“We’ve been going over to the States since 2013. In 2014 we attended the Americana Music Festival Awards ceremony where Jason Isbell got up onstage to accept an award and said, ‘Do the things that scare you – that’s the good stuff’, and that really resonated with us. We felt that the thing that scared us the most was recording in the US, and that was our biggest inspiration for going over and recording there,” says Coates.
“We recorded it in a little part of LA called Culver City with Ryan Freeland. He was absolutely amazing to work with – everything we could have asked for and more. Initially it was bit daunting, having not met him before, but he comes with some amazing credentials including work with Bonnie Raitt and The Milk Carton Kids, both of [whom] are idols of ours.”
The story of how The Weeping Willows came to work with Freeland proves that sometimes the best way of realising your dreams is to go straight to the source. “When we decided that we wanted to record in the States, we had a listen to some of our favourite albums and who engineered them, and we ended up looking at albums by Gillian Welch and The Milk Carton Kids. We really liked the sound of The Milk Carton Kids’ album The Ash & Clay and Ryan Freeland engineered that release. I ended up just contacting him through his website, and asking him if he would be interested in producing our next record, and we couldn’t believe it when he wrote back and said yes. It was totally unexpected.”
A little over a month ago, The Weeping Willows became the first Australian act to be signed directly to the North Carolina record label Redeye Worldwide. Before Darkness Comes A-Callin’ has been labelled as a shift in the wind for The Weeping Willows, something that Coates attributes to the pair’s recording environment.
“It’s definitely a darker album than our first and I think it might be because we were spending so much time in the Southern states of the US, where the sound is a little bit darker and more gothic,” she says.
More of this influence may have come from the varied musical input of the numerous guests that appear on the record. They include Luke Moller (a Kasey Chambers collaborator), Kevin Breit (a session musician for Rosanne Cash), as well as guest vocals from Melbourne alternative folk duo Sweet Jean.
“Of all the guests, we spent the most amount of time with upright bass player David Piltch, and he was so enthusiastic and prepared. He would never do only one take and say, ‘Oh, that’s good enough.’ He really wanted to make sure that we were happy with the parts that he did and he was really open to trying new things, but most of all, he just got it and us.”
BY TEGAN REEVES
