Resisting the lure of comfort
Auckland songwriter James ‘‘Lawrence Arabia’’ Milne’s new album Absolute Truth is his best yet. He talks to Grant Smithies about love, ambition and unreliable narrators.
Baked beans, poached egg, coffee, toast. A shower and a shave. It’s the start of any typical day for Lawrence Arabia, the alter-ego of Auckland musician, James Milne.
But then, in the video clip for his new song A Lake, things get weird. There’s much lathering on of white makeup, a spot of meditating in his jocks behind carefully pulled suburban curtains.
He then slips into a long black robe and heads off to meet two similarly dressed men for some ritualistic jiggery-pokery in the forest at Riverhead.
These born-again druids sweep the forest floor with broomsticks, dance under a black sheet. Between tall trees they worship a clutch of gleaming white balls.
And then they wipe off their makeup, chuck their robes into a couple of knackered old Japanese cars and drive back towards town after a hearty ‘‘See ya, mate!’’
Directed by Milne’s ‘‘partner in life and art’’, Anns Taylor, the clip is a marvellous evocation of superficially ordinary people doing wondrous things.
It’s a collision of the esoteric and the everyday, the magical and the mundane, much like Milne’s fourth Lawrence Arabia album, Absolute Truth.
As with previous LPs, his latest offering is thoughtful, drily funny, meticulously performed and arranged. These are the songs of a careful observer taking great pains to avoid cliche´. Familiar feelings are examined from fresh angles, so the lyrics feel surprising and emotionally true.
It is, in other words, bloody good – perhaps his best to date. Yet he made it when he was knackered: a new dad, stuck in that strange territory between bliss and extreme sleep deprivation.
‘‘I started writing it about three years ago, during the first six months of my daughter’s life. It was a fairly surreal sort of exhausted dream state, during a glorious summer where every day seemed to be golden and 28 degrees.
‘‘I had these very limited windows of time when I’d sneak away into our bedroom and record some backing vocals or demo a bassline on to Garage Band.’’
Over the following three years, these skeletal songs were fleshed out into bold and buoyant little art-pop gems that recall some of the more sonically impressive records of the 1960s.
Listen to the elegant constructions of bass, piano, electric guitar and strings on Brain Gym or Mask Of Maturity and you imagine intense young musicians convening in a hallowed space such as London’s Abbey Road studios. You picture dark wood panelling, a billiard table in the lunch room, vintage valve amps humming quietly in the corner.
Calling the shots, you picture a cerebral pipe-smoking producer with a classical background and a wide open mind — a New Zealand version of the late George Martin, perhaps.
The reality was more prosaic. The album was recorded under a factory betwixt a steel fabricator’s and a brothel in Wellington’s Hutt Valley with Mike Fabulous (Black Seeds/Lord Echo) at the helm.
He may well have been smoking something, but it probably wasn’t a pipe.
‘‘Mike Fab was out in Gracefield, in this desolate heavy-industry part of the Hutt, living and working in an office underneath a plastic moulding business.
‘‘It was almost as if he was paying a penance for previous bad
deeds, punishing himself by living in his own personal monastery. He lived out there for two years, and that’s where Absolute Truth was recorded, but Mike has since made his escape from Gracefield.’’
And Milne has made an escape from superfluous smart-arsery. His 2006 self-titled debut album, and another released the same year by his band the Reduction Agents, were fascinating genre exercises.
They bristled with cunning studio stunts and witty one-liners, but existed in a world of high irony, the sound a little too nudgenudge clever to make a deep emotional connection.
It was the sound of a young musician channelling his inner Syd Barrett, weirding out in his backyard shed, learning his craft. A similar sonic restlessness also informed 2010’s Chant Darling, which won the inaugural Taite Music Prize.
But with each subsequent album, Milne has seemed less afraid to be direct, open, vulnerable. As with 2012’s sparser, darker The Sparrow, the songs on
Absolute Truth are still laced with nuance, intrigue and ambiguity, but also carry a feeling of lived experience.
‘‘Over time my records have become less abstract and more personal, that’s true. They’ve gone from being songs about songs to becoming more honest, I think. When I look at the lyrics now, it’s more like a meta-memoir.’’
And like any memoir, there are embellishments, half-truths, flights of fancy and pretty lies. Milne’s own life is merely a starting point for fertile imaginings, and he’s amazed whenever people assume most songwriters simply ransack their diaries for material.
‘‘That’s one reason the record’s called Absolute Truth, because people so often assume the things a songwriter writes are the gospel truth about their lives. The title is mocking that idea, but ironically, a lot of the content on this record really did happen to me this time around.’’
One such song is that druidfriendly lead single, A Lake. ‘‘It only took seven years, and then we were truly in love’’ sings Milne in an airy falsetto over stomping piano and smack-smack Motown snares, and you think, yes, this is what love is really like: a gradual deepening of trust and understanding, rather than some lightning bolt/Cupid’s arrow sort of deal.
‘‘That song is a very literal representation of my life, and as close to confessional songwriting as I get. Really, this is a love album, but a lot of the aspects of love it discusses revolve around arguments.
