Features
You Am I: ‘We're Australia's First Emos’
By A.H. Cayley
You Am I’s ninth studio album was plagued by personal and creative insecurities, frontman Tim Rogers candidly tells A.H CAYLEY.
Archived image 1 withheld pending rights reviewImage details are recorded in the restoration file. With the sound of traffic and the occasional ding of a tram in the background, Tim Rogers speaks through a dodgy phone line from Melbourne's CBD. He’s on his way to the Athenaeum Library, Victoria’s oldest cultural institution, on Collins Street. “I go there to score drugs,” he jokes, completely deadpan. At least, I think it’s a joke. Throughout the interview he’s surprisingly frank about everything from the writing and recording of You Am I's self-titled ninth studio album, to dealing with anger, insecurities and creative expectations.
Rogers is an odd blend of insecure confidence. His sentences are peppered with pauses, “ums” and “you-knows”, as though unsure what he's saying is clear while still seeming completely certain of what he means. He'll reach the midpoint of a sentence, then veer off at the same thought from a slightly different perspective, or a better way of understanding, before placing another “you know” at the end or middle of it. They're not necessarily questioning “you-knows”, more clarifications. It seems that “Tim Rogers The Man” is painfully aware of “Tim Rogers The Name” and is still cautiously and self-deprecatingly bridging the gap between them.
On record, however, he's moving on. You Am I is an album that grows on you. On first listen, there's not much to grab hold of, until – after a few more – you begin to notice little things here and there: an interesting harmony, an illuminating lyric, a delicate crack in Roger's voice. Eventually, after even more listens, it becomes an album you don't want to let go of.
Now with independent label Other Tongues, I wonder whether a smaller budget affected how the album was recorded, compared to their albums while signed to rooART, BMG or EMI.
“There were a lot of favours pulled,” Rogers admits. “I mean, we only spent two days in the studio and the rest were in a warehouse, some kitchens. We saved up some money from shows a while ago. I think as far as costs go, it's definitely more humble than anything we've been involved in.
“We didn't have unlimited time as it was [with EMI],” he continues. “We were working to strict times and strict budgets ... so there was no amount of wasting time sitting around in the studio. I don't think we've sat around and wasted time in a studio in about 10 years, or write songs in the studio, because we just can't do that. We kinda get bored, you know.”
While he still gets “a little thrill” from being in the studio, Rogers isn’t really interested in the intricacies of the recording process.
“Those other guys are far more interested than me in the engineering,” he says. “We get it out in the open real quickly. We gave ourselves only a couple of days to finish the whole thing. It wasn't that vastly different [from the early days]. I mean, we were recording in warehouses and kitchens. That was a little different! I think Greg [Wales] our producer really encouraged that. He loves a good 'feel' recording; he likes to feel this stuff: the moss upon my kitchen table.”
Having written such a triumphant record (which follows two other underappreciated albums, 2007's Convicts and 2008's Dilettantes), it's quite a shock to hear that Rogers doubted himself throughout the process.
“Well, you know, I like thinking there's no encouragement to write 'hits' [anymore]. It'd be great to get something on a radio station, but the right thing is to write whatever you want, and I want to impress the other guys … I want to impress them, and that pressure's been increasing as they grow ever more intelligent,” he laughs. “It's kinda terrifying. I'm an old guy, a guitar player … [But] during the making of this record I was unsure that I was writing anything good, especially with the other guys' compliments the whole time. I just had this feeling of vertigo. 'What am I doing?' The amount of people out there who just aren't interested in what we're doing anymore - after a while it kinda, plays with your confidence. I want to write better for this band, you know - they're my life.”
“We can go and be ‘That You Am I Band’ anytime we can, you know, we can turn it on and enjoy it and everyone will have a great time, but as far as making records go, we just need to do something different.”
It’s a surprising claim at first, but begins to make sense when you look at the band’s career trajectory. In the early-to-mid '90s, You Am I was set to take over the world. They won six ARIAs in 1996 alone and were the first Australian band to debut three successive albums at number one on the charts: Hi Fi Way (1995), Hourly, Daily (1996) and #4 Record (1998). But at some point – for most, around 2001's Dress Me Slowly – interest petered out. Sometimes it seems the phrase, “I like their old stuff better than their new stuff”, was coined solely for You Am I. It’s a reality Rogers tackles with a shrug.
“I think it has more to do with where they were at that stage of their life,” he says. “I'm not too keen on that time [the mid-1990s] because it wasn't the greatest time of my life. I love that people love those records … but I've got to be honest about it, I don't think they're [our best albums], you know. But, hey, I understand, they want a band to be new and young, and we probably just annoy them.”
While Rogers admits “he got messy for a while” – a reference to his infamous 2004/05 Falls Festival onstage meltdown, where he took a swing at guitarist Davey Lane and accidentally knocked Missy Higgins to the ground – he says it ironically reignited interested in the band.
