Storytellers: Five Songs

For pop fans, it’s the never ending argument. Are great lyrics or great hooks more important in a song? The five tracks featured in this article have both, but it’s the stories they tell which are most memorable: Murder, death and divorce, plus the occasional glimmer of hope. We invited the songwriters behind them to explain how it all came about.

'Keith And Tina' by Sodastream

“She broke both her legs hitting the ground/ I stood over her screaming...”

Sodastream’s slow moving tragedy ‘Keith And Tina’ is full of terrible anticipation, describing a lover’s affair and bloody murder. Pete Cohen’s double bass is thick and rubbery, plodding along the melody with heavy hearted resignation, while Karl Smith’s near androgynous voice shapes the narrative. It’s hard to imagine a more violent song, sung by a more gentle man: “And though he pleaded with me to be patient/ Still I stuck him like a two-bit whore/ Oh, he bled out and red it gushed out/ And sprayed up against the toilet door...”

The duo’s 2005 EP, Take Me With You When You Go, was inspired by a 13 month tour of the United States and has a distinctly sinister, Southern folk aesthetic. ‘Keith And Tina’, says Smith, is based upon an encounter with two drug addicts in Texas which brought back a flood of disastrous memories from his adolescence. When Smith tells the story, he almost shakes when describing the look in their eyes (“that stare...”) not seen since he was a teenager.

Karl Smith on
‘Keith And Tina’

I guess it all starts in Wichita Falls. We had to drive from LA, where we landed, through Arizona to Texas for our first show. We decided to stop in this town called Wichita Falls, which seemed innocent enough. We were looking around for a cheap motel and found one which looked like it was straight out of the movies – you know, with the burnt out ‘e’ in ‘Motel’. As we pulled up, this big black dude comes out and he’s being all friendly and his name’s Drew, he’s asking what we’re doing and he was quite excited that we were in a band. I made the mistake of asking him where we could get some food that wasn’t too horrible. He pointed us in the direction of a few places and said ‘Oh, can you pick me up some beer on the way back?’ We stood there for a moment waiting for him to give us some cash... and he didn’t. So we drove off and found this Chinese restaurant and got some take away. We didn’t pass any servos to grab beer, so we got back and thought ‘It’s no big deal, he didn’t give us money anyway.’

After we pulled up, I heard this commotion outside the car. Pete had just told Drew that we didn’t have any beer and he was going ‘Fuck, FUCK! You didn’t get any fucking beer!’ At the same time, this girl who would have been about 25 – but looked like she was about 45 – walked up from one of the other rooms. She was off her head on crack and was saying ‘Don’t fucking listen to him, he’s full of shit, he’s just a fucking idiot man.’ Then they were getting into an argument and we were like ‘Ooh, what’s going on?’

This was our first interaction with any locals – besides back in Orange County, LA, where we’d gone into an army surplus store and they’d had a bazooka behind the counter – and we were already feeling a little out of our depth so we decided to try to calm them down. Pete walked off with Drew to get some beer and I didn’t know how long he was going to be, but I thought that one of us should stay with the gear. I said to the girl ‘I’m going to the room’ and she followed me straight in. I found myself in a cracky motel with this girl trying to have her way with me, asking ‘Don’t you want to party?’ I had to make up a story about how I was married and couldn’t cheat on my wife. At the same time, I was thinking ‘What the hell is going on with Pete? He’s been gone for ages.’

Pete finally got back after I’d managed the get the girl out of the room and lock the door. He gave a whole bunch – well, 90% - of the beers to Drew and put his bass up against the door. I’d never encountered anybody on crack before. It’s just like, the stare, you know? Almost like they weren’t there. Their minds were somewhere else and these were just empty bodies walking around looking for any kind of shit. It was quite alarming... The unpredictable nature of it. Looking into the eyes of these people and having no idea what they were capable of.

It was the Wichita Falls thing that triggered all these memories... I grew up overseas in Bangladesh and moved back when I was 13. It was quite a shock to the system, moving back to Australia where everything was different. It was better in so many ways and worse in so many other ways. There was a half-way house across the road from the house my mum and dad bought, and it was home to a lot of desperate people who were either alcoholics or drug addicts of some sort. Over my teenage years – I guess from 13 to 17 when I moved out – there was an endless parade of people who were in various states of disrepair. A lot of them were totally lovely people, but just really damaged.

