Ex In the City Drum Media Mark Neilsen 19.05.04 It’s a much darker sounding record,” begins Eskimo Joe’s bass player and vocalist Kav Temperley, talking about their new album ‘A Song Is a City’. “Like [debut] album ‘Girl’ was a very heart on you sleeve, love songs album, where this is the other side of that where it all turns bad.” One could almost say that ‘Girl’ was the “I’m in Love” album while ‘A Song Is a City’ is the break up album. Although a bit like that, it’s not like the band intentionally set out to do part one and part two of a relationship. “I just report from my life in Fremantle, that’s what it pretty much is, and that’s what was going on for me in the last year and a half,” Temperley says. Although darker, Temperley found writing ‘A Song Is a City’ a lot easier than for ‘Girl’. With their debut album, they were writing songs that were moving away from their earlier punkier leanings and writing songs based in guitar pop. For ‘A Song Is a City’ they’d already established a base of song writing and sound and so could build on that rather than starting something completely different. “We didn’t really have to think about writing songs to bridge our old fans to our new record to not freak them out,” Temperley explains. “We could just write a bunch of songs and choose the best ones or the ones hat fit into the theme. Because of that it’s you said we set ourselves up with a platform on purpose that wed have all this freedom for this album and because of that it was a joyous album to make, it was really fun.” [drum] Was there a theme then for the album? [Kav] Not really a theme. When you get a bunch of songs and obviously there are front runners that are the really good songs and have to be there, it starts to spell out this feel and then you start getting songs that fit into that feel and you make sure you pick songs that are relevant. Once you’ve got that bunch of songs, what we generally do is go right, we need another kind of rocking single or we need a psychedelic toilet break song. And that’s what happened this time. Well may you laugh at the notion of a ‘psychedelic toilet break song’, but the fact remains ‘A Song Is a City’ does contain such a number. It came to be when Temperley locked himself away in the jam room one day and virtually mad professor-like concocted the number ‘I’m So Tired’. It is almost dirge-like as it gradually expands (or deconstructs, depending on your point of view). “The album’s very song orientated, and by the end of it I found I was just exhausted. I couldn’t really take in the songs. They were still good songs, but in your mind you’d start to look over them a bit because there was no space. I had that song ‘I’m So Tired’ and we put it in there to give something more ethereal in the middle, kind of to give you a breather. It’s the same with ‘Carousel’, another little joining track, just to give it another couple of dimensions,” Temperley notes. Although there are little diversions like ‘I’m So Tired’ and the acoustic based lullaby ‘Carousel’, Temperley believes overall ‘A Song Is a City’ is a more coherent record than ‘Girl’. As ‘Girl’ was their debut album, Temperley felt that, as is probably the case with most bands and their first long player, they wanted to squeeze in all their influences on there. This time around the band weren’t even thinking about that. “I think ‘Girl’, even though it’s got a nice flow to it, I think it’s actually a little bit of an eclectic album, there are lots of bits and pieces going on, where as I don’t know if we consciously tried to do it, but in this album I think it has a more linear feel to it. The songs all sound more like they’re from the same album,” Temperley clarifies. [drum] What do you put that down to? [Kav] I just think we’re getting better at what we do. I don’t know. In a way we’re trying to prove ourselves as well. Like we don’t feel like we have to show our whole hand anymore because we are in this for the long game, not the short game. Each album can be what it is and down the track we can do whatever the hell we want. We don’t have to prove everything in one bunch of songs. It seems that with ‘A Song Is a City’ Eskimo Joe have used what they did with ‘Girl’ and taken it that bit further. With keyboards, string, backing vocalists and even just production-wise, the album sounds more lush and grandiose to an extent, but not in a pompous way. “I think that’s true,” Temperley agrees. “That’s a fairly good description of it. ‘Girl’ was our first record, we’d never made an album before, and obviously we were taking a different tack because we were trying to make the album we wanted to make as opposed to the one everyone expected us to make. You do learn your tricks and get better as you go along.” [drum] Did you feel any pressure when making ‘Girl’ because it was so different from what you’d done before? [Kav] A little bit but I don’t think I really felt it at the time. I think it was when I finished it was when I sat down and went, “Oooh, that was a pretty big thing we just did.” But at the same time you do it and you love it. It’s not like the winter of your discontent, really. Ever.