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TRACK-BY-TRACK: THINK ABOUT YOU TAKE US THROUGH 'DON'T DIE ON ME'

Don't Die On Me is out now!

Image: Sonny Witton.


Naarm/Melbourne art-rockers Think About You have released their sophomore album, Don't Die On Me. To celebrate the release, the four-piece are taking us through the collection of songs track-by-track.



NEVER NEVER CREEK

The Promised Lands. We are out in the world. We remember the child who jumped from a rope swing to the creek bed. 


That was then, I was one. Older now. We taunt and we encourage. We are there for one another. And if we do make a sound, it will be strong. We won’t creak. We never, never will. The world, our daddies, step back, they notice how we are. They are flawed, fallible, friends. He’ll keep making you a fool. When we slip into what we were, we often do. The late Mark Fisher wrote, “depression is partly constituted by a sneering ‘inner’ voice which accuses you of self-indulgence.” 


“In the Promised Land, where the water is blue and the leaves are green, there stands a child scared to jump off a rope swing. The crowd at the creek say, jump. The child does not want to. They wait and wait and wait and the crowd grows impatient. Will you jump for $5 dollars? ”...


Dec started with the doo, doo, doo, doos. Song broken down in classic Tay style in the studio. Vindi said Coburg reminds her of Lismore and all of a sudden the song was called Never Never Creek.



DESERT WORLD CHURCH

‘“Since the world is ending,” Peter quoted from behind us, “why not let the children touch the paintings?”

 

Ben Lerner, 10.04

 

We drive through the desert. On our way to Mparntwe. Sometimes, we speed. We don’t look. We forget what is there. Like internal disintegration. Other times, we fall asleep in the backseat. We miss the sunset. We are funny, we laugh, we smile. There are after images. On the way home we are dissociated. We are uninterested. We drive through the night. The sights and sounds of a city, of the country, intrude and overlap our consciousness.

 

We deal in fantasy, triggered by the most fulsome memories of childhood and of gender, pleasure, desire and the body…


This track was named after a desert trip Vindi and D’arcy did to Alice Springs / Mparntwe midway through last year. Also Ben Lerner’s “10.04”. Vindi brought a great violin riff, backing vocals and was very positive about it from the start. Jasper, a Cure-esque bass line and the first introduction of their voice. Dec, the build up, the orchestration of it all.



PRAYER SOCKS

“Why was it so important that they could argue to the sword what it meant if God had hands, and whether He had made the universe?”

 

Isabella Hammad, The Parisian

 

There is something dark within us. Live, we all sing, we echo at the end, away. Love, tangible. It is all biblical. It balances the ephemeral. It washes away the guilt. Despair to meet the strangeness of our time. We’re all free, in a world with a constant need to reduce everything to ‘God is good’. What if we’ve been bad? We all need a reason for big, big complexities. Let us enjoy the ride…


 Jasper started Prayer Sock’s with Vindi in Vindi’s old place in Brunswick. A studio born song that just all fell into place. Jasper’s mum does not like this song but we Jasper’s mum. Jasper lead vocals, Vindi backing.



IT TAKES FOUR

Through comparative rates of flow, of thickness, acceleration, acceleration to rupture, freedom, difference, non-linearity, a root system you grow on, but not a tree, we are horizontal without direction to enter where you please and do not trace back to co-create a mechanism for understanding all the chaos of temporality.


This one began with a bassline. Gang vocals that someone said sounded like harmonies. 