My mum ended up getting taken advantage of because she was so generous and so giving, and also very naïve. One time I had to stop a woman from attacking my mum with hedge clippers; another time, the same woman slashed herself up in the bathroom; another time, this couple... this guy called up in the middle of the night because he’d just slit his girlfriend’s throat and was freaking out. He’d almost killed her and she was lying there bleeding, waiting for the ambulance to arrive. It was just like, where people were so fucked up that they’d do things with absolutely no regard to the consequences... Everything was red raw and way beyond my understanding at the time. My parents were always going to all these funerals, and all these people were dying really early.

[Around the same time] a girl at my school got killed – she was stabbed to death in the classroom by another guy in my year... in the middle of an English class. This guy had broken into her house and found her diary and read it and found out that she’d slept with somebody else. He flipped out and brought a knife [to school] and taped it to his back and stood up in class and pulled it from his back and stabbed her in the chest while everybody was there. Nobody realised that it was happening for the first few seconds... Nobody could really believe that it was happening.

That history of violence for those few years has always coloured a lot of the things that I’ve written. I remember when the girl was killed at school, it was just such a massive... It was a complete shock to the system, but at the same time it was also normal life. I was under the understanding that this was what Western life was like. Everything was out of control. I remember trying to take one of my friends to a movie to get his mind off everything. He still hadn’t been able to get his school books because they had blood all over them.

When I started writing the story, it all sort of fell into place. There’s different scenes in there... The guy who slit his girlfriend’s throat, he ended up going to jail, but he had been so out of it that he didn’t realise what he had done until she was lying there bleeding. He was totally remorseful and once he got out of jail they ended up getting back together. There’s that part of it, which I guess is the last verse. But there’s also the second verse which is more about the calmness of going to the kitchen drawer and grabbing a knife. I was thinking more about [the murder at school] and his premeditation... Just that coldness about it. It was very matter-of-fact. You know, ‘This is what I’m going to do to you.’

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‘Lips Like Oranges’ by Clare Bowditch and the Feeding Set

When the opening lines of ‘Lips Like Oranges’ slip out of Clare Bowditch’s mouth, they sound more like a breathy sigh than words. “Factory by five, and as the morning hits/ She’s working a double split shift...”

The song, from last year’s album What Was Left, sounds like the warm glow of sunset. Its narrative follows a budding relationship between two workers at a beer-bottling plant in Mexico, balancing the monotony and powerlessness of their situation with a glimmer of hope. Bowditch’s characters are likable; they are sincere, flawed and fumbling.

“In a way, it’s like short story writing,” says Bowditch of creating narrative-based songs such as this. “When it comes to writing a song, you have a chance to play around with rhythm, poetry and story at the same time.”

Half-way through ‘Lips Like Oranges’, the focus shifts from one character to another. José, the sweet and protective male co-worker, sits in a bathroom gathering the courage to approach his love interest. The music swells and a chorus of voices join together as José finally settles upon a line...

“I guess I was wondering what you were doing on the weekend/ I’ve got tickets to this show. It’s free you know and...”

Clare Bowditch on
‘Lips Like Oranges’

‘Lips Like Oranges’ was written in the very same room I’m sitting in now, which is the back room of my house where I can see the sky and the trees. It was written sitting on the floor and originally – believe it or not – it was a song about an unlikely romance between a footballer and the girl who brings oranges at half-time [she laughs]. I was just having a bit of a muck around with an unusual story and also thinking about how much football means to so many people in Melbourne and Australia and how my interest in football has always been about the people in the crowd – when I go to a football match, that’s what fascinates me.

So that was the original idea, but then I started thinking more about this idea of quenching thirst, and these long-held thirsts that we carry around and the satisfaction of a simple orange. I once read a story about a boy who was given one present for Christmas and he’d had no fruit for about a year – it was set in war-torn Europe – and he was given a single orange and it was the most refreshing thing he’d ever tasted. I’d always taken oranges for granted.