“What do you do? I can't fix it all for other people, you know. I do take notice of it, and it affects me in a little way, absolutely, but I can't live that way. I live for the people that I love, and for that thrill of creation that I get making this music … You can't please all people, any of the time,” he says with a chuckle.
“Writing this way [now], with absolutely no formula, is kind of a thrill. That lack of confidence is also kind of a thrill, because it forces you to wonder if you're just wasting oxygen. You don't know. Seeing the rest of the band enjoying it, that's one of the only things that makes me happy. Seeing the boys' faces, playing the music that I've written, thinking, 'I am good.'” The last sentence is said not in an air of conceit, but one of renewed confidence.
When Dilettantes was released, Rogers was quoted in an interview as saying he remained unsure of the album until he went for a walk with it. He had a similar moment with You Am I in the car, although he connected with an album different to the one he set out to create.
“Probably about a month or two after finishing [the album], I'll go for a walk or a long drive, and it drops, you know: 'That's right, I'm doing this for a reason and it's better than I thought.' And it's very different from what I thought that we were going in to make … So I've been acquainting myself with it. Yeah, I like it, but it's not what I went in there to do.”
Rogers says he initially wanted to write an album of contrasting moods. “I wanted to start off with the softest thing you've ever heard in your life, and then end up with these kind of three or four hardcore songs at the end. I felt that that was exactly the right thing to do,” he says, before pondering, “Um ... I really don't know what I was thinking.”
It's notable that the album is far softer than their previous works, with fewer hard rock tunes. “I think that we've got a lot of rock 'n' roll songs that we can go and play every night … This is rather dull muso talk, but as players we wanted to challenge ourselves … to sound more like Soft Machine, rather than something more straight-up rock 'n' roll. It's just it's more interesting to us, and to play as softly as we do on this record, is harder than to be the same old rock 'n' roll band. And when we get a singer who can sing rock 'n' roll really well, we'll be right back there,” he jokes.
“I'm 41, everyone's sort of around my age apart from Davey [and] to play this kind of shifting, melodic music on this record is difficult. It takes this concentration to let yourself be emotional and try and not be ashamed of it – it's more of a challenge … That's what we want from ourselves now. We can go and be ‘That You Am I Band’ anytime we can, you know. We can turn it on and enjoy it and everyone will have a great time, but as far as making records go, we just need to do something different. A lot of playing on the record is those guys really pushing themselves, and me pushing myself as a writer.”
He sighs. “I mean, look, I only get it because people seem to get quite a bit of enjoyment from shouting at me at shows, you know, they either want ‘more rock 'n' roll’ or…”
Play 'Berlin Chair'?
“Yeah, or 'less rock 'n' roll',” he says incredulously. “We've got to please ourselves. A lot of years have been wasted on trying to please other people. We never were as far apart as when we tried to please other people. When we try and please ourselves we're right in each other's pockets, and that's where we should be. We're family; we're brothers, and that's seen us through a lot – a hell of a lot – of personal stuff; we've saved each other, and infuriated each other. Of course we like what we do, but we've released enough records to know that [the old sound's] just not going to happen.”
Archived image 2 withheld pending rights reviewImage details are recorded in the restoration file.
You Am I comes from a place of emotional resignation, which the band has been moving towards since Convicts at least. That was an album of ball-busting, swaggering, sneering rock tunes (though with its lighter moments), before Dilettantes, a more considered and very beautiful album, still dealing with regret and loss, but in a more mature and thoughtful way. Tellingly, the phrase “you ain't easy”, originally on Dilettantes' 'Beau Geste', makes a return on You Am I, sung by guest vocalist Lanie Lane on 'Trigger Finger'. This time it’s sung from a woman's perspective. Is Rogers turning on himself, more so than ever before?
“You know, I guess it's a way for me of getting through, and to enjoy as much as I can out of life, and to hopefully have my bandmates feel that same feeling,” he explains.”
“I think You Am I do make very hopeful music. I mean, even in a song like 'Thank God I Hit The Bottom' (the first track on Convicts), the tagline is, “Cause who knows if I would have seen you from up there?” I needed to hit the bottom, and to see things clearly. That record wasn't negative for me at all. It was very, very positive. I don't think it's as angry as it sounded. My music is hopeful music. Even something that sounds a bit sad like 'How Much Is Enough?' [the final track on Hi Fi Way], to me it sounded [like] smiling after you've cried. You know, we're Australia's first emos, man. Emotional music.”
Emotional as it is, You Am I doesn’t seem to be as angry as previous albums. Rogers now speaks particularly slowly, pausing between almost each word. I can't tell whether he's deciding just what he wants to say, or whether he wants to say it at all. He pauses to think before beginning. “Um, well, you know, I'm a pretty angry person. But I just get bored hearing myself being angry in songs. I think that it's more progressive to try and make yourself joyously bewildered through song. I don't want to be an angry person, and so I'm writing music to get that out. I'm a very, very lucky person; the anger is something I don't understand. But I'll work on that in private.”
