Not long after releasing Jumping the Shark, Seekae released The Worry. You wouldn’t pick that the same guy was central to both. Is there much overlap between the moods and creative processes you rely on for the two projects? Or is one like gardening, the other like painting a fence?
With Seekae, we all write everything. Like ticking boxes. We all have to approve of a melody or a lyric before it makes the cut. With Jumping The Shark, I wrote every melody and every lyric. I was in charge. There’s really no comparison. Most of my songs are written in my head before I even make it to a keyboard or am in a room with a piano player. Those end up being supercharged by somethin’. Like I want to link my songwriting with my imagination, quite directly. I don’t really like jamming, because I’m not drawn to it naturally.
I never gardened or painted a fence. I painted my bedroom once. I had an inspired girlfriend who painted things all over my walls. Little pictures, I didn’t like them, butterflies on my wall and what not. So I painted over them. We had broken up before I did that on account of I wasn’t sensitive to her emotions.
Jumping the Shark is engaging on many levels, one of which is the off-kilter lyrical humour. If you read a little deeper, it touches on somewhat perverse topics, but at a surface level there’s plenty to make you laugh, especially when coupled with the deadpan vocal performances.
I laugh at good things. I laugh at sad things. I think it’s a matter of finding something true. If I find a true thing and deliver it properly then the common reaction is for people to laugh. Most of my humour comes from a place of anger or some other negative thing.
I find it funny that people are able to laugh at the lyrics when they’re so overtly sad. I’m not a clown, but I know what’s good and true and if people feel like laughing at that then as long as they bought a ticket or a cassette they can do whatever they want. I always said it was a celebration of failure, how it’s all so inevitable. I’m not making jokes though. I’m not making fun of my songs. They’re serious to me.
Another feature of Jumping the Shark that’s continually impressive is the root simplicity. From an instrumental point of view, the majority of songs cumulatively build upon a single core idea. Making the album, was it of fundamental importance that you upheld that kind of patience?
It wasn’t really patience. It all happened naturally. I focused on the words and tried to get that across in the songs. They’re loops that build. It was simple. My good friend Ivan Vizintin and his brother Pavle coloured the album with guitar parts and some keyboards. Ivan was good to work with on that record because he was constantly telling me each song was finished. Not to fuck with it too much.
Your on-stage dance style is somewhere between Nick Cave and Elaine Benes (from Seinfeld). It has a strong libidinal aspect as well as a really erratic, dance-like-nobodies-watching ugliness. Is there much mediation about the way you comport yourself on stage?
Not really. Roy [Molloy, saxophone] just keeps talking in my ear telling me to hustle. Telling me to get paid. Telling me to sweat my fucken’ arse off. So I do that. Roy’s my guy.
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
ALEX CAMERON plays the Rice is Nice Label of Love party on Saturday July 11 at The Shadow Electric, alongside SPOD, You Beauty, Sarah Mary Chadwick and Summer Flake.