VINDI

“When sites of death and loss are forgotten and all traces of tragic events are erased the responsibility for what happened is far easier to dispense with. The burden of memory is shifted onto the shoulders of survivors and victims’ families.’ Maria Tumarkin, Traumascapes

 

Any institution can fail to cater to the surplus of conflicting needs.  In despair, we are not tourists. We are active agents in the world. Any other form of self-image is intolerable. We grapple with the inherent unknowability of suicide and the pain and sorrow young people feel. We embrace responsibility for what is comfortably buried and ignored because “guilt is to responsibility (and change) what pity is to love—a pathetic substitute.’ (Tumarkin)


Vindi leads. She wrote this beautiful poem, the lyrics to Vindi on the day we were recording at the Studio in Collingwood. She added violin. This song started at Jasper’s house. Vindi is the namesake track from TAY singer and violinist Vindi Ferguson (and the first song she's sung or written). FFO Courtney Barnett and Dry Cleaning, the verses are delivered in a dry monologue over a moody guitar riff and sludgy bass, scaling at the chorus with sweet, falsetto vocals and sunny violin.



DON’T DIE ON ME

“All this new technology will eventually give us new feelings that will never completely displace the old ones, leaving everyone feeling quite nervous and split in two.” – David Berman, Actual Air

 

We fragment and move forward like a river, like a creek. Cobbled together. Our experience of birth and death intertwine. They more than just co-exist. They achieve commonality. They intersect. They are lived experience. There is no beginning and no end. Chaotic, multi-gendered, queer, well. This is realised through the blending of the birth and infancy cycle amidst the record…


Don’t Die On Me was written in the Floyd room at Bakehouse Studios in Richmond. The song was built around a simple bassline that is cyclical and features drums, violin and guitar. Jasper and Vindi took the lead on the vocals. The pair sing in unison.  It has a country feel to it. Vindi told a story about her car breaking down on the way down the surf coast. As she pulled over on the side of the Geelong highway she said to her Nissan pulsar, “don’t die on me, you’re my everything.”


There were times when we thought about adding more lyrics to the song, but a great story can be told with such few words.



STEP JAM

We climb the stairs. We climb the stairs. We climb the stairs. We climb the stairs.

 

We climb the stairs. We climb the stairs. We climb the stairs. We climb the stairs….


Vindi rocking some double stops then soaring into some garage punk fiddle. D’arcy and Vindi singing. Dec hitting hard. Jasper thumping bass.



THE TUNA SONG

“I love you is like the Argonaut renewing his ship during his voyage without changing its name... meaning must be renewed by each use as the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new” (Maggie Nelson quoting Roland Barthes in The Argonauts 13).

 

They live in an apartment in Villa Crespo, Buenos Aires. He leaves on a boat for a week to work in Uruguay. Passion is for holidays, not for homecoming. She remains in their apartment in Buenos Aires. In the mornings, she is often sick. She sees on the news that abortion is now illegal in Texas. She misses Marseilles. She remembers stealing wine, stealing Nelson, stealing clothes, from all lovers that never, never make her body shake. She is scared to walk outside. She eats all the tuna in the house. He returns and is upset that his Sirena cans have vanished. He decides it’s time to go to Woolworths. She tries to replace the Sirena cans. To conceal an act of theft she holds her bicycle company all the way to the self-serve arena. The Sirena cans, tucked under her sweater. She breezes past security, her tuna cans undetected. When she hands them to Nic, her unborn child dies. It dies of mercury poisoning.


This is flash fiction to accompany the Tuna song. A song which actually had about fifteen verses. The outro was led by Jasper as well as backing vocals as well as the trumpet line. Dec plays the unchanging drum beat, like a hip-hop beat, maybe? We added hand claps as an overdub with Nao in the studio.



1 <3 YOU IN A DJ WAY


“The form that the experiment takes is not preliminary to the answer, not preliminary to the creation of the art object. It is the answer. It is the art.” Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager, 2004

 

Art-creation and the experiment must co-exist. We trial the insistent comprehensible and the silent incomprehensible. Chance, structure, process.

 

We try to find a common denominator for all the complexity in the world. We reduce, we convert everything to numbers, beauty, art. Our dreams, made to sell. Their fragments, a tangled mess. 


Source Chat GPT:


Interpreting poetry can be subjective, as different readers may derive different meanings from the same text. However, here's one possible interpretation of the poem "i love you in a dj way":


The poem seems to blend elements of everyday life with elements of music and perhaps a sense of longing or nostalgia. The repeated refrain of "i love you in a dj way" suggests a deep affection or connection expressed in a unique, perhaps unconventional manner, likened to the way a DJ mixes and remixes music.


