Track By Track: Fishing

‘Shy Glow’ is the long-time-coming debut album from Sydney production duo Fishing. DOUG WRIGHT and RUSSELL FITZGIBBON reflect on their chosen guest vocalists and each track’s unique evolution.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

‘Recoup’

This one has been around for a while, hanging out as various half-formed patterns and textures.
We liked that the combination of all the looping ideas ends up giving it some kind of balanced, settled feeling. That’s something to do with what the song actually is, a bit of an affirmation to start the album. It feels like having to recoup, pulling yourself together before you can begin something new. That’s why it’s quite frail or hesitant at the start, and by the end of the song you’re at square one instead of square minus one.

‘Your Mouth’ (Feat. Jonas Nicholls)

Actually, the above makes a lot of sense because this song was originally called ‘Day One’ for the feeling of starting off something fresh and excited. ‘Your Mouth’ is on that feeling of how simple everything becomes when you’re just getting out of bed in the morning and thinking about your baby.

Jonas is the perfect dude to sing that because he sounds like he’s always deep in teen love. It started as a slow ’90s smiley jam that Russ made as a birthday present to himself, but we wanted to make it bigger, faster and more celebratory. We really love Sures and always wanted Jonas on this one because his voice has such a unique pop-punk killer vibe. When he got in and sung with us, we went crazy at how good he is at smashing high notes.

In our dreams it’s also about how great it feels to be a bro at college in California with all your other bros making some sweet pop music for all the sororities. In an era of bodyboard magazines, mini-ramps, eyebrow piercings, baggy pants and high school punk bands.

‘Choy Lin’

By the third song, when everything is becoming settled, we decided to move onto something that had a bit more of a journey vibe. We tried to make listening to this song feel like reading a fantasy novel.

This was part of the first group of ideas we made (along with ‘Pacific Ocean’ and ‘Watersport’) that the album grew up from. We actually polished it up and released it in 2012 while we were starting to think about the rest, and so ‘Choy Lin’ became a starting point for where we were heading with it all.

The original idea sat around for a long time until the melody spilled over into the B section where the percussion gets more intense. Like our really early songs, we wrote by just listening to one thing and just trying to take it bar by bar where it felt most natural to go. So this type of song seems like it’s all about progression and movement.

‘Chi Glow’ (Feat. Marcus Whale)

‘Chi Glow’ was written while we were spread between a bunch of different places. We spent some time in Chicago, and at night there all the light pollution from the city colours everything and makes the sky hazy. So it’s about that, and just walking home in this vivid, suspended nighttime.

We were taking cues from things that had that jazz slow-burn/karaoke crooner vibe, so we enlisted our friend Marcus from the duo Collarbones. He visited us one night while we were recording at our friend’s holiday cottage, sung all he could in the wood-panelled loft, and in the morning he took the bus back home. We toyed for a while with rapping over the beat, just to test it as another texture for the track, and it eventually made its way in there as a permanent fixture. It’s a nod to those 16-bar rapper features where they bust in for a single verse that seems a little jarring, and makes you reinterpret the point of the entire song.

‘Swimmer’

This is the only Fishing track we’ve written with a four-to-the-floor kick. Not quite four-to-the-floor really, but pretty close. I think we were only starting to get into dance music when we first started this, so it ended up being a total blend of styles, with this kind of heavier beat and textural, washy melodies. We were originally going to keep it instrumental, but I think our feelings about the album changed, and we realised we didn’t want to play it cool. The vocals are a bit of an admission of that, and maybe when they’re all laid out pretty bare it’s a bit of a turning point in the album.

‘Nineteen/Boy Wunder’ (Feat. Alistair Wright)

Two songs in one. One song, two titles. Two titles one song. ‘Nineteen’ was a lot slower and once again instrumental when it started. One day I was going over and over it and had this crisis of faith about what we were doing with the album, like nothing we were feeling was going to get through. So I sped it up and yelled the most primal and direct thing I could think of. We were thinking about euphoria and raving with a slightly desperate twinge. Like as if you’re almost trying too hard to have fun.

We had talked to Al [from Cloud Control] about writing together a while back, and the idea of making immediate and emotionally affecting dance music was what excited us both the most. We sent this over to him to see if he had any thoughts on it, and the next time he was back in Australia we got together and he wrote a couple of hooks for the end. What he recorded seemed to flow on like a natural response to the first section, so we left the song split in two moods.

‘Voss’

The initial idea for this one formed around the instrumental loop at the start. In a lounge room jam together, we messed around with layering keyboards, vocals and other samples until we had a veritable sound buffet over the original four-bar MPC groove. Finding the bass for the end section really governed how the track ended up. It’s actually the first synth we ever used and is pretty odd, so when we stumbled on this sound we were in a great mood. It stuck, and we figured out a way of building the song up to a level of hype that allowed us to drop in such a ridiculous line. The name came from Patrick White’s fictionalised version of Leichardt’s ill-fated journey from Sydney to find an inland sea.

‘Pacific Ocean’

After ‘Voss’, which is all about Aus, this one is tripping straight overseas. Literally named for the Pacific Ocean, it’s a seriously long way across, and you can probably guess what it’s all about. It’s like the sister to ‘Watersport’, just reaching out into the air over that distance. If ‘Choy Lin’ is the introspective journey, this one’s the total pouring out.

The vocals were sung once, ages ago, and that was it. It’s a feeling where you know the takes are bad but there’s no real possibility of changing them, because that’s the whole song – that one take, for better or worse. I think that’s why there’s only one instance of a Fishing vocal in there, because the song is doing everything, then you say your piece, then the melody can take over and there’s nothing else to say.

‘Nova Current’ (Feat. Alistair Wright)

‘Nova Current’ is about beaming off into space. I think it was originally called ‘The Rapture’ (but that was a dumb title, unlike ‘Nova Current’ obviously). We wanted to make something that sounded like it was filtering through space and time, with echoes and silences. All we had was the first verse, then Al came in and just sang what he felt like the song was about in the break, and Doug wrote a bunch off the back of that. There’s a lot about just being overwhelmed by the world in here. At least, that’s what I get from it.

‘Racer’ (Feat. Lavurn Lee)

The first drum loop and instrumental hook of this one started out on a train between Switzerland and Italy. We didn’t do anything much with the original idea until some time later, when the album was coming together. The second time around, when we had figured out how the album would sound, we took it to our friend Lavurn [of Guerre and Cassius Select) and worked on making it more of a vocal track rather than a pure instrumental. We had these disjointed ideas about lyrics, and he started with them and wrote things down in his little book, changing and filtering. I think that’s such a nice way to work, when you can’t seem to define what a song is about, and your collaborator understands what you have better than you do and just makes it right for everyone. 


‘Watersport’

The album has its ups and downs – this one is to end it all up with hope. It was one of the first songs we made for a release like this and it was always going to be the end.

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‘Shy Glow’ is out now on CD (with limited free bonus 7”) and digital through Create/Control.