Last Call at the South Sea Hotel

This was the first proper album I tried to make and it took me a very long time. I spent a lot of money to get people to do things for me, but they couldn’t do it to the standard I wanted so I had to do most of it myself. As an artist with some kind of ego I have tried for a long time to figure out just how capable I am, how "good" compared to other people. In the end. I recorded all the songs in one take more or less all in an hour and a half on the night thought I was leaving New Zealand for good. I felt like I couldn’t get the real feeling across if I recorded in a studio, tracking the vocals and guitar separately. Maybe I could now, I don’t know. My middle ground with recording it all in one take was that I’d play the songs continually, verse after verse, a few times at most, until I felt like I’d got a useable version, in my head this made it so the songs could be more or less of the same performance, feeling cohesive but still with the ability to swap out an occasional verse, line or word. The effect of this however was that I spent close to a year after recording assembling the thing, I tried to get some friends to mix it but soon realised that it needed hundreds of hours of work to smooth all of the edges that I could find and would stand out to me and only me really. At the end of the day, I knew I didn’t record the songs to their potential. The potential is something I’d touched, every now and then, the sense of perfectly capturing that emotion, that image, sometimes only for a couple lines but sometimes for a whole song, and this happens to me out of the blue most of the time, busking on the street, sobering up at the end of a party, those performances disappear as soon as they are given and are the reasons I can’t really be happy with this album. It did capture a time and place, it captured my skill level at the time, my naivety, I knew I couldn’t make a perfect record at the time, so what I wanted to do was try capture the rawness of feeling that I had, on that night, with a bit of a broken heart and quite the painful throat infection. The perfection of a song A song is unique every time it is played, you will never capture it the same way again When I first tried to record my album, I booked 4 nights in the Kay Miller Lodge, above Houghton Bay in Wellington. It is a small place and cost me about $10 a night, it was made to be used as a cheap retreat for anyone who needed it and my friend Nicoletta recommended it to me when I said I wanted to record in a lil hut in the woods somewhere. I dragged up the gear with the help of my friend and Peter from Sandbox Studios in the city, who helped me set up the microphones to try capture the sound as best I could. I quickly realised I couldn’t record during the day because the woods were filled with cicadas, and you could hear planes take off from the airport every few minutes. So I had a window of about 10pm to 6am each night. I spent the first few nights playing the songs over and over again but was so tired that I knew I was not giving them the energy they needed but I just couldn’t bring it out. Eventually I decided I had “useable” versions of every song, so for the last night I got stuck into the main event, namely, weed, acid and MDMA. I took a moderate dose of everything, starting with the weed and LSD around 9pm, recording a version of the album when I started to come up, and then took the MDMA, bright pink dissolved in some kombucha, it reacted with the booch in some way and bubbled up like a mentos in coke. Then I spent the next 5 hours in some crazy state, playing almost continually, I could hear the music in a different way, those takes are filled with me finishing off a song and being like “yussss” that’s the one that’s the take I think I got it wow this feels great. There is a certain bubbly feeling that MDMA gives you and as a disclaimer I don’t take too many drugs so I was feeling the full effects and I got it from a doctor buddy of mine so I knew it was top quality stuff. Those recordings are played with a bit too much feeling, a bit too much sensuality which definitely made me feel a bit icky when I listened to the recordings. They were also the best that I’d done so far. That night was honestly one of the best experiences I’ve had with drugs and I learnt a lot of things, especially about music which I still carry with me to this day: 1. A song is improvised as it is played, and can never be played in the same way again As much as I believe in a sort of perfect version of a song, in reality I found there to be an almost infinite variety of perfect versions. I felt the songs to be quite a rollercoaster of feeling, all revolving around a central point. There were times where I felt I hit upon a perfect version of the song, but my fingers would slip out from under me, my perception of time made it a little harder to keep on tempo. The perfect version was essentially a bubble and a journey through some of its iterations. It is the transmission of this almost spiritual feeling and image to our more material world. The perfect version of a song is contained within the dance of it’s player and this potentially eternal and unmoving thing, the way this is navigated could allow a sort of portal of feeling into the realm of “perfection”. When you look at someone really performing, when they seem to be “somewhere else” when they really feel the music, I think this is what they are doing. 2. How to play with it So how do you play with it? How do you find this eternal thing in the first place? I do not know if I am even that good at this, the drugs help, but they also make it much harder to control compared with the stone cool concentration of meditation. So meditation is one thing, to find the place and keep it in your head, a big role of the artist is learning how to access these seemingly eternal spaces and strengthening a sort of connection to them. At this time, I found that when I first plucked the strings to the song, there would be nothing, but soon a little ball of light would appear in my minds eye and start dancing around a bit, I found that I could pass it between the instruments, from my voice to my guitar. In the moments of equilibrium it would show me waves of images and feeling, and I would try reciprocate those feelings and emotions and bring them in to the performance. This in a sense was pure improvisation, the song was created in the moment, around the framework I had written and was free to play within this skeleton and bring life to it. However, if I let the ball grow too powerful so that it engulfed me for a moment, I would forget for an instant, who, where and what I was and I would not be able to continue playing, or to a lesser extent, would just slip a little and lose the continuity of feeling. Conversely, if I tried to force this little dancing pixie ball into any form, say if I had liked the way I had performed the song just before, but dropped and lost the performance, it would escape from my grasp and fade away. I feel like the reason that I couldn’t get any versions of my songs that I liked all the way through were because I was not skilled enough, in terms of playing the guitar cleanly enough while tripping balls, and also that I was unpracticed at dancing with this thing. 3. Further lessons of the glowing ball I found that this concept really was applicable to so many aspects of life, the metaphors write themselves: life is a dance, relationships are a dance, conversations are a dance, sex is a dance, dancing is a dance, the universe is a dance, and ad infinitum. A dance, with a little glowing ball of light, the spirit perhaps? Some weird hallucination? I lost hazel, the lady from song #9 because I grasped too hard, and now she is gone and it seems like forever. She was fucked up too don’t get me wrong, but if I had been stronger I would have been able to manage myself a whole lot better and not end up nearly losing my mind for months on months. This lesson does for me seem to be at the core of some universal truth, the balance between attachment and non-attachment, the improvisational nature of it all, a balance between linear temporality and some globular mass of eternity, the importance of the ripple of one moment moving constantly through time, the crest of which is always this one moment running from everlasting to everlasting, or timelessness to timelessness. This is all to say, that bloody album was a pain in the ass to make, I spent weeks trying to stitch these overly sensual clumsy takes or the earlier versions morbid and boring, into some kind of cohesive whole, my friends told me work with what you’ve got, they’re good, they’re fine, finish and move on. But I, last minute, grabbed the gear and headed up that hill again to give it another go.