NZ Musician

For someone who has just completed his first solo album, Don McGlashan is very sparing in his use of the personal pronouns 'I' and 'me'. Instead he is much more likely to substitute the inclusive 'we'.

Not through any self-effacing desire to deflect the limelight (although there's possibly an element of this), but more as an acknowledgement that without the input and inspiration of certain key people, the somewhat belated 'Warm Hand' might never have arrived at all. It would certainly bear scant resemblance to the intricate and soulful work it has become, and for that he is more than willing to give credit where credit's due.

Although Don is a brainy, hard-working, multi-talented, multi-instrumentalist singer/songwriter, arranger and composer with his own home Pro Tools studio, the effort of producing a solo album which refused to sound finished was beginning to weigh on his mind. He'd spent about seven months, starting in July 2004 (when the rhythm tracks were recorded in a barn at Bethels Beach), tinkering and doing overdubs at his home studio. He'd done string and brass sessions at The Lab, and even some final mixes with Angus McNaughton, with the aim of being wrapped up by around January this year.

"But the more I listened to them, the more I realised they were nowhere near final mixes. Songs needed different instruments on them and quite often I just didn't believe the lead vocal or something. And so then I did more work..."

Quite a bit more as it turns out. Because he is someone who admittedly doesn't over-write for an album - "Never have actually," he stresses - Don was pretty reluctant to dump songs just because they weren't quite gelling. The upshot was a rather protracted period of re-jigging, re-arranging, transposing, adding and subtracting and in some cases complete re-recording, all of which takes time and can play havoc with a writer's sense of objectivity.

Enter Sean James Donnelly and Ed McWilliams (Cake), two musicians Don is obviously happy to share the NZM cover shot with, and who, through their own individual musical output have contributed some of the most original and intelligent music this country has heard for many a year. Just check out SJD's 'Southern Lights' and Cake's 'Downtown Puff', their most recent solo releases, for confirmation of this.

"Sean was in the middle of his own project ('Southern Lights')," Don recalls, "... and we were able to push each other along at different times when we needed it. My constant bleat was; 'I have to do everything myself, I'm tired of this, I just want somebody to take it off me - tell me the good bits and throw away the bad bits and just release it!' And his constant refrain would be; 'Deal with it, welcome to solo albums.'"

So while 'co-producers' might be an adequate technical description for the role these two played in getting 'Warm Hand' made, it doesn't really paint the whole picture.

Over a nice lunch (I brought the fish, he did the salad) at the Auckland villa he shares with wife Maryanne and their two children, Don's telling me that the changes by no means started and ended there. By the time rhythm tracks were started at Bethels, his concept for the album had changed from being "a fey, fragile little acoustic folk record," to "... an album with a lot more blood in its veins, an album with real people playing, with an overlay of quite a lot of cinematic texturals."

These textural backdrops are an important component of SJD's own solo work, and his expertise in this area proved invaluable. "He'll fill up the frame with lots and lots of detail and then he'll start to erase bits and then arrive at the form he wants, and I think he's given me some permission to do that."

As Donnelly also played bass on all tracks while Don would simultaneously lay down a rhythm Telecaster part, McWilliams' input as far as producing the sessions became paramount.

"Ed set up and basically ran the sessions. He was the producer in the sessions because Sean and I were playing on the rhythm tracks. We needed that outside ear and he was fantastic for that; he really put a lot of energy into it."

McWilliams also facilitated all the beg-borrow-and-stealing of the various extra leads, mics and outboard gear needed for successful 'garage-style' Pro Tools recording. His real forte though was apparently his enthusiastically unconventional approach to engineering. For example setting up overhead drum mics to capture the sound of the rain on the iron roof, "... really trying to catch the feeling in that barn at that particular time", as Don describes it. Or literally climbing inside the drum kit to alter some aspect of the sound. He likens Ed Cake's tinkering and questing for perfection in capturing a certain mood or feel to that of Brian Wilson. "Although hopefully without all the medication!" he hastens to add.

"Before the session Ed said, 'Why don't we both go away and dream up the ideal session?', and we both came back having more or less had the same dream."

He goes on to talk about a photo on the sleeve of Neil Young's 'Harvest' where the light refracts through holes in a barn wall, the band are sitting on hay bales, you get the picture...

"Just that idea of isolation and being able to sort of think our way through each song and not be distracted. Because we knew we hadn't had much rehearsal with the songs and we really needed to find the center of each one somehow. And so Ed really put a huge amount of energy into that."
Always an even-handed sort of a fellow, Don is also high in praise of engineer Tom Miskin, who took care of most of the button pushing, but also lent his considerable organisational skills to the sessions.

