Ironside's Debut E.P.
I know we're spamming the hell out of this at the moment on every possible internet medium we can find, but we really want people to have a listen to our music and believe that we've got something decent to offer. Even if this E.P. isn't something that's going to make waves and shake the very foundations of the independent music world, we know that we've got some tricks up our sleeves and a plethora of new songs that WILL! So by getting onto this bandwagon early, one day you'll be able to say that you were into us before we were "cool".
Anyway, self bloating, ego maniacal vitriol aside (hang on, isn't that the whole reason anyone starts a blog!?), I thought I'd give you a blow by blow run down on what the E.P. is about, the motivations behind songs etc. I often prefer for people to take their own meanings away from music because imagination and interpretation are amazing things, but for some reason I feel like I need to explain myself a lot too. I tend to get taken out of context a lot and often give people the wrong impression so I thought I should simplify some of my motivations behind the recordings. Actually, this is probably as much for my own benefit as it is for the general internet reading public.
Let's start with the artwork: drawn by local illustrative genius and good friend, Nathan Smith, front man of
BMXRAY and past member of
Budd and
Warped. Boutique guitar store aficionados may also recognise his work from some tee shirt designs he did up for local institution
Tym Guitars (shirt image
here). Anyway, we asked him to represent us as best he could with what he knew about us, somehow linking it to something from the recordings. It's a fairly well known fact that myself (Daniel) and Darren ("Disco") are quite fond of the occasional tipple (read: we will drink until everyone else in the room decides to go to bed or we pass out in a pool of our own fluids) so some drunks at a bar seemed more than appropriate. There was originally going to be a song on the release called Barfly's Lament however I was never really happy with how it turned out and I want to re-record it to produce it how I think it's really meant to sound. That will feature on our album when we release it later in the year or early 2013. We also have a song on the E.P. called Meet Kandy, which is a song about bacon (I'll get to the full details later) so naturally, between this and Barfly's Lament (a ballad-esque song about how your typical barfly never likes closing time or being told he must leave... my father was a publican, so I've met a few) things started leaning towards a drunken pig being kicked out of a bar. We're pretty confident he nailed it!
Now for the songs:
Looking at Maps - One of the first songs I wrote for the band. It didn't have lyrics when we first started jamming it and for some reason when we'd get to the chorus part, all that would come out was "What I'd give just to be somebody else" and mainly because that seemed to fit with the melody I had in my head. As this was my first ever attempt at fronting a band and writing all the songs, I was incredibly nervous and formulated the concept that I'd rather be anyone else than someone who has to write songs to perform. This expanded to involving situations I'd rather not find myself in, like not having clean underwear, and also includes a reference to the passing of my father ("Toe up in the gutter, cardiac arrest"). So it's an incredibly personal impersonal song.
Meet Kandy - As I stated just before, this song is about bacon. Interestingly enough, I stumbled across the main riff by trying to replicate a song from memory: a song by The Donnas (if I was ever going to be unfaithful to my girlfriend, The Donnas would be entirely responsible! Chicks+instruments+rock and roll = sploosh!). What I was playing was different enough from
5 o'clock in the morning that I decided to make my own song out of it. So I wasn't ripping it off as such, just leaning on it a lot. I'd also had a random thought floating around in my head for a few weeks: "all the good riffs are gay or taken", alluding to the fact that it's hard to write a good riff for a song that hasn't already been used. There was an immediate connection between this riff and this lyric. At practise, I mentioned to the guys that I was singing this as the start of the chorus but that I couldn't think of anything else (I'm possibly THE slowest or least prolific lyric writer in the history of music) when Tal Wallace (original bass player, is also frontman in
The Smokestack Orchestra) piped up with "All the good riffs are gay or taken? Just write a song about eating bacon". When I told him how amusing and ironic it would be due to the fact that I've been vegetarian since Feb/March 2000, he astonishingly asked why I don't eat bacon, claiming that it's "meat candy". The rest formed around that premise. I try to avoid making song titles an obvious grab from the chorus lyrics and for some reason I find it boring, so I just opted for a slight play on words to make it different.
