“I think regardless of what’s coming out around me, I want to make a better record than the last record,” McNeil says. “You always want to do better with each record and you hope you’re growing as an artist. [For Thieves], the goal was to make the best record I possibly could in that given time and just be true to what I’m writing.”
The members of The GoodLife have plenty to offer as players, writers and vocalists, which gives extra dimension to the songs on Thieves. However, McNeil had all of the songs ready to go before showing them to the band.
“As far as the lyrics, the melody, the structure, I take those songs finished to the band,” she says. “But they’ll come up with their own vocal harmonies, they’ll come up with their own guitar lines – Dan and Luke are really enjoying that kind of Allman Brothers, guitarmony, ‘70s thing. I might have a melody line, Dan picks it out on guitar, Luke adds a harmony. So it is a collaboration, but a collaboration in terms of the guitar tones, their parts. I certainly don’t tell them what to play. The songs are pretty fully formed when I bring them in, but it’s a democracy afterwards.”
The band’s collaborative bond was strengthened by the fact that they all share very similar tastes. “We’re all coming at it from the same place of loving [the same music],” McNeil says. “From the ‘70s: Fleetwood Mac, Allman Brothers, Steve Miller, even The Eagles, dare I say it. All that old stuff with the harmonies, and then new contemporary bands like Shovels and Rope, Houndmouth, Dawes, Jenny Lewis – so we’ve got this real blend, but we’re all into the same stuff. So any ideas people would have we’d say, ‘Yeah that’s fuckin’ cool, because it’s not like someone’s coming from leftfield, listening to death metal or wanting take it to a funk level. I feel safe and we all trust each others’ ideas.”
There is some variety among the artists McNeil names as influences, but there’s nothing radically different about them.Accordingly, McNeil’s stylistic orientation is quite distinctive, but Thieves doesn’t stay fixed on a particular sound. There are more introspective songs, like Ashes and Blueprint, which sit in contrast to upbeat numbers like Middle of the Night and Paradise, and the psychedelic-tinged White Rose. But rather than having a premeditated plan of attack for the album’s dynamic range, Thieves developed in correlation to McNeil’s personal circumstances.
“I wrote the songs throughout [last year], and I was travelling. I was in Canada for three months – my father had cancer, and I was trying to spend as much time as I could with him. I was thinking the whole time I’d fly back to Australia and he’d pass away, but he happened to pass away while I was there. So it was a tumultuous year. The whole year was insane. There were a lot of friends around me going through marriage breakups or affairs and craziness. And then two weeks after [my dad’s] funeral I hopped on a plane and met my band in Nashville and we played the Americana Music Festival, and then we were in LA.
“So I was writing from where I was at the time, not thinking about how it would all work in the end. I knew I was trying to write a record, but everything was so specific. The songs are all really personal.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
