SECRET COUNTRY 4:17

 I wrote this song in 1993 after reading John Pilger's book of the same name. It's about a "time machine" view of the flat where I was living in Sydney at the time. Ten years ago someone else lived there. A hundred years before that it was probably someone's back yard. A hundred years before that there was only the aborigines. I suppose it's a post Mabo reflection on the "white blindfold" view of history. I never recorded it because I thought its meaning would become almost immediately redundant. I was wrong.

EVER LOVIN' LAUGHTER 3:05

Michael, Stuie and I started this song on a lay day in Adelaide a couple of years ago. It was very difficult to fit lyrics to but the end of the song ("you make me sad with your ever lovin' laughter") came first so I had to work back to front. My mum died in late 97' and it took me a while to get over it. It being a shock, for some months I couldn't quite picture her face. When eventually I did it was a memory of her laughing. More of a giggle really. So there's a bittersweet twist to the memory. Just like a sun showers.

THE MEN WHO RAN AWAY FROM THE CIRCUS 3:27

I used to work in my brother's second hand shop where all sorts of characters used to come in selling stuff. There were these two blokes who used to come in quite regularly with loads of absolutely useless crap that they wanted to sell. Garden rakes with four teeth, pen knives with no blades. They had this really lost look about them; probably the living evidence of government restructuring of mental institutions (i.e. turf 'em out on the street). Anyway we used to call them the men who ran etc. because they looked like the antithesis of excited young boys who ran off to the circus. I use it as a parable about the decline of the live music scene in Sydney from the 90's onwards. I have a specific memory of the San Miguel in Cammeray where I saw some real magic happen.

THE MAN THAT MIDAS TOUCHED 3:15

 More a tone poem than a song. The title is quite nonsensical but it fits the meter of the song. I suppose you'd call it doggerel. It's a nice instrumental moment that we came up with in the "Recovery" dressing room at ABC TV, Melbourne.

ON THE SACRED SAND 2:52

On The Sacred Sand A song about the beach as the greatest meeting place in Australia. Our is the biggest island continent but the vast majority live by the coast and when it's hot we head for the beach. It's also the great social leveler. Judge, bricklayer, nurse, musician, all the same without their clothes on.

SOLILOQUY 3:52
Another observation of the endless battle between romantic love and primal instinct. Our brains still have trouble keeping up with our beasts-in-the-fields urges. And those conflicts produce the best films, songs etc. That's what I reckon anyway. Another "Recovery" dressing room tune.

WATCH OVER ME 2:19

 Inspired by Nick Lowe. Have always wanted to write a 2 minute pop song with a bit of bounce. I suppose its about the childish desire for a real life guardian angel. It's got a Phil Spector vibe about it. BACK TO MONO!

LASSO 3:02

A song about the special magical power women have over men. You know what I'm talkin' about. It's like being roped in... just like that... like a lasso. Beautiful double bass work from Mr. Galeazzi on this one.

HOW LONG 3:31

A song about being dead scared of being left alone. I'm talking fetal position... repeating to yourself over and over it won't be long know! I love the brushed snare on this track.
Nice work Stuie!

NO VEIL, NO HEART 3:35

 I wrote this song just after a very low point where I stopped playing live in 1994. I was quite disillusioned with the music business and I likened it to the Muslim convention of taking the veil; if you don't conform you get left on the shelf. There's another conjugal metaphor I could employ but I think you get the idea. The Arabic interval in the chord structure is not coincidental..

MERCY SLEEP 3:32

Stuie & I started this song when we were soundchecking at the Cat & Fiddle in Sydney. The sheer weight of the major seventh chords in it immediately brought to mind the only true King of Pop, Dave Graney so therefor we determined the song would be about things regal. I'm the king of my castle and I get quite irate when people like Telstra and Optus salesman come around cold selling at 7 o'clock at night, so the song's about the inalienable right of being left alone. Also I met Jimmy Webb (Galveston, Wichita Lineman etc.) at a song writing workshop in Sydney earlier this year and bought his book Tunesmith (which he very kindly endorsed "É.to the lineman of the county") so I employed some Webb like melodies for the song.