The references to specific places like "hillsong fridge north balwyn" and "tram tram tell my mother" alongside phrases like "running on still" and "it’s crazy to sing" evoke a sense of movement and flux in the speaker's life, perhaps reflecting the transient nature of relationships and experiences.


Lines like "hold my hand doll / hold my hand" convey a desire for intimacy and connection amidst the uncertainty and flux. The mention of a "rhinoplasty angel" and "dreams pay us back" could suggest a reflection on the consequences of past actions or decisions, and the idea that dreams or aspirations have a way of coming back to us.

Overall, the poem seems to explore themes of love, connection, uncertainty, and the passage of time, all within the framework of a DJ's creative expression and the fluidity of music….


DJ Way began from a riff Vindi played on her violin. Jasper located this riff  from a jam gone by on their ride to work. Jasper has a healthy ear for riffs. It felt good to play, it felt strong. And if it feels good, you stick with it. The vocals came in later. I <3 You In A DJ Way was a funny concept. Our friend Selena said it was brilliant. That was definitely a good sign. We all love Selena. So we kept this idea, to love someone in a whimsical way. The song, a tangled mess of fragments and conversations. Elements of the everyday, of worship, of nostalgia and friendship. Perhaps you love someone in an unconventional way, like a DJ mixes music.


We’ve played the song for a couple of years now. Jasper and D’arcy sing it together. We tend to finish shows with it and all kneel around Dec. It’s a moment for reflection. We play the full version not the radio edit. There’s plenty of instrumental. We’ve also turned DJ Way into a medley, featuring Mental As Anything’s, Live It Up. It’s the only cover Tay has ever done. It certainly surprises people when after the final verse of DJ Way when we leap into, how can you see looking through those tears? Maybe we’ll save that for Like A Version. People are like, did you just do a medley with your own song and a cover? I didn’t know that was possible. It’s possible, it’s all possible.In the recording process, Vindi layered a viola part over the top of her violin part. She came up with this in the studio when we felt like the song needed a little something else. Nao crept her part in, giving a haunting feeling. The actual album version of I <3 You In DJ Way goes for about seven minutes. Jasper wanted a radio edit for DJ Way. In the original version, the vocals don’t come in for about four minutes. I suppose this adds to the irony, that at the very core of this song is an unusual working of form and that for the single release, we’ve tried to make a radio friendly version of an art-rock / post-rock / celtic folk / australian garage punk song about disc jockeys. 


Quote about DJ Way “This song is Tay. Hear movement and flux, in experience, in relationships, in past decisions. There is an idea that dreams or aspirations have a way of coming back to us - if we don’t forget them.”



TRAP

“Depression as a form of being stuck, both literal and metaphorical, that requires new ways of living or, more concretely, moving” (26). Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich

 

Cvetkovich reconsiders depression as a medical illness and investigates depression as a social construct that affects individuals of differing gender, sexuality, class and race. From a 1970s feminist consciousness raising approach Cvetkovich pulls apart upon the “bad feeling” we feel in capitalism. Don’t Die On Me follows the journey of otherness, of ill and good health, death, loss and gender. Is the record over after DJ Way? No, it’s not. Maria Tumarkin writes, ‘nothing is more human than the experience of feeling trapped’. A system, a trap. Its roots rupture social housing, psychiatric wards, imprisonment and immigration detention.

 

This image of “stuckness” requires new movement. A constant state of flux. This emerges from a stuckness that allows growth for the depressed individual, through the denial of contraction to a singular identity, through narrative multiplicity, through multiple voices. For Cvetkovich, “maintaining a hopefulness about the possibility that slowing down or not moving forward might not be a sign of failure and might instead be worth exploring” (21).


Will you pull over, please?


Don't Die On Me is out now!


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