AINSLIE WILLS’ debut album, You Go Your Way, I’ll Go Mine, is picking up momentum since its release in March with Wills gaining comparisons to a range of artists including Beth Orton and Thom Yorke. LOUISA BULLEY spoke with Wills about her new album, recording in a beach house, jazz, and her upcoming tour.
So your debut album, You Go Your Way, I’ll Go Mine was released at the beginning of March. How are you feeling since the album’s release?
I’m feeling kind of quite liberated I suppose, quite free. I suppose nobody really knows what it’s like to go through the process, any process, until you’re sort of in the driver’s seat, and this album has been being written since 2009. So it’s kind of been, I keep on thinking of this analogy, like you do nurse it like it’s your kid, and as if it’s the most important thing in the world. To other people it’s great that they enjoy it, but they don’t sort of see what it’s like behind the scenes. So all I can say is that it’s fabulous to get it out and about and it’s getting some really great feedback and songs are starting to resonate with people and they’re responding to them. So yeah, it’s doing the job that we set out to do and yeah, I’m feeling good.
I just wanted to get a little bit of background, musical heritage, what you grew up listening to and what you’ve been listening to as you’ve been writing this?
Well I think earlier on I was listening to a lot of musical theatre stuff. My parents were quite musical and listened to music a lot around the house, like old-school musicals, The King and I, and all those kind of things, and my dad was quite into classical music as well.
My mum was quite into jazz, so earlier on it was that kind of music. It was my interest in jazz that led me to study jazz for about 5 years, not all at one institution, I studied two years at Ballarat doing a Diploma of Music that was sort of honing in on jazz and popular music and then I did a Bachelor of Music Performance at Victorian College of the Arts, which was kind of jazz and improvisation and getting into the nitty gritty of making music, simultaneous music and also composition. So I guess that had quite an influence on the way that I write, as it gave me a bit more of a phonic vocabulary, because you know, it’s kind of easy to pick up the guitar or the piano and just bash away and not quite know what’s going on, but still like the sound of it. I’m not saying that you need to go to school to play music, but I feel like you start to realise, well in my case, I started to know how to label the things that you already were hearing but didn’t quite know why they have different sounds and stuff, like a chord progression or in a song. So yeah, I was singing a lot of jazz originally.
Over the time that the album was made we were listening to a lot of Feist, and Sia, Grizzly Bear and St Vincent, although she was kind of a bit more recent. But definitely between Laurence (Folvig, guitar) and myself, and Laurence is the guy who co-wrote the album with me, we both were listening to a lot of Grizzly Bear, and couldn’t stop listening to them, and were starting to write songs that were very much influenced by their kind of chord progressions and just like, they have a very specific tuning that they use on their guitars and some of their songs. They just have such a broad and colourful palette, and I think they were one of the biggest inspirations for the album. And of course, there’s always a lingering influence of Jeff Buckley, I’ve always been a big Jeff Buckley fan and I often go back to listening to him at various stages, so yeah.
There have been a lot of comparisons being thrown around about your music, putting you in the company of Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, Beth Orton and even Thom Yorke. People keen to categorise your music if they can.
I don’t really have a problem with that. I know a lot of artists kind of go, “I don’t sound like them, I sound like myself”. But I think, yeah, I do the same thing, I hear a piece of music that I haven’t heard before, or a singer or something, and I think that they sound a bit like Ella Fitzgerald, or like Elvis Presley, or something like that. You can hear the things that have influenced them. Unless you’ve been raised in a bubble or something, artists are influenced by artists all the time, so I don’t really mind the comparisons. I feel like the music that I make, and certainly the music we’ve put on this album is quite an eclectic mix of songs and I feel like it really kind of reflects the thoughts and tastes of myself and Laurence, who I wrote the album with. Yeah, I don’t think we necessarily wanted to make an album where all the songs started to sound the same, even though to some people that’s sort of essential for a good album, they want familiarity and a sense that they know what’s gonna happen, whereas we wanted to actually explore song-writing and our own song-writing capabilities. And while we were doing that I think different things and different sounds just sort of pop into the songs, and you’re not necessarily conscious of them at the time, but then when you listen back you sort of go, ‘oh yeah’. I do it all the time. There are specific songs on this album, for example ‘Liquid Paper’, there are a couple of lines in there that I know, they just remind me of a Roy Orbison tune. The melody is not exactly the same, but I can see that I’ve been influenced by that sound and it’s kind of made it’s way into my song. So yeah, I think really that you can’t escape being influenced by and being compared to other people. And when people don’t know who you are and have never heard you before, they want to try and understand what you’re doing and so they want to put you in a context of artists that they’ve heard. I think in a way people want to kind of claim ownership really, like they want to show that they understand it.
