Features
Track by Track: Clue to Kalo
Contributions by MARK MITCHELL
Original page credit: Mess+Noise
‘The Motives Records’ is MARK MITCHELL’s first album as Clue to Kalo in five years. It combines richly varied and layered – as well as frequently shifting – instrumentation with story-driven songwriting.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
‘The Men That They Make Us’
This is a love song about a couple of violent subversives who admit in a moment of reflection that the one good thing about ‘The Man’ is that he brought them together. This has my friends Cornel [Wilczek] and Jojo [Petrina] performing the intro vocal melody, and I think I performed the melody a few times as well with put-on voices to make it sound like different singers.
‘Form of Love’
I tried to make this one sound like a soul song, but with soft Simon & Garfunkel-type vocals. Some of that was out of necessity; the melody was tough to sing, and pulling back on it got me to the finish line. The song’s from the perspective of someone who, despite their best efforts, never came close to ‘making it’, and is oscillating between self-deprecation and self-loathing. It’s also a love song because he’s serenading a partner by telling him or her that it’s high time to settle for someone of his calibre.
‘Burning Arrow’
‘Burning Arrow’ is sung by someone who’s nostalgic for an adolescence of ambition while simultaneously peddling the benefits of giving in to a day job and waiting for death. I think it’s easy to be seduced by the promise of not having to push anymore, so I try to be mindful of a time when I always overreached. As a child of the ’80s, I’ve used Fairlight sounds here to evoke the applicable feeling. Jojo does the backing vocals in the chorus.
‘Close to a Modern Missionary’
This is a sister song to ‘Burning Arrow’. I imagine the speaker to be into big business and being everybody’s boss. He’s arguing that arty types who think they’re better than him are likely to become him, and how it might not be so bad if they do because his kind is in control. The oldest song on the record, and the solo in it is my voice tuned, sped up and processed.
‘The Secret Policeman’
I was happy with the words and theme of this one, although it was tricky to figure out how to get the parts to fit together. A military policeman announces he’s retiring for love, but then goes unapologetically apeshit when someone hurts his life partner. Violence is all he knows how to do, and here it’s a romantic expression. I think the synth brass in the finale makes it sound like ‘Sussudio’.
‘A Dad on a Deathbed’
Randy Newman’s one of my favourites, and this song steals the approach from Sail Away’s ‘Old Man’ to insert it into another context. A guy thinks spiteful things about his unsupportive dad as he avoids visiting his deathbed. I find it hard not to fall back on percussion, so at the very least this song was meant as an exercise in restraint.
‘Mapmaker’s X’
In this one a cartographer tries to talk an ex from the ledge by drawing an awkward analogy between life and his trade. Jojo’s on vocals again in the chorus, sounding impressively like Bob Seger’s backing singers. Some of the drums were played by my friend James [Cecil] and nabbed without his knowledge from an abandoned session on the studio computer.
‘To Guyana, Greenest Grass’
Another older one, this song was written when I was reading a lot about Jonestown. It’s not supposed to be explicitly about the Peoples Temple. It’s a fictionalisation of the moment they moved to South America; superficially joyful (they’re relocating to the promised land), with a pretty standard dose of dramatic irony. Because we all know how well that turned out. The last song I finished in hometown Adelaide before moving to Melbourne.
‘Gante and Luna’
Most of the time, to remember vocal melodies I record gibberish placeholder lyrics on the fly. Sometimes I try to sub these out with words that sound similar if it feels like they’re fitting well. That’s what happened here. As I started to tease out some actual English, it became clear I could make the protagonist a werewolf, so this song’s about a beast man in the olden days who uses his power as a soldier of the lord. He’s also trying to get his sweetheart to see him as more than just a monster. I tried to make this sound like a Bollywood number, but I think that’s beyond my capabilities. Anyway, all I had were those Mellotron samples.
‘Early Rulers’
The singer in this song is returning to his hometown a burnout. He’s addressing his childhood pal, and after once wearing the pants in the friendship is now trying to weasel his way back into the life of his now-successful former buddy. I did the strings, woodwinds and brass first, and dumped an 808 on top of it. Again, I find it hard not to fall back on percussion.
‘Time as a Turbine’
This is me assuring myself that it doesn’t matter that I’m getting older, that I can still do all the things I once could do, but knowing in my anxious bones that of course it matters that I’m getting older, and of course I can’t do all the things I once could do (for better or worse). My friend Corn did the final mix and I asked if he could make it sound a little like a Kate Bush or Peter Gabriel record. I think that comes through on the bass line he wrote for the verses and the effect he put on my response vocals in the outro.
‘Motives’
Sometimes when you’re making music everything falls away and you feel like a billion bucks. I had that writing this one so I made the song about that feeling. I wanted it to sound summery (that’s when you use a steel drum, of course) to close out the album with something affirmative and open-ended.
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