Jackson McLaren released his debut LP Songs To Greet The Dawn last month and the folky Warrnambool-native is familiar with this struggle to summon the ideas within.
“I’m slowly starting to realise when I can feel that creative impulse coming on,” he says. “You can feel something swelling inside your head and you’ve just got to get it out. It usually comes at the most inconvenient times – when you have to run off to your part-time job, or you have to get a train, or you have to go have coffee with your friend. It’s like, ‘Oh shit I can feel a song coming on and I’ve got to write it down.’”
Perhaps this unannounced outpouring of material explains the oft-heard claim, ‘I like the old stuff better than the new stuff.’ See, the ‘old stuff’ generally comes together before songwriting is an artist’s exclusive focus, so it has a unique, accidental edge.
“I carry a song journal/notebook around with me pretty much everywhere I go,” confesses McLaren. “I write a lot of songs when I’m on the train or going somewhere. Then [I start] paring it down and picking out the best bits and putting it into songs.”
However, the elusive quest for creative gold isn’t likely to cease after reaching a certain level esteem. “I remember reading an interview with Robert Forster from The Go-Betweens,” McLaren recalls. “He talked about how he’d have the whole afternoon free and that was perfect songwriting time, but that’s often when the most boring ideas would come. But when his wife was like, ‘It’s ten minutes to dinner time,’ he’d pick up a nylon string on the couch and come up with something great.”
Songs To Greet The Dawn itself is characterised by patience and clarity, which belies the fact it was patched together from ideas conceived in transit. After the initial onset of inspiration, McLaren’s approach to songcraft is actually rather deliberate.
“I’ve got hundreds of notebooks in my bedroom and if you look through them you can see how an idea will start a bit rambley and eventually you perfect it over a series of re-writing and coming up with different ideas and putting in new things.”
What’s more, McLaren didn’t just throw together the first bunch of songs he’d written. One track from each of his three preceding EPs made it to the LP. “It was written over quite a long period of time so there was an abundance of stuff to choose from. I really wanted to have the first album as one initial impression of that period of time. I could have quite easily released an album with 20 songs, but I wanted to pick 10 really good songs that worked together really well.”
There’s a few key ingredients helping tie the collection together. Namely McLaren’s trusty sidemen The Triple Threat and producer John Castle, who have been with him since 2011’s Mirror’s & Strings EP, were integral in realising the potential of each song.
“I think it’s really important, when you’ve got other people in the same room as you and you’re all in a project together, to collaborate a little bit and throw ideas around. John Castle’s ideas and recommendations are usually quite clever, so I’m always open to trying out things and exploring different avenues.
“I see myself more as a songwriter rather than a musician,” he adds. “I can play the guitar and dabble around on a few instruments, but I’m not particularly good at them. So it’s the songwriting which is the huge focus for me.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
