Track by Track: The Townhouses

JEFF LEE takes us through his third and final album as The Townhouses. ‘Ill-Fitting’ is a gorgeous mediation on personal anxieties.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

‘Easy’

‘Easy’ is basically a commentary on that period between ending a relationship and cutting all romantic ties/moving on. There’s that comfortable feeling that draws you back like a magnet into the same bed, the same jokes and the same feelings, however pretty soon the blemishes start to show themselves once again in even more undisguised ways. It sounds kind of bitter, not really acknowledging that a relationship can redefine itself in new and exciting ways as a post-monogamous relationship, but when writing this I was at the stage where I couldn’t really see this happening.

‘Nag Champa’

Probably the simplest yet most un-relatable pop song I’ve ever written. The story is that I was on the 86 tram going about my day and whilst being stalled at the traffic lights, I checked my phone and noticed a wi-fi symbol. I realised that I was actually outside an ex-lover’s old apartment, a place where we shared a lot of ourselves over the space of many months. I really hadn’t thought about that part of my life in a long time but found it incredible that my phone had remembered everything. Technology is unemotional yet we program it to never forget.

‘Gap Year’

I found my first sharehouse in Richmond on Gumtree and lived there for about six months. One of my housemates made a big life decision about a year beforehand and had moved to Australia from Canada. She wanted a new life but when she got it, she found it was very much the same as her old life. She still had to work, pay rent and was still going from job to job being constantly mistreated and feeling emotionally drained until eventually she went back home. It’s such a romantic idea to live in a new city and become someone different, but you’re always yourself, and if you’re like me you still have the same anxieties, the same lack of qualifications and the same issues with identity. Painting a picture of someone waiting for a tram on Lennox St was my quintessential Toby Martin moment.

‘Pressbyrån’

This song is about a feeling I’ve never been able to properly explain. Whilst waiting at Stockholm airport for my partner to come in from Melbourne, I was overcome with an uneasiness that forced me into the bathroom to shave off my whole beard (which after two months of travelling was about an hour-long job and one totally inappropriate for a public bathroom). I had so much love and admiration in my heart for who I was meeting that I couldn’t really get over how I physically appeared to them. At the same time though, I knew the relationship was coming to an end. There was something about that person/situation that made me question everything about myself and want to be constantly changing/developing, yet ultimately it was an abandonment of their love and a concentration on some kind of personal productivity that had changed everything. My love for that person and my own personal anxieties could never really resolve each other nor result in many actions that weren’t emotionally neglecting for them.

‘Theatres’

As a teenager growing up in Dandenong, I saw masculinity in every corner of my life whether it be at school, home or in my surprisingly long stint playing football in the DDJFL. I knew its qualities, but always wondered why I didn’t naturally possess them like all the other men in my life, and it was only much later in my early 20s that I see the advantage of not possessing all those characteristics. I went from being ashamed of my lack of abrupt boyishness to feeling empowered by the fact I didn’t possess those cold qualities (mainly thanks to a community of likeminded people I wish I’d met earlier in life).

‘Theatres’ is about dismantling the privilege we as men systemically receive every day of our lives. It’s a message to the men of my youth that if masculinity means to keep taking up space and play the game utilising that same aggressive pattern year after year, then I’d feel much stronger sitting on the bench.

‘Suburban Curve’

In the last 12 months I’ve only played two shows, not because I’m exclusive or cool, but rather due to performance anxieties that don’t allow me to get that outer body experience that I once had been able to achieve. The metaphor for missing an express train is kind of an indirect explanation for how I felt performing – only rarely was I able to make it through an entire ride without having to stop every station and overanalyse everything there – something that had really stalled me. There was a promoter who emailed me once about a show and when I said no because I was struggling with performance anxiety, he responded by offering me a hundred bucks.

‘Magpie’

My best Bill Callahan impersonation to date. This song is about that terrifying feeling with a new love when you feel like you can no longer really control the routines of your emotions that you’d had when you were single or polyamorous. It’s a familiar feeling in your 20s after churning through a few partners, yet when it’s good, it feels like it’s especially catered by that new person.

‘Good Taste’

This is an overly twee mess of nostalgia and regret all jumbled up into a song about running into ex-intimate partners at your local organic supermarket. It didn’t actually go down that way though; I just walked out and went to Woolies instead.

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‘Ill-Fitting’ is out now as a limited cassette/photo zine and free download through Healthy Tapes.