Former Moscow Schoolboy Jess Cornelius talks to JP HAMMOND about touring with the Mountain Goats, working with Casey Rice and her new solo project Teeth and Tongue.

Where are you at the moment?

I’m in the office at the warehouse I’m moving out of and it’s a bit noisy. I’m moving and it’s a bit busy. But we’re leaving tomorrow morning [for the album launch in Adelaide].

The songs on your new record, Monobasic, don’t seem to be static, with the mood changing a lot between songs. Is that something you do consciously? Or does it come from having studied music (at the Nelson School for Contemporary Music in New Zealand)?

I don’t really ever do anything particularly consciously. I think I get a little bit bored, I think there has to be a change somewhere and often it’s a mood change … I don’t think it’s from studying music because I didn’t really study it! I guess I always feel like there has to be something else, some kind of movement. I don’t really know where that comes from, apart from getting bored if I stay on one thing.

The shift from being in a band [Moscow Schoolboy] to going solo, I get the feeling it wouldn’t have been that dramatic because you’ve been writing for quite some time?

Not really, it was actually quite smooth. Until it came to recording! Even before I was in Moscow Schoolboy I used to do recording at home. It was more of a sense of going back to what I used to do and the way I used to create songs and mood and sounds. It was great and a lot of fun. But we re-tracked everything for the album and that was when I felt the pressure … I found that I was stuck on certain sounds and I didn’t really know how to recreate them. But Casey [Rice, producer] was great and really helped.

You’ve collaborated with people who are well-known musicians (Joe Talia from City City City and Ricky French from Actor/Model/Hand Hell) in their own right and have distinctive musical personalities. Was it about managing those personalities into your vision, or allowing them to colour your vision?

It worked both ways. With Joe Talia, the drums were programmed so I gave him the drum programs and just wanted him to play them. But, of course, when he did it sounded much better. But I was pretty strict, I just wanted it to sound very metronomical on some songs … but for others, if it wasn’t working, he really added a lot of energy and depth to some of the songs as well. For those, he gave it an extra bit of “Joe Talia”, which was great. With Ricky, it was more like “just play some noise over this track”. He got to do whatever he wanted with that one.

Was it an easy dialogue with Casey Rice? Are you a fan of the records he’s produced in the past?

Yeah, he’s done some stuff I really admire and he produced a friend’s EP and we met up and had a chat. He’s done such a wide variety of albums and I didn’t know where the material would go – I was going to use programmed drums, I could have got a band together and recorded in a studio. I had a lot of different options and I just thought I would go with Casey because he has done electronic, he’s done rock and he’s done some really noisy stuff. It was an intense recording time, because we did it over about six months, maybe once a week … Most of the time it was just me and him so it was a pretty intense relationship. One of the things I’m most grateful about is that I started getting worried I was running out of money … and we tracked everything (apart from the drums) in the studio above a bakery. Casey cut me some keys and he set me up with a good microphone so we could just swap Pro Tools files. He’d just set me up and leave and afterwards we could go through and mix.

How did you keep your enthusiasm for the material over that six-month period?

That amount of time that it took was good, but it was frustrating. It gave me time to learn my parts properly because I’d write them and then record them at home pretty shabbily and then, six months later, I’d be in the studio and couldn’t remember how to play them. I used to have to go home and work out what I’d have to learn … Having time also gives you more choice and you get more confused. We remixed one song from scratch because we couldn’t get it right. I’d go home at night feeling stressed.

Would you look to record for that period of time again, or over a shorter timeframe?

When I finished the record I was like, “I’m never doing that again!” I just wanted to go into a studio, rehearse with a band, and record it live with a band over five days. Definitely in the near future, I want to do that for an EP and do a live recording. But I still really love pottering around at home in my bedroom, playing with different instruments and percussion.

So the grant you received from the Australia Council for the Arts didn’t create that timeframe because you sound like you work at that slower pace naturally?

Well, the grant was great because it allowed me to make a full-length album and work with Casey, which I probably wouldn’t have done. The real reason it took so long was because Casey had other projects and I was working as well. It was more out of necessity, really – we both had to work on other projects in order to get by.

It’s quite a dark record – is it hard to return to?

Well, I think it’s a bit lighter than some other stuff I’ve done. We’re doing some new material live because I guess I need a break from some of the material but that’s also because the live set is a bit different. But it [the album material] is really fun. A lot of the songs on the record I’d never played with a band before. I thought I’d be really over it, but it was really exciting as well.

The live material … how’s that changing?

It’s probably a bit heavier … We strip everything down to the basics because that’s the way I like to play. It’s the way of creating the dynamics I’m after with a much more simple line up.

You’ve played around Australia with the Mountain Goats recently. How was that?

It was great. I didn’t really know what to expect. It was fun – people didn’t boo us off stage! It was weird playing with a crowd barrier though. It was obviously more for the Mountain Goats, but John [Darnielle] said he wasn’t used to it either. He made some joke about how it was, “Like every condom you’ve ever worn at once.” He was a very funny man. And he helped me lug my gear, which I was impressed by.

Mess+Noise has just run a poll for best albums of 2008. Your album is a bit of a latecomer but it’s made a big impression. Has anything recently made a big impression on you?

The Jack Ladder album sounds really awesome, but I haven’t heard all of it yet. And the St Helens album, but that’s not coming out until next year so that doesn’t really count.

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