Then, somehow, it morphed into another song, which is the song as it is now. It was inspired by a trip I made to Mexico in 2001. I was feeling a bit lost and I was travelling with friends and I was on a bit of a pilgrimage of sorts, I guess, except there was no peyote involved. I went off on my own for a week, which is quite unheard of in this area of Mexico I was in – for a woman to do – but I had to do it. I went and visited all sorts of religious icons, like the Virgin of Guadalupe. I also had this feeling that my life wouldn’t be complete until I’d visited the Corona factory and seen it for myself. So I took a bus towards a place near the border of Mexico and America. I didn’t realise at the time that it was considered one of the most dangerous cities in the world, and that women in their hundreds had gone missing from there in the last few years – usually women who work in the factories, who’d been making their way home. So I went on this bus trip and I passed the Corona factory, and I started thinking about a love affair that could’ve occurred between José and Josephine, two characters who may have been working in this factory. It became a story about a long-held love and this notion of protection. Often these women, who in real life would be murdered on their way home from the factory late at night, were women who had no protection from the male workers at the factory. All of these crimes have gone unsolved – it’s absolutely horrific. So I started thinking about this woman who always had this guy, José, looking out for her, keeping an eye on her, and then after fifteen years of working in the beer bottling factory together she finally got it.

Often my characters have pieces of my neighbours [in them]. There’s a guy who wanders around my neighbourhood who’s slightly simple, who asks very direct questions and is very honest. There is a part of him in José. I like stories where the good guys with patience win.

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‘The Black Birds’ by Bluebottle Kiss

“When I think of barren and desolate,” says Jamie Hutchings, “I think of here. I’ve driven around Australia so much and seen... so much nothing. There’s so much emptiness.”

Hutchings is the enthusiastically individual songwriter behind Bluebottle Kiss, whose latest release, Doubt Seeds, is ambitious to say the least. A double CD structured as a type of musical autobiography, it includes nods to inspirations like Sonic Youth, Tom Waits and Neil Young. It’s a rich and literary album, with songs based upon the stories of DH Lawrence, the diaries of Thurston Moore and Australian folklore.

“Lyrically, I think that I was interested in those times where the physical world mirrors the inner world,” he explains of the band’s dreamlike narratives. “You may feel like you can’t explain yourself or feel bamboozled by all these different elements in your life and at the same time, just when you’re trying to make some sense of it all, you’ll seem to be in a street that’s really, really busy and it heightens the whole confusion.”

‘The Black Birds’, located late on the album’s second disc, is a eulogy to one of Hutchings’ friends. Unusually sweet sounding, it’s a mixture of imagery (dead birds on the beach) and stunned hope (“I thought I saw you in the street and by some strange chance we’d meet and begin again...”) which turns overcast upon the last breath of vocals. A stark and abrasive guitar solo rises from the drumbeat thereafter, only to be cut suddenly, jarringly short after exactly two minutes.

“Good stories generally come out of trial,” he says with reference to the song. “Good times you don’t need to document. You should be busy absorbing and enjoying them...”

Jamie Hutchings on
‘The Black Birds’

It’s probably one of the most personal songs on the record. It’s quite an old song. We actually attempted to do it on another record [2003’s Come Across], but it just didn’t work. The genesis of this song was a dream I had where a friend of mine was leaning against his car and one of our old songs was playing out of his car stereo and he was saying that he was going on a trip, that he was going away. I woke up and realised that he was dead. He died about five months or so before I had that dream. I guess it was my mind trying to make sense of it. I think your mind does that, it often dreams about things afterwards, but it puts them in a different context or tries to explain it to you or tries to fix it up somehow in its own subconscious way.

The song is about this friend of mine, who I used to live with. A few of us went camping and we were out surfing. He used to suffer from epilepsy, and he paddled out and tugged my leg rope and said, you know, “G’day,” and that was the last time I saw him. I went out to go for a surf later on – it was a fairly desolate beach – and there was a helicopter at the beach and they’d found him. He’d drowned and they found him on the beach, dead.

