In celebration of the album’s release, and the success of its first single, Rich Man, Tinpan Orange will be hitting the road for a huge tour. Beat speaks with vocalist Emily Lubitz to learn about the making of this mesmerising new album, and what’s next for the band.
“We approached this album a little differently,” she says. “Usually, we write on our own – I’ll write most of the songs that I sing and then bring it to the band, then we’ll finish it all together. This time we did a lot of co-writing with my brother Jesse, who’s in the band, and my husband Harry [Angus, The Cat Empire], who produced the album. We’d never done that before.
“It was actually a bit scary to write together from the beginning – to be sitting there in the room with a guitar and be strumming and humming and getting out those first ideas, which are often your shit ideas. When you start writing a song you’ll often revert to the clichés and the easy chord progressions. Usually you’re doing that on your own and no one knows, but we showed each other and we came up with some really good stuff. Rich Man was co-written like that.”
This openness gave Tinpan Orange the opportunity to evolve and learn new things about each other and the songwriting process, which Lubitz admits is still “very much a mystery”.
“I think because of that process I started to sing differently,” she says. “With Rich Man, it was Harry who came up with the melody of the verse. It has the climb into the falsetto voice. I’d never really sung like that before, and didn’t know that I could. It didn’t feel unnatural. I discovered this whole new range of my voice, so I wrote some other songs that went up into that head voice too. That was really exciting.”
Rich Man also gave the band a chance to experiment with another medium, self-producing the song’s music video. It’s a beautiful, haunting, production, which Lubitz dreamed up herself.
“The simplicity of the idea really appealed to me,” she says. “I think often simple film clips are executed the best. It’s an image of a woman staring into the camera as if it’s a mirror, and then these outside arms come in and impose these lavish and expensive things on her. Then at the end of the song she finds her own arms, or autonomy. She takes off the expensive stuff and she’s naked and free at the end. I liked the clarity of that message. It was also really fun to do. My two friends were the arms, and we shot it in our friends kitchen.”
Love is a Dog is a concept album, and an illustration of thematic experimentation. According to Lubitz, the concept formed through the course of the writing process.
“It emerged after the fact. A lot of the songs had this theme that was kind of like, ‘The downside of a good thing.’ That became the thread in the album. I was reading The Great Gatsby at the time I wrote a lot of these songs, which is all about the wealth in that world, and yet everyone is so unhappy. We started by recording 15 songs, then cut the album down to 11. The one’s we cut just didn’t fit, whether it was thematically or sonically, or even just vibe-wise. We really wanted to have a surplus of songs to choose from so we were able to trim down to the best.”
With the album done and dusted, the band are getting ready for a huge year on the road, starting with a lap around Australia before they turn their gaze overseas.
“There’s definitely going to be some reinventing happening, because when we recorded the album, quite a lot of the songs had a rhythm section. However, we’re touring as a trio. I play electric guitar, my brother plays acoustic and Alex Burkoy plays violin, mandolin and electric guitar. So it’s a very string-and-vocal based setup. We’re going to bring those songs with bigger production down into that format.
“We actually love doing it that way and playing as a trio, because we love the space that’s there when there’s no rhythm section. Hearing the singing and Alex play his violin in that space is sometimes more intense without a rhythm section. It gives you the dynamic of going from really quiet, with just one guitar and a violin, to soaring up with three voices and all the guitars. We’re really enjoying that intensity at the moment, but we will need to tinker with those new songs.”
BY SETH ROBINSON
