Don McGlashan - A Year Of Many Marvels
Author: Mark Bell (photography by Mark & Deb Smith)
Meanwhile back in the real world there was an album to finish, this time a more band-oriented project than his 2006 release 'Warm Hand'. The tracks have more of a live feel thanks to the solid backing of The Seven Sisters which comprises John Segovia on guitars, Maree Thom on bass, Chris O'Conner in the drum seat and new addition Dominic Blaazer on keyboards.
"There's quite a lot of live takes on it, our version of Bathe in the River is pretty much how we put it down and not overdubbed. The Switch, there's quite a lot of overdubs on that, but the basic track and me singing is pretty much one live take. We're comfortable playing together and everybody's contributed a lot."
The album has undoubtedly benefited more than it's suffered from the talented Mr McGlashan's rather fat 2008 portfolio, with a late burst of four songs finding their way onto the final tracklist.
"The last rush of songs was very last minute - Bad Blood, You're the Song and 18th Day came in right at the last minute, and Marvellous Year actually. And I'm glad they did too, because I had a bunch of other songs (normally I use everything, I'm a really slow writer), but this time I had some other things that I wanted to throw at it. I just got cold feet in about October and I thought, 'No, if I really think about it there's two or three more songs just banging at the door waiting to be finished."
Sean Donnelly once again takes on co-production duties, but on this album there's none of his trademark layered atmospherics and only a smattering of his inventive bass playing.
"This time because we mixed it pretty quickly and we mixed it all at Roundhead - I had a bit of a deadline so we couldn't take it away to either my home studio or Sean's home studio and do all that layering, so there wasn't the opportunity to do that. But I think that the kind of record that I wanted to make was a more immediate one, more band-y and less atmospheric." He adds that with this record, "It was as if the trainer wheels had sort of fallen off and I was just able to get ideas out and take more risks too. I was able to do some songs that were lighter in touch and more throwaway like C2006P1 (a song about a comet no less) and Radio Programmer which were not ideas that had been really fretted over for a long time."
We close out our interview by talking about Seven Worlds Collide, Neil Finn's star -studded concert and album project to raise money for Oxfam. Without wishing to come on too star-struck, I'm keen to hear some of Don's observations about working with such talents as Radiohead's Ed O'Brien, the legendary Johnny Marr, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy and Scottish songbird KT Tunstall.
"Given that the group contained a fair number of heavy hitters, there was a total lack of 'Don't you know who I think I am?' behaviour. Johnny Marr, Ed O'Brien, Phil Selway (drummer) from Radiohead and Wilco's Pat Sansone were the basic band for one of my songs - Johnny leaping in on acoustic guitars, backing vocals and tambourine and making a lot of good production suggestions. He has an enormous breakneck Mancunian energy about everything, all the more remarkable because these days it's fuelled on nothing but healthy living and Chinese white tea.
"For the other song, I had the Wilco rhythm section of Glen Kotche and John Stirrat, Ed played layers of finely judged guitar atmospherics, Jeff Tweedy came up with a blistering solo on his SG and I roped in Ivy Rossiter, who was supposed to be only there to make coffee, for some late-night vocal harmonies. Apart from those two songs, I just wandered from room to room as we all did, throwing ideas in, picking up instruments and trying overdubs, joining in group discussions about where each song was going and where else it might go if you changed this or that element."
He says he could talk for days about what he learnt and took out of this amazing experience, but the over-riding impression was "…the idea of putting aside the normal insecurities and constrictions of the studio, and giving yourself over to purely 'playing' in the child-like sense of the word. You can only do that when there's complete trust all round, and I think Neil and producer Jim Scott did a great job of setting up and maintaining that atmosphere."
Whatever the future holds for this unique musician with incredible work ethic, 2008 was surely one he will look back on and think, "Well yes, that was a pretty marvellous year."
