“It’s not one of those stalker stories, I promise!” laughs Swift upon recalling the day he hooked up with the Sparta vocalist/guitarist. “It’s still a weird one, though, I guess… Jim was selling some guitars on Ebay and I bought one of them because I’m a Sparta fan and I loved At The Drive In, so I bought one of his guitars. When he was coming out to Australia for his solo tour a while ago, I thought I’d go and see him play at the Ballarat show, it was the only one I could make it to. Because I’d bought his guitar I thought I had a starting point for a conversation, so I started talking to him and told him I’m the one who bought his guitar and we just kept in touch since then. I kept an eye on his newsletters and I found out he was building a studio so when it came time for me to do some recording I looked up his email address on the guitar purchase receipt and I got in touch.”
Not surprisingly, what had initially started off as an EP pretty quickly turned intro a full-blown album once Swift found himself face to face with both Ward and engineer Gabe Gonzalez in El Paso, Texas. And while Swift admits that lyrically The Way We Were Raised gets retrospective about his life in the outer suburbs of Melbourne’s south, it’s just as much sprinkled with a touch of El Paso on a more sonic level. It’s an interesting combination indeed, as Swift himself agrees.
“The songs were written over the past three or four years when I was going through a bit of a quarter-life crisis,” Swift chuckles. “I was reflecting back on things like where I grew up, which used to be just a small town, and it’s just looking back on how much has changed. There are quite a few nostalgic ones on there, like when I got in touch with someone I hadn’t seen since I was a little kid who lives in Gippsland, and just to see them all of a sudden married with two kids – it just makes you realise you never know where you’re going to end up. Musically, El Paso definitely contributed to the sound of the record. Jim and Gabe actually ended up performing on the album as well, with keys and guitar parts, so they got to put their own touches and that whole West Texas feel to the record as well. I had no idea how it was all going to mesh and end up sounding but I couldn’t be happier with it. A lot of people in the States were going like, ‘El Paso? Why? There’s nothing there!’ but the people were just amazing there and it’s almost like a whole other culture next to the Mexican border. There’s not a lot of greenery, it’s very plain and there’s lots of desert. That’s what’s so good about El Paso, it’s not a tourist area like LA or New York, it’s the real West Texas, it’s the southern cowboys and guns, but without the cowboys and guns!”
According to Swift, the entire experience was so enjoyable that the singer-songwriter hopes to relocate to the area – at least temporarily – in the near future. While the music industry types take their time figuring out how to market someone like Swift here in Australia, the man is taking his talent and setting off to America in the meantime.
“I’ve been told that they just don’t know what to do with me,” he laughs. “It’s like, ‘we like what you’re doing, but we don’t know what to do with it’! “Relocating is definitely one of my goals at the moment, I’m working on making that happen because I’d love to have that change even if it’s just for six months or a year.
“I’m definitely off to the States again in March so I’ll be doing some shows over there again, maybe I’ll bring my band as well. When I was working with Jim and Gabe on the record, I ended up doing a show with Jim’s band Sleepercar and that was a bit of an interesting experience. We drove up to San Antonio and we were taking our trailer back to the hotel and I think we must have got followed by some people. The trailer was too big to park in the carpark and when we woke up in the morning it was gone! Sleepercar lost everything – all of their gear – and I lost my acoustic guitar and microphone. We must have been followed back from the venue and we must have been seen loading up the trailer with all this stuff. But no that hasn’t put me off from going back again!”