Setlist - This one's pretty simple. On my way to rehearsal and for most of the afternoon leading up to it, I had this amazing looming feeling of creativity, like something was brewing up inside: a song! Somehow I just knew that at rehearsal that night we were going to write a new song. I didn't have any ideas or riffs I had been working on lately but I just knew somehow that it was there and it was going to spill out. And that's what it did! As I have mentioned, I'm really not a prolific song writer and I would make THE worst free styling rapper. I just can't come up with lyrics on the spot. The same however cannot be said about riffs! I was looking at a setlist a previous band had left on the rehearsal room wall and realised that every second line kind of rhymed. I played the first thing my hands made me play and sang the lyrics off the setlist and within 3 minutes, we had our new song. A one-take wonder. We have since discovered who the band were who left the setlist pinned to the wall and discussed it with
them. It was even discovered after we had recorded the song that they had made a spelling mistake and that's how I have sung it. The line "M. Maser" was apparently an abbreviated version of "Metal Master".
Highwayman - After being kicked out of my previous band for really shithouse reasons (not going to go mudslinging, so don't ask), I was feeling pretty pissed off at the world and the music scene in general. I'd been playing around with this riff for a while and it reminded me for some reason of a US desert highway scene with a sort of dusty cowboy swaggering along from town to town, a loner, having completely lost faith in the goodness of people, his only friends a guitar, a dog and a bottle of whiskey. He does however hold on to a guiding light, knowing that he's got a lady friend he can rely on, who he will be back home to see eventually. That's what this song is about. It's an added irony that the band I was kicked out of had a song called Highwayman, and that just made it even more appropriate a title. I still don't think this recording really captures the intent of the song but we've recorded it twice now (once for our
demo) and I really can't be bothered revisiting it again for fear of looking like I'm trying to push shit up a hill on a rainy day.
Whiskey Knight - My personal favourite off this release and possibly the most personal. Despite my penchant for the drink and my flagrant outbursts of opinion, I really have my heart in the right place and want to make a difference in peoples' lives. Sadly, these two things often combine and I turn into what can only be described as a loud drunk with a big heart. My girlfriend can tell you a tale of how she carried home a blubbering mess one night after a work function at which I'd left an everlasting impression on the entirety of the largest Retravision franchise group in Australia (including mooning the entire gathering through the glass doors at the side of the Convention Center function room we had hired and "hand grenading" every single wine glass I emptied). That's right, she actually managed to carry me for what I recall to be about 3 hours, though in all honesty was probably only about 10 minutes, and I'm no diminutive figure. The man she was carrying was the Whiskey Knight: the noble warrior who fights (pontificates) for what is right and who wants to make the world a better place. A man who, despite being a complete drunken mess, rides high in the saddle and tries to make people think, trying to get them out of their mundane daily routines and join him on his crusade to make the world a better place, where everyone gets along and shares common dreams. And yet through all of this, he doesn't want recognition, admiration, or to be placed on a pedestal and worshipped: he just wants to be remembered when he's dead as "that guy who was actually pretty cool/nice/down to earth".
Also included in the download are 4 live tracks we had Murray Paas (from
Foundry Sound) record for us: Punchdrunk, Between the Sheets, Tumbleweed and L.Y.O.N.S. (Lower Your One Night Standards). We were originally going to release all of this as a full length L.P. also using the 7 studio tracks we recorded but after I decided I wasn't entirely happy with Barfly's Lament and considering we were no longer playing the instrumental track we recorded (after we parted ways with our previous drummer, Nathan Peauril), we opted to cut it all back to a 5 track E.P. and just record all the other ones properly at some stage in the future, along with the swag of new songs we're continuing to write. I guess by including it in the download as a bonus though, we're pretty much doing the full album thing. Shit! Didn't mean to do that. The live stuff is just not an
official part of the E.P., ok?
So there you have it. That's the fundamentals behind the 5 songs on the
E.P. Hopefully it will make some sense when you listen to it. It should probably also be mentioned that our drummer, Graham, was not involved in the recording process and as such, it's really not a strong indication of our sound. We're really quite a dynamic band these days, as anyone who has seen us live can attest and we're only just now really hitting full stride in what we do. I'm pretty fucking excited about our album. We've started recording it and have 6 tracks almost ready for mixing. We've written another 2 songs since recording them and still have at least 2 more of the old repertoire to add, so by the end of the year when Graham returns from his UK stint (he'd better bloody well return!) we'll be churning out a full album which should be quite an impressive piece of work!
