A Year Of Many Marvels
Author: Mark Bell (photography by Mark & Deb Smith)
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After a huge year of what could only be described as over achieving, one of this country's favourite songwriting sons is about to release his second solo album. Don McGlashan talks to Mark Bell about the challenges of juggling his various endeavours and enjoying the ride that was 2008.
Don McGlashan has just finished telling me, with a completely straight face (so I have to believe him) that the title of his new album 'Marvellous Year' has nothing to do with what has been, by anyone's measure, a truly remarkable year of creative output for the highly respected Auckland songwriter. A year so marvellous, in fact, that John Campbell would be struggling to find enough superlatives. It saw him complete two major film scores, take on the role of MD at the Silver Scroll Awards, perform at WOMAD here and in Australia, tour the US and Europe with Crowded House, participate in the sublime Seven Worlds Collide project and - if all that weren't enough, he also recorded his second solo album at Neil Finn's Roundhead studios with his backing band Seven Sisters.
Donald Bain McGlashan has always been a pretty driven creative force, a true renaissance man who can turn his hand not only to a variety of musical instruments, but to popular music, orchestral composition, theatre, dance music (in the old sense of the phrase) and film with equal facility. Yes film. He's also been working up a screenplay with old Front Lawn sidekick Harry Sinclair whenever Harry is over here from his home base in LA.
Confronted with such a diverse and demanding workload, I ask how he managed to keep all those plates spinning without at least a few crashing to the floor.
"I kept plates spinning. I had cutlery, I had salad bowls, I had a huge amount of kitchenware up there and there were moments of stress, but looking back on it, it's sort of like a dream year really."
Having completed (with Seven Sisters) the music for 'Show of Hands', Anthony McCarten's story of an endurance prize competition set in a New Plymouth car yard, he was about to begin grappling with the enormity of scoring for the NZ Symphony Orchestra when things quickly got really interesting.
"I've worked with orchestras before, but never a full project - it's a 90 minute film and there might be 50 minutes of solid music, and I was in the middle of all of that, and I was curating the two WOMAD end of show galas…" Oh yeah, he did that too…
"I did a couple of songs with Neil Finn when he did his solo set at Taanaki, and just before we went on he said, 'Come to America with us, come and do the Crowded House tour'.
"I initially thought, 'I can't' you know? 'All of these things are falling out of the sky and unless I dodge one or two of them I'm gonna get squished.'
"But everybody around me said, 'You can probably do it, it's an orchestral score, it's all sitting there on your laptop, there's a lot of downtime on a band tour.' And so I kind of bit the bullet and did it, and it was fantastic! I had a great time on the tour, I didn't have time to get nervous in either direction, I didn't have time to stop and think ,'I'm learning Crowded House songs and trying to play them onstage.' I was playing a few different instruments, sort of like their utility midfielder, and I didn't have time to get nervous about that. As soon as we'd finished playing I'd rush off and get my laptop, put the headphones on and work on cue number 33."
I ask whether he found it difficult to transition from the euphoria of gig mode to the solemn requirements of composing for an Edwardian costume drama that is the Toa Fraser-directed 'Dean Spanley'.
"I tend to sort of fade into the wallpaper after gigs anyway, and sit there being pale and interesting while everybody's having a raucous old time, so in this instance it was the same except I was being pale and interesting with a laptop. But also I didn't have time to get nervous or think, 'I'm writing a score for the national symphony, they might think it's a piece of shit' because I was so busy. So it worked pretty well for me. I think whenever I stop and think too much, that's when I get into trouble."
I speculate that touring the world with somebody else's band must have come as something of a relief after the struggles of keeping The Muttonbirds going in the UK for so long.
"Yeah, if you take away the bits where you have to continually worry about the future or how everything's going, who's got their nose out of joint for some reason, how many people are coming to the gig, all those stresses that are necessarily there when it's your baby… If you take those bits out, what's left is pure music, and it was such a thrill to be eating and sleeping and breathing music solidly for a whole month. And the film score was all bound up in that, it was just fantastic."
Donald Bain McGlashan has always been a pretty driven creative force, a true renaissance man who can turn his hand not only to a variety of musical instruments, but to popular music, orchestral composition, theatre, dance music (in the old sense of the phrase) and film with equal facility. Yes film. He's also been working up a screenplay with old Front Lawn sidekick Harry Sinclair whenever Harry is over here from his home base in LA.
Confronted with such a diverse and demanding workload, I ask how he managed to keep all those plates spinning without at least a few crashing to the floor.
"I kept plates spinning. I had cutlery, I had salad bowls, I had a huge amount of kitchenware up there and there were moments of stress, but looking back on it, it's sort of like a dream year really."
Having completed (with Seven Sisters) the music for 'Show of Hands', Anthony McCarten's story of an endurance prize competition set in a New Plymouth car yard, he was about to begin grappling with the enormity of scoring for the NZ Symphony Orchestra when things quickly got really interesting.
"I've worked with orchestras before, but never a full project - it's a 90 minute film and there might be 50 minutes of solid music, and I was in the middle of all of that, and I was curating the two WOMAD end of show galas…" Oh yeah, he did that too…
"I did a couple of songs with Neil Finn when he did his solo set at Taanaki, and just before we went on he said, 'Come to America with us, come and do the Crowded House tour'.
"I initially thought, 'I can't' you know? 'All of these things are falling out of the sky and unless I dodge one or two of them I'm gonna get squished.'
"But everybody around me said, 'You can probably do it, it's an orchestral score, it's all sitting there on your laptop, there's a lot of downtime on a band tour.' And so I kind of bit the bullet and did it, and it was fantastic! I had a great time on the tour, I didn't have time to get nervous in either direction, I didn't have time to stop and think ,'I'm learning Crowded House songs and trying to play them onstage.' I was playing a few different instruments, sort of like their utility midfielder, and I didn't have time to get nervous about that. As soon as we'd finished playing I'd rush off and get my laptop, put the headphones on and work on cue number 33."
I ask whether he found it difficult to transition from the euphoria of gig mode to the solemn requirements of composing for an Edwardian costume drama that is the Toa Fraser-directed 'Dean Spanley'.
"I tend to sort of fade into the wallpaper after gigs anyway, and sit there being pale and interesting while everybody's having a raucous old time, so in this instance it was the same except I was being pale and interesting with a laptop. But also I didn't have time to get nervous or think, 'I'm writing a score for the national symphony, they might think it's a piece of shit' because I was so busy. So it worked pretty well for me. I think whenever I stop and think too much, that's when I get into trouble."
I speculate that touring the world with somebody else's band must have come as something of a relief after the struggles of keeping The Muttonbirds going in the UK for so long.
"Yeah, if you take away the bits where you have to continually worry about the future or how everything's going, who's got their nose out of joint for some reason, how many people are coming to the gig, all those stresses that are necessarily there when it's your baby… If you take those bits out, what's left is pure music, and it was such a thrill to be eating and sleeping and breathing music solidly for a whole month. And the film score was all bound up in that, it was just fantastic."