"It was great having Tom there, because apart from having great ears, he's also an extremely organised engineer who can keep track of multiple sessions. He's the kind of guy who will take notes as to what's being said in the room. So you'll go back months later and look at a whole bunch of takes and you'll read, 'Ross (Burge, drummer) liked this one' or 'Ross didn't like the cymbal crash' or something like that, which is really great."
With such a long gestation period there are naturally many other musical collaborators who also deserve mention. Of the core musicians, old Muttonbird mate Burge took care of the bulk of the drumming, doing a great job according to Don.

As far as live work goes however, it was amicably agreed that after 15 years of working together it was time for the pair to have a break from each other, so Ross won't be seen in the Seven Sisters, the live four-piece that evolved out of the recording process. That role has been taken by Chris O'Connor (early TrinityRoots, Cloudboy), who played on the re-recording of This is London, plus a late addition in the form of an SJD track, I Will Not Let You Down. Interestingly this song failed to make the 'Southern Lights' cut - but only because it didn't quite sit with the rest of the album. It looked likely to miss out on 'Warm Hand' as well, until a new version recorded on Christmas Eve 2005 when O'Conner bought a stay of execution.

"I got the idea of transposing it to a different key and changing the instruments around. It only took a couple of takes and it was just really effortless - I'm really pleased with the way it sounds on the record."

It has to make you wonder how many potentially great songs get chucked simply through lack of that sort of perseverance. Willy Scott (Anika Moa, Dimmer) helped out post-Bethels but pre-O'Conner, contributing drums to another twice-recorded enfant terrible - Harbour Bridge. With Donnelly on bass, John Segovia - the slide and pedal steel maestro, makes up the fourth core member of the Seven Sisters (a constellation, a geographic curiosity at the White Cliffs of Dover or a bunch of shadowy ancient Greek dames - take your pick). Accordion player Tatiana Lanchtikova's contributions were eventually whittled down from a constant thread to an occasional feature as the nature of the album became less acoustic/folk-oriented.

Don speaks enthusiastically about his relationship with his new record label Arch Hill, something that he would have found difficult to do towards the end of The Muttonbirds' contract with the giant Virgin company in England.

"I've always liked the kind of community they (Arch Hill) represent. There seems to be a lot of really good music on the label and it's really small but perfectly formed. I guess if you talk to Ben (Howe, the label boss) about something, he's going to tell you what he thinks. He's not going to have to go and run it past a committee. I suppose my last experience with major labels was in England where the committees were all over the place and you never knew whether somebody was just being polite, or whether they really had an opinion about your material."

He goes on to describe a situation where Howe asked if he would consider doing a structural edit in the interests of better presenting a song, Miracle Sun, to radio.

"I think if a major label person had asked me that I would have come back with a full head of outrage and told them where to stick it. But the fact that it's Ben and I know where he's coming from and he wouldn't ask me if he didn't think it was a really good idea, meant that I went and tried it and I actually like the results."

Now that he can finally and irrevocably say he has put the album to bed, Don talks of a weight being lifted and how he is again walking around with a notebook, starting new songs.

"For a big chunk of last year, where this thing was a bit stalled and I didn't know whether it was finished, and I didn't know whether even if it was finished anybody would want to listen to it, I actually wasn't writing much new stuff. I wrote new stuff when somebody needed it, like the song for the film 'No. 2' Bathe in the River. That was great because it was a very clear brief and I could kind of pour all that frustrated energy into it over a really short space of time."

Frustrated energy clearly did the trick in this case, because as I write Bathe in the River is perched comfortably at number two (oh the sweet irony) on the national charts.

As to the question of whether he should be able to knock out his next album in better time than the first he has this to say. "There's a number of people in my life who, if that doesn't happen, they're going to take me behind the bike sheds and give me a good seeing to!

"I think maybe a simpler album (next time) that just comes from what is turning into a really good band - I think that should be a lot quicker."
So it is true that bands make albums faster than solo artists. Don starts out agreeing, but then changes his mind.

"I don't think making a solo album per se is necessarily slower, because if you're somebody who had a touring schedule and management hassling you to finish stuff, then that would be impetus. All your various collaborators would feed into you, and so you get things done as fast. I'm not in that situation - I mean I am now, now that I've got something to release I have got a manager (Roger King who previously managed Dave Dobbyn for almost a decade) and I've got a record company.

"But for all the time that I made this album, if I'd just sort of said, 'I don't actually feel like making a record', I don't think anybody would have found out for a long time!"