We’ve emerged from hibernation with a freshly-picked demo: A jaunty, Lee & Nancy kind of number! What do you think?
Album Release & Tour
Our new album, Risk It For A Biscuit, is out now! It’s 10 tracks travel an undulating path encountering transcendence, hope, risk, revelry, grief, rapture, commitment, heartbreak, liberation and discretion. The download and disc are both available via the Music tab of our website, which takes you to our Bandcamp page. The player is embedded below. We’d love for you to have a listen and tell us what you think of it.
We’re touring from November 17 to December 4, performing in Gloucester, Coffs Harbour, Brisbane, Sandgate, Mt Burrell, Newcastle, Sydney, Erina, Canberra, Ulladulla and Melbourne. All the details are on our Shows page. It’d be great to see you!
Album-in-progress
Hello! Time flies when you’re recording an album. As we wait for a break between downpours of rain, aeroplanes, neighbourhood powertools and squarks from nesting crows, this seems like a good time to give you an update on our album-in-progress. We’re writing this post together, so we’ll start each paragraph with an initial so you know who’s speaking.
A: I’ve been enjoying the puzzle-solving nature of lyric writing. It’s a buzz when the right word falls (or is pushed) into place. Spinster’s Delight (a working title) was the most difficult song. Not many words rhyme with ‘spinster’ – I eventually decided that ‘I convinced her’ worked best. In the same song, I felt I’d reached a career milestone in having the slang word ‘khyber’ in a song, to rhyme with ‘moral fibre’. In Come To Our Party, I’d written two verses with ‘or’ sounds and wanted to keep the pattern in the other verse, but I was stumped! Then I remembered that I hadn’t plumbed the shallows of my foreign-language knowledge. Good old ‘por favor’ saved the day, and I threw in ‘respondez s’il vous plait’ to boot.
B: Here’s a little something I whipped up whilst testing a new mic position. Some steel string Faux Flamenco if you will …and I did, so you might as well, as well! You can hear a little distortion as I check to hear how close I can get to the mic before peaking. You don’t wanna peak too soon they say, and it doesn’t until later in the piece, so all good there. I couldn’t resist adding some keyboard as well. Whilst listening, think pathos, self belief and joy of the heart.
A: There’s a 15-second “laaaah” on Ooh La La Lah, so I’ve headed back to Bikram yoga. When I was diligently attending classes many months ago, I discovered that it gave me more singing stamina. It’s sweaty and overwhelming and gruelling, but it delivers the goods. I’ve recorded that vocal now, but there’ll be no slacking off for me because I’ll need to sing it at our shows very soon!
B: Summer Love will definitely have birds chirping on it. They were very chirpy one day whilst I was recording guitar, and since the song is about Summer I think it will be fitting to hear them at the beginning. This made me wonder what other albums have unintentional incidental sounds on them. At the end of David Bowie’s Life On Mars you can hear a telephone ring and the pianist (Rick Wakeman, I believe) stops playing. I’ve always wondered if that was planned, but I assume it was just something that happened and they deliberately left it in. Do you know any other examples?
Christmas Single/Card & Tour!
Hello! We’ve just released a Christmas single / Christmas card and we’re going on tour!
The song is called Christmas With You. It’s a sing-a-long knees-up duet, complete with sleigh bells, whistling, key changes and lush 1960s-sounding “bup-bup” interludes. Its message is that you don’t “need lotsa money for the latest festive trends – Even cracker jokes are funny when it’s Christmas with friends!”
The CD’s colourful sleeve makes it a fab Christmas card and gift, with plenty of space to write greetings. A white envelope is included, for posting or for presentation as a gift. We’ll have it for sale at our gigs or to order from our online shop. You can also listen or download it here.
Our tour starts on November 22nd, and goes to Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, McLaren Vale, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Canberra and Euroa. We’ll post date and venue details in a future post, but you can also check them here now. We hope you like the song. It’d be fab if we can say hello in person at one of our gigs between now and Christmas!
The Troggs, Blur and Lila Jean
Hello! Annie here with a recording, a video, a magazine and a funny photo.
Audio: This is my and Bern’s cover of The Troggs’ song With A Girl Like You. At one gig, after the second line “and do all the things you want me to” I threw in the caveat “within reason”, mostly as a saucy joke with my good friend, Kylie, who was in the audience. I’m tempted to repeat that at most gigs, but wouldn’t want it to become predictable. You can throw it in any time though if you’d like to add some sauce!
Video: Bern and I saw Blur this week. It was a real love-in of a gig. It felt like we were meeting up with a bunch of friends we hadn’t seen for ages. It was so joyous – us seeing them do what they do so well, and them showing and telling us how much they were enjoying it too. Damon and Alex’s back-to-back shenanigans in Coffee and TV particularly tickled me. Thanks to James Belsey, you can see them for yourself in this video! If you’re a Blur fan, please feel free to leave gushing comments. We can keep the love-in going.
Magazine: Lila Jean Vintage is an Australian vintage fashion and nostalgia magazine, enriched by real stories. It commissions local writers, photographers and illustrators. The first three issues were entirely self-funded by founding editor Naomi Gall, and the next is being crowdfunded. We opted for the $20 perk, which sees Issue 4 mailed straight to us, but there are vouchers, discounts and jewellery AVAILABLE ONLY UNTIL AUGUST 5TH!
Indie-go-go-go to: http://igg.me/at/lila-jean-vintage-magazine
Photo: Such was the levity of our recent photoshoot with Kelli Morris, that Bern and I just struck this pose for a laugh, but it has turned out to be one we both really like. Until next week then, a toast to the unexpected treasures of levity!
Here Comes The Love
We are very pleased to release our debut album, Here Comes The Love. Along with our perky pop, dramatic ballads and tender odes, we’ve recorded our versions of Alex Turner’s Glass In The Park, Lulu’s
To Sir With Love, and Gerry & The Pacemakers’ I Like It.
The emotional current of the album is one of a willingness to sincerely open your heart – To others, to your own feelings, and to possibility.
We’re selling the CD at gigs but you can also have it posted to you by ordering it on our Big Cartel page.
Not that you even need to wait for the postie – You can buy it right now as a download from our Loudr page.
The download site also allows you to play the album before buying. It plays the 10 original tracks in their entirety and plays snippets of the 3 covers, which are included in their entirety when you buy the album. We hope you like it!
If You
Hello. Annie here. This is the first track off our debut single. It’s an invitation, an encouragement, to approach someone with whom you might turn out to have a lovely connection. I’m quite a shy person with people to whom I haven’t been introduced, but I’ve found on occasion that if I just say hello, they lead the conversation. It’s easier said than done, but reaching out to someone you don’t know from a bar of soap can be very enjoyable and rewarding, even if only for a few minutes.
The vocal melody was sparked by a calypso-ish rhythm from a jam with my and Bern’s previous band. The lyrics came to me soon after. Bern had already written his beautiful introduction, which always makes me go a bit dreamy, and he gave it a home in this song. We hope you like it.