Wake To A Bright Morning is out now!
Image: Supplied.
Indie-folk artist Jack Carty has shared his sixth studio album Wake To A Bright Morning. If you're loving the release and want some insight into each song, we've got you covered! The musician has treated MILKY, taking us through the album track by track.
BOAB
Boab is about the time we have and how we spend it. I wrote it after a trip to The Kimberley region in Western Australia on which I visited “The Prison Tree” just outside of Wyndham. It’s big old, hollowed out Boab tree and hundreds of people have graffitied it over the years, carving their names into its trunk and branches. I found my wife’s name, carved there by somebody else, and it made me think about distance, and how time is like a 4th dimension separating us from events that happened in the same place long ago. I didn’t graffiti the tree – I would never do that – but a bit of poetic license never goes astray and I really like how this song turned out. It was recorded in London with some wonderful musicians and friends from that part of the world: Fred Claridge on Drums, Lukas Drinkwater on Bass and J.J Stoney on Keys.
DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE
The kernel of Don’t Believe The Hype came from watching the constant churn of internet trends and feeling like an outsider just wanting to actually connect with something. I wrote it whilst I was living in East London, writing lots and listening to a whole bunch of music from artists just quietly doing their thing. There seemed to be a depth to a lot of that music that is impossible to get across in the first 3 seconds of a social media post, and so it often gets lost in the constant deluge of information coming at us all. It’s got a kind of dreamy feel about it which I really like. My wife Natasha and I made a zero-budget, DIY film clip for this song one afternoon, and it's hands-down my favourite video for any of my songs.
DRAGNET
Dragnet is an anti love song. I wrote it with Jonas Persson, a wonderful London-based Swedish songwriter and producer who also mixed the album. This song is one of the more straight-up pop tunes I’ve ever released, but it’s got a tension and a darkness to it that I really like. The backing vocals are all sung by Georgia Mooney from All Our Exes Live in Texas and I love what she brought to the recording.
AUTUMN LEAVES
Autumn Leaves is a ballad about the changing seasons, both metaphorical and literal. Like Dragnet, this song was written with Jonas Person in his studio on Burners St in London. I got a new appreciation for the changing seasons living in the UK, and this was written going into my second English winter, which I think comes through in the lyrics. UK-based Australian singer-songwriter Emily Barker leant her beautiful voice to this recording, and the drums were recorded in a very DIY way in her studio space in The Cotswolds.
GIVING UP
Despite its name, Giving Up is a song about hope, perspective and how amazing it is that any of us are here at all. The final verse of this songs is one of my favourite moments on the album and comes pretty directly from an actual experience I had walking around Islington on a grey day. The piano and a lot of the BVs on this tune were played/sung by J.J Stoney – a beautiful English musician who played most of the keys on the record. We recorded his parts on Giving Up in his apartment the night before I moved home to Australia for good – flying back to prepare the birth of our son. I remember being in the rideshare heading back from his house at 3am, winding through the streets of London, saying goodbye as we went.
TELL THE TRUTH
The title is pretty self-explanatory with this one. My 2.5 year old son loves the groove on this song and dances around the room every time I play it. I spent a couple of days at Squarehead Recordings in Kent with a wonderful producer/audio engineer called Rob Wilkes in the early days of making this record, and I think that is where this song really found its form – just mucking around with the amps turned up real loud. I’ve always been pretty drawn to the idea of the simple life (whatever that means), and felt fairly allergic to the “influencer” side of social media…I guess that was the impetus for this one.
DO I MAKE YOU CRAZY
This song was written on a train travelling between Hamburg and Amsterdam. I found an empty first-class cabin and went in with my guitar to work on this idea. Eventually a ticket inspector came around but when he saw I was writing a song he let me stay in there – I love touring in Europe. I was travelling playing shows with Josh Pyke and eventually he came in and we spent a little time working on the chorus together. I had this really vivid dream on the tour that a bird with ink on its beak came and gave me a tattoo by pecking me…I don’t really know what that means, but it made it into the bridge of this song.
LONG TIME COMING
Long Time Coming is a kinda big, acerbic, sarcastic rock song. Like most of the record I wrote most of this one on an acoustic guitar, but it really came into its own recording electric guitars at Squarehead Recordings in Newington, Kent with Rob Wilkes. Almost all of this album is recorded pretty DIY in bedrooms, living rooms and home-studio, but those few days were really valuable. There is a whole bunch of stuff layered into this.
THE WIRES ARE HUMMING
For all its advantages, social media has always kind of made me uneasy. I think the downsides have been making themselves more and more known lately with the spread of misinformation and echo chambers. This is about that, about digital anxiety and devices that fight to capture and keep our attention. My wife Natasha sings the harmonies in the chorus, and Lukas Drinkwater plays Double Bass on this song. We recorded his parts in my bedroom in a big warehouse I was sharing in East London. We had to put a blanket over the radiator to stop it from ringing out with the vibrations. This tune feels kinda dreamy, but there is a tension underneath – that seEms to fit with the subject matter.
FLEETING
Fleeting is the last song I wrote and recorded for ‘Wake to a Bright Morning’. It’s a song about how one single moment can hold more meaning and significance than an entire lifetime leading up to it. It’s sortof about relativity in that way - the relativity of meaning.
I recorded all the vocals in a closet in my house here in Brisbane, whilst the piano and string parts were arranged and recorded by J.J Stoney in his studio in London. Time seems to be a common theme that runs through all these songs and Fleeting is a perfect bookend to that. It’s something I think about almost every day, especially now I have kids. This song is the closest I’ve come to capturing the joy, fear, love, wonder and constant change of life, and the preciousness of every moment.
Wake To A Bright Morning is out now!
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