Brighter Quicker Dimmer

There's a commonly held belief in the pop music industry that an artist's second album is make-or-break time. The reasons for this are many, but the over-riding concern (unless, Elvis Costello-like, you can come up with half an album on the crapper), is that you've had your whole career up to that point to assemble the material for your first album. Then, perhaps only a year or so to come up with songs of suitably incandescent brilliance to match the first. It's the international law of diminishing returns, aka 'the sophomore slump', and only the truly gifted seem to be (at least partially) immune to it.

Drugs do not appear to help very much in this situation, although probably make the whole anguished process more bearable. The more successful or critically praise-worthy the first record, the more intense is the pressure to match it, often resulting in over-cooking the whole shebang to ghastly effect.

Sometimes too, wayward attempts to break new ground will leave established fans scratching their heads in bewilderment. Can anyone hum anything off Alanis Morissette's follow-up to the multi-platinum 'Jagged Little Pill'? Can anyone even remember what it was called?

Shayne Carter, and this will be no surprise to anyone familiar with his against-the-grain modus operandi, has totally turned this axiom on its head by finishing the follow-up to 2001's 'I Believe You Are A Star', another six-banger title - 'You've Got To Hear The Music', in well under half the time of its predecessor.

This is fortunate, because 'Star' really was a Herculean labour for Carter as he battled to master Pro Tools and its infinite overdubbing/manipulating potential, learn bass, production duties and secure a release.

Whole rafts of work were consigned to the waste-bin of cyberspace as he eventually realised that the computer was not going to write the songs for him in any sort of meaningful way.

So it's great to see the now 40ish Carter looking relaxed and happy with the fruits of his latest labours, the bulk of which was written during one golden month of creative outpouring. To put this in perspective, the admittedly brilliant Smoke single from 'Star' took fully four years from inception to completion.

Difficult follow-up album? Quite the opposite really. So then, was the radically reduced turnaround time a function of greater familiarity with his Pro Tools set up (which came as part of his advance from Sony on the first album)?

"Definitely, yeah." he agrees. "I did all the hard work on the last one, learnt everything I had to learn on the last one as far as the process went. But yeah, I just wanted to make this one really direct and organic sounding and I didn't want to use computer trickery.

"Every tune on this record was done basically click track, acoustic guitar and a vocal, and I built around it. I just thought that if the tunes worked in that elemental form, then they'd work any which way. I just tried to make it real easy for myself, because I recognised that you can make it really hard for yourself."

When I last interviewed Carter he mentioned that even after all the work he'd put into 'Star' there were still a few niggly things that he wanted to change, but the record company wouldn't let him. This may have had something to do with the fact that it had already been mastered! Carter is known as something of a perfectionist, so I ask if his latest creation went off for mastering in a niggle-free way.--BREAK---

"I am really happy. I've done everything I could think to do with the tunes. I think it's rawer and more stripped down this time, it's not as layered as the last one, and I deliberately made it a lot less complicated for myself when I was writing the tunes. It's really direct - there's only so much you can do with that kinda shit."

Another factor which probably contributed to this relatively smooth gestation was a much greater willingness to farm out musical contributions to other musicians. Indeed this is more in keeping with his original concept of Dimmer as a kind of umbrella banner under which a fluid line up of musicians could work, rather than the Shayne Carter Show that 'Star' became.

Quite an illustrious line-up of contributors it is too. Anyone who's heard the lean, sinuous funk of first single Getting What You Give will not have missed the Fat Freddy's Drop horns all over the intro (rather oddly they never re-appear in the song - sooo Shayne P. Carter), while golden-tonsilled diva Anika Moa contributes backing vocals on nearly half the tracks. One track even finds our two pre-eminent pop princesses panned left (Moa) and right (Bic Runga). Now you can call me churlish, but that strikes me as just plain greedy.

Audio engineering wizard Nick Roughan has again made his presence felt on the sonic side of things. Andy Morton contributes some very tasty keyboards while Carter has also delegated some of the bass duties to Pluto's Mike Hall. Regular drummer Gary Sullivan, responsible for the beautiful computer animated clips for Seed and Getting What You Give, is now based in Sydney but still in evidence on the album, augmented with new live sticksman Willy Scott.

Carter even handed over some of the guitar duties to new Dimmer regular Ned Ngatai, proving beyond doubt that he checked his ego at the door when he set out to make this record. If it made the songs better, if it made things easier rather than harder, then it was in.

One of the more interesting collaborations was with fellow home-recording ace Sean Donnelly, better known by his SJD handle, and a man who shares Carter's taste for creating intelligently noir-ish audio. Carter says of Donnelly, "I really wanted to work with him because I really rate him - a very talented man."

The fact that we're sitting in the boardroom of Festival Mushroom Records invites the next question, because the last time we spoke was at Sony Music on the occasion of the release of 'I Believe You Are A Star'. What's the dirt there, Shayne?

"I'll tell you afterwards..." he deadpans conspiratorially, then bursts out laughing. "Sony - I don't know, I just don't think they were into that last record I gave them and I was perfectly happy with it, I thought it was a really good record. I really enjoyed working with Malcolm (Black, Sony's A&R honcho) and full respect to that guy, he was great to work with through the whole thing.

"But they wanted to see the sales figures up on the board and they wanted the commercial airplay and all that kind of stuff, and it didn't really happen. It still sold respectably, it's nearly gold, but I think the main thing was we didn't get an overseas release for it, and that's what we always banked on."