You could really take it as a compliment I think. Like the comparisons you’re getting you are placing you in good company at least.
Yeah, I’m lucky that it’s been good artists that I’ve been compared to! Not Nicki Minaj or anything!
You recorded the album in isolation in a beach house in Blairgowrie rather than in a regular studio. What was the thinking behind this?
Well, I had seen Feist’s documentary about the making of her album, The Reminder, which is called Look At What The Light Did Now, and she took her band and her engineer and all her gear and went to a chateau in France, lucky thing! And the documentary goes through the recording of that album. So watching that was so inspiring because you got a sense of how much the space influenced what they were making. But also it puts you in this space of, kind of, not like you’re in limbo, but since you’re not in the studio space and there aren’t high expectation that you’re gonna smash out an album in like three or four days. I think the reason why we did choose to go to a beach house instead of a studio is because we wanted to feel like if we wanted to start at 8 o’clock in the morning and then finish recording at 2 o’clock in the morning, that we could, and we didn’t have any restrictions. I think that that was really a lovely experience
I’d also done it for the EP before this album, Something for Everyone, that I recorded in 2010. That was recorded in a Barn in country Victoria and that was really cool, it was the same kind of vibe. There were no expectation and we just went in there and recorded it and we came out with something that we were really happy with and proud of. looking at the album, we not only went to the beach house to do most of the tracks, but we went to a studio that my best friend’s cousin owns and it’s actually in her old family house that’s been converted into a studio and that’s where I recorded the rest of the vocals, I did some of them at the beach house but then I finished them off at the studio. And then we added strings at the Northcote Uniting Church here in Melbourne. So I think sort of every space, like, it definitely influences the way that you feel and therefore the way in which the songs translate onto, well in this case computer, or in other cases onto tape. But yeah, I think that was the reason for us choosing to use the beach house over a studio, and I’d definitely do it again, it’s so much nicer.
So you’re touring the album nationally over the next couple months. How are you feeling about getting on the road and playing these songs live?
I’m feeling really good about it, because I think that, you always hope for the best and that there are no major catastrophes and that your voice holds up for the whole entire tour and that, you know, everything goes well, and hopefully it will! But I think more than anything I’m looking forward to playing, because we haven’t really been playing shows very much at all, we’ve more been laying low rehearsing with the whole band but not playing live. So I feel like the anticipation has been building up in preparation for the tour and I feel like, hopefully, it will be a really fun tour and hopefully the people that will come out to see the shows will really like what we’ve put together, because it’s been a long time coming.
I love the album, it’s got such a great range of sounds. It kept surprising me, even just with the timbre of your voice changing between songs.
Oh great, thanks!
Do you have a favourite track on there, or maybe one that you have a particular tie to?
I actually am pretty proud of ‘Mary’, the opening track, and that was because it was quite hard to record that song. When I started writing it, I didn’t know who Mary was, like I didn’t know who I was writing about. I was like ‘Mary, who is this Mary, and why am I writing about her, what is this about?’, and it took me a while to sort of settle what the song was going to be, like I did various demos of just trying to work out the song and what I wanted it to sound like. So I finished the main structure of the song, verse, chorus, instrumental section, I figured that out, and then at the end of it I kind of thought that this could set the pace for the album, that this is the starter. And then I thought, yeah, I sort of was thinking about this Mary, she ended up being a fictional character that was kind of based on a few different characters, like Mary Magdalene and I thought that, yeah, I needed to set the scene. And the intro that I added to it later, so that was after I’d already come up with the main structure and everything, once I had that in place I was like, “yeah alright, this song is making more sense to me you know.” So yeah, I think I’m really proud of that one because I think it took the longest to get to where it is now.
Anything else you’d like to throw in or anything?
I suppose the only thing I would like to add is that I think it’s great that people go out to support live, original music, and I hope that they continue to do that!
Yeah, it’s so worthwhile seeing a band live, it changes the way you experience their music…
Yeah, you’re totally right. I think if people hear your album or whatever you have coming out, and they have it in their ears and have gotten familiar with it, and then they get to see it live it’s that extra reinforcement and everything. It’s a pretty special thing to hear live music I think, and I feel pretty lucky to be involved in that too.
Ainslie Wills performs at the Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle, on April 20, 2013, and will be supported by Kira Puru and the Bruise, Post Paint, and Grace Turner.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0uAYxO5jM0