There were a number of factors,” Dickins says. “The sheer factor of space – being able to rent a house and completely deck it out as a home studio – that was important. Also physically and geographically having space from Melbourne to immerse myself fully in the writing process was really important. I think my writing over the last five or ten years has always been informed by the world that I live in and written very quickly – these tiny little vignettes in time – but I wanted this album to have this quite wholesome and fully-formed atmosphere.”
The songs span the best part of a decade and while some are new (one was performed for the first time during the speeches of Dickins’ wedding – awww) many are an alchemy of sorts from historic bursts of creation. “For the songs that were from the vault or from the briefcase, it was about revisiting these experiences and while I’d emotionally moved on and things mean different things to me now, when viewed through a lens five years later, I was able to be a ruthless editor because of the distance of time,” he says. “That was quite a new experience for me. One of the more interesting things about the space in terms of new songs was like, there’s a song called Green Paper Heart, it has so many references to songs I’ve written over the last ten years; so many lines have been borrowed and so there’s this new process in that song whereby I’m finding the phrases that I like and giving them new breath and new life.”
That process was integral to the finished product. As many artists painfully discover, it’s one thing to create a song in an explosive emotional purge but it’s quite another to refine it, record it and refine it some more. It’s easy to hate every song from an album by the end of a recording session. “It was something I was conscious of during the whole process at Woodend – creating the exact space I needed to give each song the quality it needed,” he says. “I was able to go for a walk every day for an hour and listen to what I’d done for the day and dig super deeply into each of the songs. It wasn’t without it’s challenges and you can end up resenting a song that is alluding you. But I could get naked and record if I needed to create vulnerability or I could have a few shots of whiskey if I wanted to sound drunk and angst-y or lay on the floor for a vocal take if the song was fatigued.”
A Brief Case Of Madness may have never seen the light of day if not for a hugely successful crowd-funding campaign, ($10,000 in less than 10 hours with the campaign reaching a total of $25,600 in over a month). While there has been much speculation as to why Dickens’ approach worked so well, it seems that it was the sense of community that put him ahead of the rest. That sense of community is threaded throughout the album, it’s process and will be ever-present during any touring for the album. “I think part of it was timing; our campaign was the right campaign at the right time, crowd-funding was just entering the consciousness and it hadn’t tired out yet,” he says humbly. “There were plenty of people that said that my associations with Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaimen was the sole reason it was successful, which I don’t agree with. I think it really comes down to the fact that the way I’ve always interacted with people is from a collaborative approach and people really were a part of this process. We created this online Facebook group for all of the supporters where they were able to see the songs come together, share their artwork, share their stories, share our stories, and we basically built this fantastic 500-strong community that were integral to the creative processand will continue to be.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
