“This record is probably the first record where we’ve focused on just trying to sound like ‘us’,” says guitarist Dean Hanson. “On our previous records we’ve always had a bit of pressure, not from anybody in particular, but just from the making of the record that forced us to push our songs into particular territories. It’s subliminal at the time, but you look back and think, ‘I wish we had’ve put a few more riffs in these songs, or didn’t play it so safe for the sake of trying to please some subliminal thought.’ This record was very much about not really giving a shit about what we thought other people wanted to hear, and more about the record that we wanted to make and how we wanted to portray ourselves.”
The Queensland quintet took some time between their third and fourth albums to tour Europe, and then take a break from the band completely, which wasn’t an easy thing for Hanson to do.
“We’d planned to start making the record in June last year, and then we started writing and it hit a bit of a wall, we decided then and there that we were going to put it off for a certain amount of time. At the time it was a bit ‘wow’, because there was five of us sitting there going, ‘We don’t know what to do for the next few months.’ That wasn’t the best at the time, but in hindsight, we’re really happy we did it because you don’t realise you need a break until you’ve done so.
“This has been the longest in between records for us. It’s been about two-and-a-half years. It’s felt like a lifetime,” Hanson says.
He recounts the story of how Ball Park Music came to record their latest album in a small studio in Castlemaine, Central Victoria, after their frontman Sam Cromack discovered the space via Facebook.
“Sam stumbled across it because one of his friends liked their Facebook page. It caught his eye because it’s a completely analogue studio – there’s no digital recording equipment, it’s all these tape machines. We decided to challenge ourselves a little bit and record all the instruments down there to a four-track tape machine.”
It’s said that recording with a four-track allows the listener to hear a somehow more authentic version of a sound, capturing the intricacies (and mistakes) that are often silenced with software. Some famous albums that have been recorded to four-track include Elliot Smith’s debut Roman Candle and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.
“I think our desire for this record was to limit ourselves to only have things that we could record ourselves live on, and to capture the energy that we normally have live,” says Hanson. “It was a bit risky, and a lot of the people in our team were apprehensive about us doing it that way, but they trusted us.
“We’ve recorded to tape before, but that was with a 16-track tape machine. The producer we worked with, Matt Redlich, who produced our first two records, went to the studio to check it out, and he said that the tape machine in the best condition at this particular studio was a four-track. When we heard that we were like ‘Ooh, ouch’ – only four tracks to work with, and obviously we have many more instruments than that. It was going to be a challenge, but Matt said he was up for it. In the end it felt really natural, and after the first day of recording we never really spoke about how limiting it was.
“The results we’ve had in the past with Matt have been great. I think in music you can sometimes try and do things differently, but if you’re trying to fix something that’s not broken, sometimes it can be detrimental. We have good chemistry with Matt, and we knew he’d be up for a bit of a challenge.”
The original title for the new album came from a track called Inner City Loveless, which never ended up making it onto the record. Eventually, the band members ended up losing taste for the first title they’d chosen – something not uncommon at the end of a recording process.
“We tossed a few names into the hat, we had one name which we’d settled on for quite a while, which we ended up falling out of love with. One day I was sitting down with Sam, working on the album artwork, and he just punched the record title [Every Night The Same Dream] into the Photoshop file, and it looked really nice. I asked him where it came from, and it turns out it’s a lyric from a song that he’s had kicking around for ages but has never used. The title really seemed to resonate,”Hanson says.
BY TEGAN REEVES