PLEASE GOD AND THE WEATHER 3:32

 I borrowed this saying from my elderly father. I think it's an old phrase brought over from Ireland by his grandfather in the 1850's. It's a farewell term meaning I'll see you again soon contingent on God's good grace (no heart attacks, car accidents etc.). It's a pretty fatalistic sentiment but always delivered in good humour. The song's the same. You live and love and die but you can still have some fun along the way. With my Mum's death it has an added poignancy. My dad hasn't heard it yet and I hope the old bugger takes it all right when he does.


Overall "Into the Land of Promise" is just that. A record of unparalleled beauty and emotion. A stunning and bold attempt to bring back those old fashioned values of songs that sing to the best & worst of our emotions.

Someone at Warners ...

We recorded this album in different ways in different places. In December '98 we spent 3 days at Megaphon in Sydney with Tim Whitten (Clouds, Powderfinger, Love Me) engineering. This was for some of the bigger drum sounding songs like "Circus" and "Lasso" where some isolation is desirable though the sessions also turned up tunes like "the Man That Midas Touched".

In March '99 we relocated to a big old, former Marist Brothers retreat house on the NSW south coast for 7 days, again with Tim Whitten engineering. We took a lot of gear from my home studio plus some hire stuff and set up a very efficient 16 track system in a big comfy room overlooking seven mile beach.

These sessions gave the album the atmosphere we like because there's no pressure. We could go swimming when the weather was good and play late into the night without being bothered by anybody else or for that matter bothering them. These sessions yielded the bed tracks for 8 of the album songs and some B sides. It was a great way to work. Some evenings we'd set up the barbie on the front lawn, cook some seafood and have a few beers and then move inside to play some more. Can't beat it!

In April/ May we finished vocals and other overdubs in my home studio in Sydney plus a couple of days doing some string ensemble and piano overdubs at Megaphon.

In June we transferred the tracks from 3 DA 88s onto 2" tape in the Phoenix Room at Studios 301 in Sydney. This involved processing the sounds to tape through some very nice old Focusrite units care of Jeremy Allom (Massive Attack, Specials, Vika & Linda etc.) This is my third album with Jeremy (Olana and Jimmy Little's "Messenger" being the others) and it was great to be mixing with him in the big room at 301 with all the grown up's toys. Jeremy was a panoramic sonic vision who can really bring out the warmth in the music. We mixed 14 songs over 10 days. There was one song that we abandoned mid mix because it wasn't up to scratch. Maybe next record.

We mastered at 301 with Don Bartley mid June. I love mastering. You turn up at 10am and Don sends one of the boys out for breakfast and you sit there with a nice coffee while Don puts together the picture for you. That's when an album comes alive. Love it.

As with our other albums, I look after production and Stuie does the art work and layout. The primary image on the cover was a photo in the Sydney Morning Herald in late '98. The accompanying story was a fairly mundane piece about wool prices but the picture of these freshly shorn sheep emerging from an old tin shed set against a cloudy sky was very powerful. It was taken by staff photographer Andrew Meares on a property at Crookwell near Goulburn, NSW. The image worked in very well with our working title of "Into the Land of Promise".

The title came from a Scandinavian Film, whose name I can't recall, starring Max Von Sydow. In his preamble to the movie, film critic John Hinde (sic) spoke about the story of a young boy and his elderly guardian taking the boat across the water to 19th Century Denmark where there was work. It was the land of promise. Not the promised land where the "milk and honey" were provided but where there was opportunity, a place where the possible could happen. The image of three freshly shorn sheep casting off their old skins as it were and bounding off into a new experience resonated with that idea of a land of promise, over there. In fin-de-siecle Australia it has some currency. The idea was to give the cover a book like quality. Like encountering Neville Shute's "A Town Like Alice" for the first time in a bookstore. I think Stuie succeeded.

This Album won an Aria in 2000 in the "Best Adult Contemporary Album"
(which can be something of a noose around your neck when it comes to getting
airplay on Triple J the "youth" network...)

Click here to see the Photo's from the event.

 

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