Karl Smith speaks to SHAUN PRESCOTT about life after Sodastream, his new band Lee Memorial and his transition from confessional songwriter to storyteller.

While it may be tempting to classify Lee Memorial as “Karl Smith’s new project”, Smith is quick to point out that this is a new band; a group that is very much the sum of every one of its parts.

Previously known for his direct, confessional songwriting with Perth-born duo Sodastream, Smith’s lyricism has taken a sharp turn on The Lives of Lee Memorial, the various reasons for which he tells me over speaker phone from his Melbourne home.

A lot has been made of the diversity of Lee Memorial’s musical background, how did the band come together?
I’ve known Matt [Bailey, of Paradise Motel] and Laura [McFarlane, of Nintynine] for a long time. I worked with both Matt and Laura on a record we did a few years ago called Small Sips. We’re old friends and have known one another for a long time. When I was putting some songs together for the new record I asked Laura to come and play drums on a couple of the demos and that went really well, plus we’d worked together before. She’s a great singer and an amazing musician. She puts me to shame.

I met Maddy [Madeline Spawton] at my old job at Shock Records. I’d been looking for a clarinet player, and one day we were just packing CDs into a box when she happened to mention that she played clarinet, so we started rehearsing a bit. She plays cello and keyboard as well. The two of us did a bunch of shows together when I was still figuring out how to get into the project properly.

When I thought of guitarists I kept coming back to Tom [Lyngcoln, of The Nation Blue] and I wasn’t sure whether he’d be up for it because it’s obviously not the sort of music he normally plays. But he had played with a lot of other friends so I thought I’d ask him, and thankfully he said yes because he’s just incredible. I feel very lucky to be playing with all the people I am. Matt left the band last year, and I saw Zond in November and thought they were great, so when Matt left the band Steven [Thomas] was kind enough to agree.

So you’re the songwriter for Lee Memorial?
Yeah, I’m writing the songs. It started out as more of a solo thing but when we started playing together as a band it kind of took on a life of its own. It’s becoming more of a band thing, that’s for sure.

It’s been a while since the last Sodastream album, what have you been up to since then?
I was studying writing during the last year of Sodastream, so I’ve been doing that, working on a film script which I got funding for a few months ago. I’m working on that and some other writing projects. I guess I was pretty burnt out after 10 years in Sodastream and I had to walk away from music for a while to get some perspective. I’ve been really enjoying writing and it’s reinvigorated my music as well.

“The world is bigger than what’s just inside your head, so it was a choice to write about the things that I see, not just the things I feel.”

What is the film script about?
It’s based around a friendship I had when I was about 20 working the graveyard shift at a petrol station in Perth. It was the mid-’90s. A friend I made while working there was a manic depressive schizophrenic and a Buddhist. We would chat every night, because obviously there wasn’t much open all night in the mid-’90s in Perth, so it became a hub for the local misfits. Me and this guy got to know one another really well, and also got to know all the people in the surrounding areas. It’s about unlikely friendships and how people fall together in the same place despite their personalities.

Is that likely to come out soon?
It’s not even in production yet, just development. Knowing I’m a novice when it comes to the film industry, I assume it’ll probably take five or 10 years, it feels like everything takes forever. I’m not in any hurry really, just enjoying the process.

Are you working on any other writing?
I’m writing a kids book as well, and then some non-fiction bits and pieces. It’s kind of nice having a second pursuit, that way when one thing isn’t working you can switch to the other and it all feels fresh again.

Having come back to songwriting, do you feel like you’ve evolved or changed? Has your approach become noticeably different since Sodastream?
Lyrically it has and I’ve enjoyed playing a bit louder, doing some noisy stuff and also trying out some more pop stuff. Lyrically I’ve made a conscious effort to stop writing about myself. I wanted to start telling stories. In the past, most of the songs have been from personal experience, whereas this time I wanted to take those experiences and throw them into stories and have them outside myself a little bit. I did it because it wasn’t something I’d explored much before, but also because thinking about yourself every night you end up destroying yourself because you’re reliving the worst moments of your life over and over again. It was part survival instinct and part creative choice.

Did you feel any pressure making that change in direction with your songwriting? Did you feel that perhaps instinctually you were more of a confessional writer than a storyteller or character creator?
I try not to think about how people are going to take it when I’m working, it’s more of an intuitive process and a point I’d come at anyway. I’d spent a long time exploring that [confessional] way of writing, so to repeat it because it was familiar seemed ridiculous. So I thought it was time to start something new. I had to fall in love with music again and that was my way in, and it was quite freeing because you can write without being so self-conscious, you can tell a story. Some of the stories on the record aren’t particularly nice, and the points of view can be quite aggressive. But you know, you’re always exploring yourself, whether it be through stories or a more confessional approach. I guess I felt I had a little bit more scope – there were more instruments to play with, extra characters, more points of view, and it seemed like the right match.

What caused the exhaustion that led to Sodastream breaking up and your break from music?
I guess it was health issues, I don’t like to go on about them. I’ve suffered from depression for a long time and that becomes quite debilitating in a lot of ways. It’s something I explored in a lot of songs over the years and have spoken to a lot of people about. Everyone has their own journey, but for me one thing that was becoming quite difficult to keep going on with was that. And also, as you get a bit older you begin to realise that you don’t have to experience everything to put yourself in [a] position. The world is bigger than what’s just inside your head, so it was a choice to write about the things that I see, not just the things I feel. That’s a simplistic way of putting it.

