the end, it’s the “songs” that count.

Nick: The working title for ‘The Widow’ was ‘That One Where We’re Trying to Be The Travelling Wilburys’ – but really we were actually trying to be more like Dave Dobbyn doing his Footrot Flats song. We managed to fail in both respects.

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‘Takes One to Know One’ is out now on CD, vinyl and digital through Black Hat Rackets/MGM. National tour dates below; tickets on sale here.

Wed, June 11 – The Northern, Byron Bay, NSW
Thurs, June 12 – Sol Bar, Maroochydore, QLD
Fri, June 13 – The Zoo, Brisbane, QLD
Sat, June 14 – The Brisbane, Hobart, TAS [DARK MOFO afterparty]
Sun, June 15 – The Brisbane, Hobart, TAS [DARK MOFO afterparty]
Thurs, June 19 – The Barwon Club, Geelong, VIC
Fri, June 20 – 170 Russell, Melbourne, VIC
Sat, June 21 – The Rosemount, Perth, WA
Sun, June 22 – Mojos, Fremantle, WA
Wed, June 25 – Transit, Canberra, ACT
Thurs, June 26 – Newtown Social Club, Sydney, NSW
Fri, June 27 – Newtown Social Club, Sydney, NSW
Sun, June 28 – RAD, Wollongong, NSW [two sets]
Sun, June 29 – The Old Hepburn Hotel, Hepburn Springs, VIC
Fri, July 4 – The Theatre Royal, Castlemaine, VIC
Sat, July 5 – The Governor Hindmarsh, Adelaide, SA
Sat, July 6 – The Loft, Warnambool, VIC
Sat, July 12 – Darwin Ski Club, Darwin, NT