I never had before and never have since really experienced death in such close proximity and with someone I was so close to. The strange thing was that the next day we were still camping there and my brother built quite a heavy monument and we carried it down to the beach – we wanted to leave some sort of memorial where he had died – and when we got down there, there were all of these birds that were dead all over the beach. They were mutton birds, actually. There was a whole bunch of them, and there was one that was still struggling. It was still kind of half alive and we felt compelled to try to keep it alive. It just wouldn’t... It seemed like it was really stubborn, it just wanted to die.

When I think of that happening, I always think of those dead birds strewn all over the beach. Again, it seemed like something from the outside world mirroring something that had happened to all of us. It’s about somebody leaving and different images or different things left behind, whether it be a dream or something that you see which reminds you of what happened.

Sometimes it’s hard if you’ve got a song that’s really personal, especially if it involves somebody else or somebody else’s family. You don’t want anything to be undignified or exploitative in any way, so you can worry about whether you should release these kind of songs. I feel fine about it now. People who [are close to the events] have already heard it.

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‘Rain’ by Jen Cloher And The Endless Sea

Jen Cloher’s voice sways between husky and sweet. Dead Wood Falls, her debut album with backing band The Endless Sea, plays like a “how to” guide in dark, country-tinged pop, featuring stomping rock and roll rubbing shoulders with love songs and sensual lyrics. “Spring was my honey, for her I oozed,” Cloher sings on ‘Spring’, “as she sat back and swallowed each spoonful of you.”

With a background in acting, Cloher explains the process of sketching her songs’ characters in terms of the theatre. “A lot of the process is research. Finding out about what their life was like, the times that they lived in, what their relationships might have been like... You have to do so much work behind the scenes to bring a character that’s living, breathing, eating, walking, loving and hurting to the stage.”

The stories she tells on Dead Wood Falls are vivid and emotional, based upon the work of authors such as Raymond Carver and Sarah Waters. “Literature has played a big part in that album and I think it always will,” Cloher says. “It’s also because I don’t see a division. Watching Gareth Liddiard [of The Drones] on stage and watching Geoffrey Rush on stage playing a madman; seeing great paintings and reading a great work... it’s all the same. Artists are good at many things.”

Jen Cloher on
‘Rain’

I moved from Sydney to Melbourne just a little over four years ago with the intention of writing an album. I had some material that I was working on but I was still finding something that the album could work around, and that was narrative. If I’m saying something meaningful or telling a story that means something to me, that’s my way of connecting with an audience. A lot of the time I will write songs where I am the character that I’m telling the story about and often I write about characters as opposed to myself. With ‘Rain’, when I moved to Melbourne a friend of mine gave me a collection of Raymond Carver’s short stories and I became a fan instantly. I think that he’s got a lot of fans in musicians because of the way he writes: Short, succinct, the imagery’s simple but haunting. I think good songs are really similar to the way he writes.

I love the story behind Raymond Carver and also I really connect with him as a person. I found him really open and quite feminine, quite in touch the more emotional side of himself. I went over to New Zealand for a week and had been staying at my parents’ house and I went downstairs and wrote ‘Rain’. I’d been working on it and little bits had been here and there... it was coming together, but I nailed it that night. It was one of those songs where I knew something special was going on. I think every songwriter has their favourite songs – they’re not always the ones that the public like, but yeah, I just went, “This is something special.”

The narrative of the song corresponds with one of his short stories about a man who loses his wife and family [after a divorce] and moves to a country town and tries to stop drinking. He puts aside his old ways and gets to work in the fields, just doing work and going back to his hotel room and being alone and asking the big questions; essentially trying to change, trying to work out what’s happened. I think maybe in the story he did meet a woman, but I might have made that up... He’s an alcoholic and he meets another alcoholic woman and for some reason they couldn’t be together. Like, he’s totally in love with her, but she’s not into him or something, like in recovery. It’s a double-edged sword where he realises that he can love again and [there’s the possibility of] a new life for him, but that it’s not going to be with this woman.