“A night off's not what I'm in for – I don't take holidays. I'm a goddamn working musician.”
He also gets sick of the sound of his own voice. In an interview with Melbourne’s Herald Sun last year, Rogers intimated that the band was “getting a singer in”. It caused a stir on the youami.com.au forums, fuelling speculation as to who it was, and causing some to question whether it was the beginning of the end. Rogers says he was being self-deprecating, but the thought has crossed his mind.
“It's just about wanting to get as much enjoyment out of music as you can, and sometimes I really, really enjoy singing and other times I don't. I should really just shut up,” he jokes. “The times that we do [play with another singer], whether it's the band with Tex [Perkins] or Evan [Dando], I think that's when we're at our best. The guys don't agree with me, and so that's the reason why we've continued with me singing it.”
The future, he concedes, may be different. "We want to be playing music, but if we can't be You Am I, if it's not viable for us to be You Am I, if we're not making each other happy, then – look, I wish it was. But at the moment – I dunno, I still think we've got something, with me singing. So we'll go for a little while longer, and then we'll do something else together. … I like playing in this band – I love it, y'know. I'm not gonna fuck that up again."
Perhaps the album’s guest vocalists, including the aforementioned Lanie Lane and also Megan Washington, who duets with Rogers on 'Lie and Face the Sun' and adds some gorgeous harmonies to the end of 'Shuck', are a step in that direction?
“Maybe. It's more just 'cause they're friends,” he says. “It was a lot of fun. I like someone like Meg ... [She] just seemed right for that song. I mean, it sounds very pretty, but it's not a pretty song.”
While ex-Jet member Stevie Hesketh, who also played on the album, will be touring with the band – “he's family,” says Rogers, “he's part of the band” – it's likely Lane and Washington won't be. “We're a shoestring band at the moment – Davey's gonna put on the glasses and push his hair forward. We're not going to try and replicate the record – it'll just be logistically impossible to get Meg or Lanie every time.”
With the band about to embark on their first national tour in a year, it’s still unseen how the new album will translate live. “There's some pretty loose structuring going on with this record – I'm really looking forward to playing around with it,” he says, excitedly. “I actually just can't wait to get on stage every night and see if we can pull it off. It's actually a very challenging record to play, and it's just us…
“We seem to be the cover band for hire,” he laughs in reference to his participation in last year’s White Album concert series and the band’s recent performance of Stones songs at the NRL grand final. “They're job things, you know. I have to make money, to look after the people I love and get through it … A night off's not what I'm in for – I don't take holidays. I'm a goddamn working musician.”
He later alludes to being “not well”, and I ask if he could explain what he means. “It's not important,” he says, softly. Then immediately, as though to cover his tracks: “It's not making sense.”
Rogers has never shied away from discussing the effect of mental illness on his life; the adolescent episodes that informed so many of his earlier songs. Speaking frankly on Andrew Denton's Enough Rope in 2008, Rogers revealed that he'd been living with depression, an anxiety disorder and schizophrenic episodes as a teenager and young man.
Now able – and willing – to speak about it, he’s become the ambassador of Metta Generation, an organisation set up by a family in Wagga to raise much-needed funds for their son, who suffers from high-risk bipolar. “You know, they're just hard-working people trying to look after their kid, who is the most beautiful, enigmatic young man. Going out to Wagga, and meeting them was just one of the greatest nights of my life.
“I speak about mental health stuff only because I don't want some 16-year-old kid thinking there's no future. I survived something that I feel infinitely thankful for, when at the time I thought that my life was over. I got through it, and that's the only reason I talk about it. I don't feel deserving of any sympathy or whatever, it's just that I got through something and it's possible … that other kids will as well … That's why I talked about it on Andrew Denton, and also to my mum and dad, who didn't understand what was going on at the time.”
Rogers has also recently worked with Rebetika Mortika for The Key Of Sea, an album of collaborations between popular Australian artists and refugee and migrant musicians. Working in a new genre called rebetiko – often transliterated as rembetiko – Rogers seems at home. An urban Greek folk music that saw a great revival in the 1960s, it’s been described by Grinderman’s James Sclavunos as a “sort of outlaw blues” dealing with themes of “exile, loss of family, wandering the streets after dark, taking drugs and drinking to excess, unrequited love, imprisonment and death”. With the word itself being a derivation of the Turkish morpheme “rebet”, meaning rebellious, it's little surprise Rogers would take to the genre so quickly.
“I love what the record's about, but they don't want it to be a political statement. It's more of a social statement, for multicultural listeners. That's what makes this country what it is,” he says. “I get to write a song and record with some other rebetiko musicians; music I love, music from a culture that I love, and with people that I love, on a song about lost love – what's more perfect?
“It's the music of the misplaced,” he continues. “Writing in that style, [it's] very straight writing – there's no grey areas, it's black and white, you know. And I think that might be a better way to go,” he laughs. “I've run out of shonky metaphors.”
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