The opening track, ‘All These Things’, is apparently you role playing from the point of view of an overly-protective, materialistic person. It appears to be an observation on a general condition at the moment. Is that an accurate assessment?
Yeah, that is essentially what it’s about. It’s an observation rather than a criticism, because I know we all fall into the same trap all the time. If you’re working full time you buy yourself things to treat yourself so you can get through the week, because it’s difficult to go to a job you can’t stand. It’s an observation that we’ve all been heading in that direction for a long time and it’s become more and more accelerated. I wrote that about a year ago. I was getting upset with how much value people place on money and security. Instead of turning to family and friends for security, they turn to money and I think that’s a huge trap.

As an artist and a writer do you feel you’re in any way immune from that materialism? Have your passions and pursuits drawn you away from solving problems through consumerism?
It certainly means that you don’t make any money! [laughs] I guess in a way you insulate yourself from that because it’s no longer an option. If you choose to make art of any kind, 99 percent of artists make no money from it, so you have to do it for the love of it. I guess you get that sense of satisfaction from expressing yourself in a way that feels comfortable to you. And you feel that, even if no one is listening, you have at least expressed yourself, and that’s the main thing.

As far as being immune to it, it is hard to not want things all the time. Advertising has become more and more aggressive and more directed at individual sub-groups. People go to uni for years to learn how to press all the right buttons, to make you want something you don’t need at all. I’m certainly not immune, but it’s a choice that I’ve made because I do what I do. I won’t be rich so therefore I don’t need to think about it. I do my best not to want all those things because I can’t have them anyway.

Sodastream were a successful band in terms of critical acclaim and fan adoration. Do you have any reservations regarding how Lee Memorial will be received?
There’s always a sense of trepidation. I guess it’s a bit different to Sodastream in a number of ways. I certainly don’t expect everyone who likes Sodastream to like Lee Memorial, but you just have to travel your own path and hope people appreciate that what we’re doing is something different, something new, and we’re all energised by it. Most of us have been in bands for a long time and this band has a pretty loose framework and we’re all just playing what we can. We try not to bring any external pressure [into it]. This is just the first one, and things will evolve. I hope that people who enjoyed Sodastream will jump on board and come on the road with us, but if they don’t that’s OK too.

One of the most surprising moments of the album is ‘Private Joseph Skelling’, a song written from the point of view of a soldier’s mental decline. It was the most obvious instance of you taking a departure lyrically. Where did that song come from?
It was one of those songs that came to me pretty quickly. I was playing in the back shed and I started humming the melody in the chorus, and I’d been reading a fair bit about what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’d spent a good few weeks reading more and more about that because I had some spare time and had become quite fascinated by all of the conflicting things that are going on there. I came across a few articles that described these situations that were quite similar to what I ended up writing the story about.

I was just exploring - It’s a very complicated issue because we make these people into what they are, these soldiers who are everyday people who go into training and see all these terrible things, and all these terrible things are asked of them. And then, when they behave in a manner that we consider barbaric, we label them as psychotic. It’s not to say that [that label] is wrong, it’s just a difficult situation because they are victims of their circumstances as much as the Iraqi people. I don’t know what else to say about it except that I was trying to put an everyday person in the shoes of a soldier who has become so damaged that they can’t stand themselves so a whole new horrific world opens up to them, a self-destructive path.

Do you find it intimidating writing about characters – their emotions and instincts - when you’re not immediately familiar with them? As you said before, Sodastream was “in your head” but this song is coming from somewhere else. Did you feel wary about that?
Not really. I had some difficult times when I was younger, and it’s all just about extrapolating from the things that you already know. I’ve certainly experienced my share of violence, so I took those experiences and put them in a new situation.

What times are you referring to? Your time spent as a youth in Bangladesh and India?
There was some there, and also in Perth where I spent my teenage years. My parents worked with a lot of damaged people. I won’t go into it because it’ll take over the whole conversation, but there was a girl who was killed at my school. She was stabbed to death in the classroom. And there were other things that happened within a three- or four-year period where a lot of people died in various violent and tragic circumstances. As a child you see it in a different light. I don’t know what it’s like to be a soldier but I use those experiences and those primal fears of violence and of feeling powerless, and also the images that I remember of those times. I hope that it rings true, though I’ve never been a soldier, never killed and raped anybody, but you do what you can to put yourself in that situation. At the end of the day I’m a storyteller.

Is every song written from a character’s point of view? Certain tracks like ‘Shoulders and Floors’ is lyrically reminiscent of a Sodastream song.
There is a couple. ‘Shoulders and Floors’ is definitely one and it’s one of the earlier ones that I wrote [for Lee Memorial], but it’s still a character-based song, because no matter how much you try to get away from yourself you do follow certain patterns sometimes and that one was about a number of things. I tried to combine them into one story, whereas in the past, in a Sodastream song, I would’ve made the whole thing a little more abstract and dealt with it that way. The song represents a number of things I was going through.

Is there anything that the characters of Lee Memorial share in common, any theme?
They’re people who have been forgotten, I guess. For a number of reasons, whether they’re outside the corridors of power, or they’re not a member of the comfortable middle-class. For whatever reason they’re outsiders or have been forgotten. These are stories of people who can’t tell the stories themselves.

The cover art resonates more now that you say that.
That’s just down the road from my house. The idea is that we’re all living out our own lives and we all have burdens and challenges, and most of the time we don’t hear about them, we just hear about the ones from Who, or who Britney is dating. It’s ridiculous to the point of absurdity, so this is a way of putting stories out there that might not have been told.

That’s sounds similar to what you’re exploring in your film script.
Yeah, it’s certainly something I’ve always felt strong about, and now that I’m approaching things from more of a story structure, this record and the film script were written in tandem so there are a few similarities. We don’t have a title at the moment, but the working title is Another Kind Of Loneliness.

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