The gravitas of these names hasn’t slipped by him either. “To have some of the names I do on there is absolutely fantastic,” he enthuses. “For them to believe in what I do, and thinking the tracks are good enough to be on there is just overwhelming.” Speaking through a phone-line diced by Melbourne’s weekend weather-tantrum, Devine went on to explain how he came upon making an album.
“I had a whole lot of songs from different bands that had fallen to the wayside. I wanted to do something with those songs, and through helping to organise tours and organising tours myself, I thought I’d get those types of people – like people from Jurassic 5 – and put them on tracks with the local people who I’m friends with in Melbourne to make a great album, and to show that people in Melbourne can be recognised internationally, and are just as good as [those international acts].”
Contest Us saw Devine scouring his network for artists he thought would coalesce perfectly with songs he already had a vision for. After four years of sessions, production, playing bass, and adding the odd questionable back-up vocal (“I’m a horrible singer,” he confesses), the album is poised to fulfil two of Devine’s dreams. One of them was to stake airplay on triple j, which he attained through Cries of Freedom and the other was “to have a CD in JB Hi-Fi, which will come true on Monday.”
Big projects like Contest Us have a premise of being thematic – of the album’s crafters tethering an allegory to the piece to add weight. Contest Us eschews that tendency in a genius way in that, with each song having various artists, the songs will appeal to a variety of people.
“Each song is individual,” Devine explains. “I’d like to think the CD is for everyone; there are a lot of different songs in there and a lot of different genres involved. Anyone can pick it up and say, ‘That’s a cool song, I’ll download that one’. You can say, ‘I like that artist, I like that artist, I’ll download that one particular track’.”
This versatile approach is likely to work well with online stores like Spotify and iTunes which is a prescient if not sly move on Devine’s part. “It will respond to a lot of people. People can download a lot of different tracks. I’m not trying to force everything on everyone.”
Before his first album is on any shelf, virtual or tangible, there are already plans for another collaborative project with, “KRS ONE, Brother Ali, and a few other people,” and then he plans to use connections with The Temple of Hip Hop and radio distribution networks in America and Europe to take the show worldwide.
In the meantime, his focus is on his launch party at The Toff on July 13 where he’ll be flexing more talent from his social circle to perform the album. Though as an artist, he’s sensitive to keeping the integrity of the songs, detailing over the stuttering phone line, “I’ve got the original hooks in place, but they’ll be doing different verses and still have the same subject matter. I don’t want people to impose on what people have done before,” and then cheekily hopeful of the future he adds, “but if Akil and Jean Grae were in the show, they’d be more than welcome to jump up.”
BY EDGAR IVAN