It’s got nothing to do with anything that was going on in my life at the time, aside from the fact that I really identified with that sense of going to a new town, of being very alone, of starting again, of making the choice to be someone new. It’s a classic song of redemption. I think my favourite lines in it are “I’m a faulted man, I’ve lied and I’ve stolen/ Felt the heaviness of guilt and the loneliness of withholding.” And I love the one about “Joy in a woman is as good as her touch.” It’s about coming to life again. He’s been dead, you know, asleep, and meeting this amazing woman has brought love back into his veins. I love that line because it’s so true. Joy is one of the greatest things in a person.

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‘Shark-Fin Blues’ by The Drones

“Standing on the deck watching my shadow stretch/ The sun pours my shadow upon the deck/ The water’s licking ‘round my ankles now/ There ain’t no sunshine way, way down... Lord, if I cry another tear, I’ll be turned to dust/ The sharks wont get me but they don’t feel loss/ Keep one eye on the horizon man, you’d best not blink/ They’re coming fin by fin until the whole boat sinks...

Fin by fin, by fin, by fin...”

These words, the crux of modern classic ‘Shark-Fin Blues’, should need no introduction to our readership. Since relocating from Perth, The Drones have become one of Melbourne’s most loved acts, releasing their second album Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By to rave reviews and invariably sold out shows.

A country-punk symphony of fingernails drawn along steel strings, Wait Long... surpasses the limits of “uncomfortable”. It is abrasive and morbidly addictive, cataloguing the humanly possible depths of loss. ‘Locust’ recalls those country towns the nation would rather forget, amongst other tragedies: “Ether was the town where I was born/ They pulled iron from the ground/ And knife wounds from the port/ They built a prison and let it temper in the sun/ It rose up off a plateau like the last tooth in a gum... They made the blacks live outside of town/ The weekend come they’d tear the whole place down/ Chinese came without weekends at all/ And the whites complained the pay was better/ Shooting them in the war...”

Songwriter Gareth Liddiard is one of the country’s most talented and evocative lyricists, claiming the pessimistic French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline as his earliest inspiration. “I think I take a fiendish pleasure in doing things like this,” he says about his songs. “You know, creating something that’s such a fucking drag. It’s funny in a sense – there’s a certain humour about it.”

Gareth Liddiard on
‘Shark-Fin Blues’

Where do I start? I remember how it started. I did an old trick – a lot of people do this, I don’t know if they’d mind me telling you their names, but... – you can write a song over another song. There’re no rules for writing a song. There are only so many different types of form as far as lyrics go. You know, rhythms and meter and rhyming patterns and shit like that, right? So what you do, if you’re feeling a bit flat, is you can chuck someone else’s song on – a song you like – and just write your own words over the top. Later on, when you come up with a good chord progression, you put yours over that and it becomes something totally different. Say if they had four chords in a pattern, you might have three or five. [With] ‘Shark-Fin Blues’, I was just fucking around with it at the start on a Karen Dalton song, which is probably not even her song – this fucking old traditional banjo song called ‘Same Old Man’. I wrote it over the top of that. It’s just a one chord song, a really bizarre, psychedelic kind of hillbilly country song made in about 1970. And that’s how it started. I was just bored that day.

I can remember doing it over the Karen Dalton thing to get started, and then the first draft was shit and by the time I’d finished it was completely different. It wasn’t a very good time in my life. My mum had just died, so I wasn’t feeling fantastic and then... I just sort of wrote that. As far as the narrative goes, you just let it write itself. You don’t get in the way of it.

I’d always wanted to write a sea shanty. I guess that’s a silly thing to want to do. I can’t remember if the intention was to make it a silly sea shanty, or what it wound up as. But I guess that was the thing – to give it that flavour. I don’t know why, thinking about it now. It’s kind of blurry. Fuck knows. What’s the first line? [he sings the first few bars over the phone]... I did steal a line from the Karen Dalton song, maybe that was it. You know the line in ‘Shark-Fin Blues’, “floating away on a barrel of pain”? That’s from this traditional song that she sings. I think I took that and everything wound up getting built around that. But on the song she does, she’s sort of singing about it in the context of being in New York in the winter – which is completely different – and wanting to be back in the country; a metaphor for the country farm girl, or something. That’s probably what started the whole sea thing.

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