For his second release Walk Along The Wire, McLaren will play at Gertrude’s Brown Couch in his stomping ground of northside. “I moved up [from Warrnambool] at the start of 2009, so it’s been a couple years now,” he says easily. “I did a little show with Jordie Lane in Adelaide on Friday night, and then Warrnambool on Saturday. It was nice! I caught up with my mum, and my sister, and my friends,” he says, listing them off affectionately. “I probably go back once every two months or something. It was a good place to grow up.”
The EP’s first single This Be The Place has an accompanying clip which was shot in New Zealand, but much to McLaren’s chagrin it’s not yet up on Vimeo. “It’s kind of in limbo, la-la-land at the moment. I don’t know how long it takes to upload a video, I mean I’m not really a technical wizard or anything,” he laughs. The clip tells the story of a young man finding his way through the streets of Melbourne, then outer Melbourne, then into fields and snowy mountains, all the while gathering rocks into a hessian sack for a very sweet purpose at the end. The video was shot by Jefferton James who creates many of Boy & Bear’s music clips. “It was basically just me and [James], with a backpack, a camera and a guitar. We spent a week in New Zealand, travelling around, ate lots of good food, drank lots of beer,” McLaren says.
Boy & Bear are amongst the 21-year-old’s colleagues on Wonderlick Records, a label created out of the Wonderlick Management crew in conjunction with Sony. “I was the first artist to be signed to them when I was a little spring chicken,” McLaren says a little shyly. “They’ve got such an incredible roster. They do Josh Pyke and Grinspoon and Boy & Bear and Airbourne. And so they’re just venturing out with the record company and I’m sort of the first cab off the rank for that. It’s been fantastic working with people at Sony, because it just opens up that whole world, and resources, and everything to really push the recordings and get them to the right ears. It’s a really good lead-up to do the first full-length album next year as well.”
McLaren plans to get straight down to business with the album, beginning late January. True to his middle name of Bard (“I was really embarrassed about it as a kid, I thought I might change it to Bart for The Simpsons reference”), the singer had about 70 songs written for the just-released EP. “I feel like there’s an album there already to choose from quite easily but I’m really interested to push myself a little bit further. Potentially even collaborating with some Australian artists.” There’ll be plenty of those lining up to co-write with this raconteur. “It’ll be interesting to see what we can get,” he says, “to get the strongest debut possible.”
BY ZOË RADAS
