Snowman’s Meltdown

Does a band that live together stay together? In the case of Perth’s Snowman the totality of their songwriting process nearly tore them apart. DARREN LEVIN speaks to singer Joe McKee about the challenges of making Snowman’s second album, 'The Horse, The Rat and The Swan'.

I’ve caught Snowman’s Joe McKee at a vulnerable time. Sitting in the loft-style apartment of his label boss in North Melbourne, McKee – dishevelled, but still dapper in a two-piece suit – has just endured two gruelling days of press in support of the band’s second album, The Horse, The Rat and The Swan.

“Yesterday we were in one cafe all day,” he tells me begrudgingly. “It just sucked to stay in the same environment for the whole day. I think there were 10-face-to-face interviews and a few phoners.”

It’s 5pm on a Thursday and I’m lucky last before McKee jets back to Perth, where he shares a house with bandmates Aditya (Andy) Citawarman, Olga Hermanniusson, Ross DiBlasio and artist Matt Doust. Later this year, the band will follow in the footsteps of Perth luminaries The Triffids and The Scientists when they relocate to London. “It’s a one-way-ticket,” says McKee.

Why the relocation?

Andy has a job transfer over there, he's a civil engineer. So he's going over there to do that. He's got a two-year contract, so I suppose if we're still afloat we'll continue to do it. I think it's just about throwing ourselves in the deep end. I don't want to be too comfortable. I don't want to slip into old habits. I think we need to keep things interesting for ourselves.

Do you find Perth creatively stagnating?

Not really. Andy and I met each other when we were 13 and started writing almost immediately, so we've been drawing on those experiences for a while. But potentially it could be [stagnating] if we stayed. We've done what we can do there [Perth]. I can't see myself challenging myself in Perth anymore.

There's a great tradition of Perth bands relocating - from The Triffids to The Scientists to The Drones. Is that a symptom of the city?

They probably experience similar things. They all moved east first, so I guess we're skipping that step.

On the other hand, do you find that being isolated from the rest of Australia opens up creative possibilities?

I do think so. You don't have any industry there really. Things are developing [in Perth], but there's a lack of spotlight which gives you time to develop. You don't consider record labels over there. Only when we started coming to Melbourne did people offer us money for this. Before that it was inconceivable.

How are you handling that?

What? People giving us money? [Laughs]

Well with money comes responsibilities ...

There are expectations now that we have this infrastructure behind us - there's the label, the publishing company, the management company, the booking agent, the people expecting to hear a new release. That stuff is in the back of your mind, sure. But we're fortunate enough that our label is so good that they're not prodding us or looking over our shoulder. We get to just write.

Do you do a lot of the writing at home?

Yeah, all of it. I can't really write on tour.

How do the songs come together?

There's a room in the house, where I can isolate myself and shut the door. It's got a desk I can work on there. I can't sleep if I write in my room with all the fucking paper everywhere ... I go in there and work on whatever. With this particular album we had certain things that we wanted to do, so I kept them in mind and then sparks appear. The kitchen is the next room and that's where we rehearse. If I have something we work on it in the kitchen.

Everything I was consuming from the media was driving fear into me, which is what the media does – they just fucking fill you with these visions of impending doom.

The Horse, The Rat and The Swan sounds like it comes from a dark place.

Well, I don't like to dramatise it - although I guess there's a lot of drama in the music, isn't there? The last six months of writing - the second half of last year - we weren't on tour much at all, so it was a really focused time of writing. But you need balance, you need light and shade, but I was probably focussing on one thing too much … And that [songwriting] was all I was focussing on.

And I guess you live in an environment where you live and breath the band.

That's right, sure ... And everything I was consuming from the media was driving fear into me, which is what the media does - they just fucking fill you with these visions of impending doom. You can either tune into it or not, and at that particular point I was tuning into it and dwelling on it. I think a part of me let myself do that to see where it would lead me. Everything was consumed by this apocalyptic fear and I was having nightmares about it. It was an interesting ride, but you can't run on that negative steam for too long before you hit a wall. Which is what happened. I couldn't write from that place anymore, so I had to take some time off. The band actually split up ...

So you split up and you still had to live together? Well, we decided that we weren't enjoying it with that sort of intensity, particularly me. I was hating it at that point. So I thought that the best idea was to finish the record and not continue. But all I really needed was time off. It's inevitable that living together we were going to get back into it again. It became OK to do it again, but from a distance. I didn't immerse myself in it again. That's where The Horse, The Rat and The Swan comes from. You’ve got the horse and the rat, which represent paranoia, fear, corruption, betrayal on a personal level and on a larger scale. And the swan is the release and the detachment from that and the letting go. They’re the themes that reoccur on the album, because that’s what I was going through at the time I suppose. But in no way is it a political message and I’m not trying to make social statements. I don’t want anyone to get that from it.

The album seems to be sequenced that way. It starts off being quite brutal and mellows out towards the end. But those brutal moments always threaten to reappear.

The tracklisting just happened naturally like that. If you’re in that headspace and going through that trajectory, you’re going to write like that I suppose. It just made sense that it was a chronological set of songs.

And you have a track called ‘Rebirth’ in the middle of the album.

That piece of music, I remember when I was working on it, was so cathartic and soothing.

What samples are you using on that track?

It’s short wave radio just scanning through the channels.

There’s a filmic quality to this record. Are you inspired by film?

Visuals in general are a big influence, particularly when writing this album. I have a [US artist] Mark Rothko picture called Saffron up on my wall and it’s just the more beautiful, minimal piece of art I’ve ever seen. And that, in itself, gave me so much. Just the texture. Often you’ve got these textures, you just need to trigger them off … When you have an experience, there’s textures and colours that kick around in your head and you just need to channel that and translate it.

You mean like synaesthesia?

Absolutely. Everybody has that capability to see colours and feel something through music.

Were you inspired by other music too? Were you listening to anything in particular when you were making this record?

So much. There’s just so much in the house that it does become a distraction. But I think the most important thing is not to compare what you do with other people.

The record reminds of PiL’s Metal Box in the way it uses tribal rhythms.

We grew up listening to that stuff, so it’s inevitable that it’s in our DNA. Thematically, it’s about this apocalyptic thing. We wanted it to remain instinctual and we wanted it to remain ritualistic, but at the same time we wanted it to be mechanical and of now. It was more about minimising and devolving everything.

What part did [the album’s producer] Dave Parkin [of Perth’s Blackbird studio] play in the recording process?

He’s a translator and the interpreter of our ideas … Plus, he’s a psychologist in the same way he’s a producer, because he’s dealing with a family every time the band comes in. And that time was a complex time … He had to deal with what we were going through at the time, so all credit to him. He held us together. We had to dive back into all that material, which was a headfuck for us in the first place. It’s not like playing it live because that’s a physical thing. Playing it live, you don’t draw on the emotional weight of it. You’re drawing on everything that’s happening right now. I don’t even know what I’m singing live. The romance of the song is long gone by the time you play it live.

Is it a difficult album for you to listen to?

I’m listening to it from a detached perspective now. I’m happy with it and I’m proud of it.

Would you say it’s a less song-focused album?

It’s less conventional, not relying on rock clichés which unfortunately is what people call a song. To me they’re songs. They’re within the length of what you’d normally call a pop song, they still have a structure, they’re not noise entirely. They just don’t rely on those clichés and the amalgamation of influences so much that the first record did. This is far more focussed. We were sure of what we wanted to create and it came from a purer place.

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