‘‘For example, I Waste My Time is about me being lazy, and my girlfriend giving me shit about it when she gets home from work and the house is a mess. She hates that song!’’
Milne’s aim was to write some unpretentious songs that contained ‘‘an unvarnished representation of love’’, rather than the usual ‘‘fairytale depiction’’. And he wanted things a little lighter this time around.
Written during a cold autumn in London while he was pining for home, previous album The
Sparrow was darker, sparser, more melancholy and nostalgic.
On that record, we were offered a Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man, biking around his hometown of Christchurch, a low-rent Serge Gainsbourg stifled by this ‘‘small town of perfect isolation’’, desperate to get the hell out of Dodge.
A few songs later, there he was again — older, possibly wider, certainly chastened — slinking back into New Zealand again after his overseas ambitions had crashed and burned.
In the real world, Milne has achieved a great deal over the past decade or so: a brace of muchloved solo albums, international tours with Neil Finn and Canadian singer/songwriter Feist, stints playing as a member of The Brunettes, The Ruby Suns and Texan band Okkervil River, a gig in the Royal Albert freakin’ Hall.
But in song, he took a lot of inspiration from small-town ennui and dashed ambitions.
‘‘Back then, it always felt easier to deal with an idealised version of the past than the present, I guess. On older songs like Travelling
Shoes, I was thinking of a time before adulthood when you have a sense of infinite possibility.
‘‘You didn’t know what might happen to you and it was all terribly exciting. But I feel less nostalgic now after having a child. My life is exciting now in a very different sort of way.’’
Early reviews of Absolute Truth have been very positive, if inaccurate. An old bio on Milne’s website mentioned a penchant for ‘‘70s West Coast Americana’’, and several critics here and overseas have mysteriously identified precisely that sound.
‘‘It’s hilarious how people endlessly requote these things without actually listening. I reckon you could seed any rumour you liked and all of the world’s laziest reviewers would soon be saying the exact same thing.
‘‘One song they mention as an example of 70s Americana sounds more like Abba to me.’’
I hear The Beatles in there, with Milne’s voice recalling a less nasal John Lennon. Also, a bunch of sly Motown and Latin touches. ‘‘Yeah, songs like Sweet
Dissatisfaction have that slightly ropy garage-soul sound you associate with the Daptone label, and other songs might sound derivative of a certain time period because I grew up on a lot of 60s and 70s music.
‘‘But I couldn’t identify any particular styles I ever try to consciously ape. I’ve been doing this so long now, I’ve synthesised my influences into a collection of sounds that I idealise and want to redeploy in various ways. Those sounds are now part of my DNA.’’
One of many standout tracks is O Heathcote, in which our hero imagines what might have happened if he’d settled into a very different sort of middle age in his Canterbury birthplace.
‘‘It’s about the temptation of comfort, and people abandoning their idealism and turning away from a more bohemian life they once had. I’m thinking of myself and my friends, all starting to desire a more bourgeois lifestyle as we grow older.
‘‘It is written out of a desire to fight that particular instinct in myself.
‘‘That shallow temptation is behind a lot of the problems in the world, including the housing crisis, with all these people in their 30s
and 40s obsessing about buying a house because they’re fearful of being left off the property ladder.’’ What Became of That Angry
Young Man looks at similar themes from another angle, with Milne entertaining the possibility that some of his earlier boho behaviour wasn’t sustainable.
‘‘That song is full of images from my life, but not strictly autobiographical.
‘‘It’s more an imaginary alternate future where I didn’t stop being bohemian and instead became an alcoholic.’’
In the early days, Milne was one of the wonky-pop cool kids, part of an indie pop renaissance spearheaded by Auckland’s ‘Lil Chief label.
Now, the thoughtful lyricism and adventurous arrangements of his songs puts him closer, perhaps, to esteemed songwriters such as SJD, Don McGlashan or Neil Finn.
‘‘I definitely admire those people, and I do feel like I’m getting into that milieu now. It’s amazing to me how the feeling has changed, from being a young upand-comer who plays Camp A Low Hum to a Radio New Zealand staple who plays arts festivals. I’m glad of it, because if those people can be making a living from music into their 50s and beyond, maybe I can too, so long as I can maintain a certain quality control.’’
In the meantime, is he happy with where his career is at right now?
‘‘To a point, yes, but I’m still globally ambitious, which is something that’s hard to admit if you’re a New Zealander. We’re known as such a self-deprecating people. Someone says, ‘Hey, I like your shirt’ and your response is always, ‘Oh, this old thing? It was five bucks in an op shop.’
‘‘We generally qualify a compliment with a put down so no one thinks we’re arrogant.
‘‘But I want to fight that habit. I think what I’m doing is valid and special and interesting, and it deserves to find a place in the wider world.’’
Lawrence Arabia concludes his Absolute Truth album release tour with a show in Auckland’s Crystal Palace Theatre this coming Friday, July 29.
‘I feel less nostalgic now after having a child. My life is exciting now in a very different sort of way.’ James Milne