The bedroom tapes
The Auckland housing crisis didn’t prevent Amelia Murray – stagename Fazerdaze – from delivering her superb homemade recordings, reports Grant Smithies.
We have a new album to discuss, but this being New Zealand in 2017, mention must first be made of the current national obsession: real estate.
Auckland musician Amelia Murray and I compare stories of shabby places we’ve lived over the years.
It’s a competition I can easily win, so I play my biggest trump card first.
Permanently penniless and frequently drunk, I once set up my single bed in a converted coal bunker on the side of an Edwardian tenement in Dublin. There was no window, just a coal hatch to let in a few weak rays when you slid it open.
Murray, who records as Fazerdaze, can relate. She’s been living in crap flats galore over the past few years, including a windowless loft inside a hot ceiling cavity and a teensy basement box-room.
‘‘They were sooo appalling, but that was all I could afford,’’ she tells me by phone from a far nicer flat in Morningside, the Auckland suburb after which she’s named her new album.
‘‘Oh, my God! One room was so small, I could barely fit a single bed. Even so, I recorded so much of the new record in that tiny room. Another place had no windows – just a skylight. There was no view outside, and I was pretty sad in that room. It was dark, and always too hot.’’
Originally from Wellington, Murray was dismayed to become just another sad statistic in the Auckland housing crisis. Herself, her friends and assorted family members have been endlessly traipsing around from flat to flat, she tells me, moving into dumps because that’s all they could afford, or getting chucked out of decent houses because the owner wanted to sell them for the capital gain.
‘‘It’s hard to be creative in such an expensive city. It really wears you down. You’ve got to work so much just to pay rent, and if you record in your bedroom like I do, it’s hard to find a room big enough to set up your instruments. Everywhere’s either really depressing or really expensive, and it’s just so difficult to find a place to call home. I made bits of these new songs in each new flat or at friends’ houses, and it was just so stressful. It was a real struggle to get into a songwriting mode. But I did it.’’
She did, and her new debut album is a pearler, despite the trying circumstances under which it was made. Even when the lyrics are about loneliness or loss, many of the songs sound buoyant, dreamy, oddly serene.
As with her earlier self-titled EP from 2014, Morningside collects a fistful of near-perfect pop songs, all overflowing with interesting textures, golden melodies and swoonsome vocal harmonies.
Amelia Murray wrote them, recorded them, played almost all the instruments, aside from some drums and synth from her mates Andrea Holmes and Merk, and the occasional bassline from her boyfriend, former Goodshirt keyboardist Gareth Thomas.
Central to the sound are Murray’s deft and memorable electric guitar riffs, which arrive richly lathered in feedback and dunked in a warm bath of distortion.
Some songs recall a one-woman Jesus And Mary Chain, with compelling earworm chord progressions bolted to simple drum machine rhythms, her double-tracked vocals delivered though a cave load of reverb.
‘‘It’s hard to know how I arrived at this sound. I wasn’t listening to a lot of other music when I made it. I just record myself playing guitar then sing over that with headphones on and just let whatever emotions I have flow out. Then I’ll go back and develop the good bits further.’’
The trick is to just switch off her inner critic and sing whatever comes into her head.
‘‘I do my best not to think too much in the initial stages and just see what’s sitting there in some corner of my mind. A lot of my melodies come out that way, and the lyrics, too, and I edit from there. It’s all very… feely, rather than technical, I think. It’s cathartic for me to switch my mind off and sing.’’
Why cathartic? Because Murray is ‘‘hugely introverted’’, she says. Performing doesn’t come easily to her, though she’s done her share, with short tours to the United States, Britain and Canada and a prime slot opening the main stage in front of 12,000 people at this year’s Laneway Festival in Auckland.
She’s gradually getting more comfortable on stage, opening international gigs for Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Explosions in the Sky and Frankie Cosmos, among others.
But recording works better when she’s by herself, because Murray gets painfully self-conscious if others are watching when she plays.
‘‘Accessing my subconscious is far easier when I’m alone. I can sing and it will just flow out without me having to care what anyone else might think. But I’m slowly getting better at collaborations, which opens up new possibilities. There are a few demos on my computer where I think SJD would be awesome on this track, or I can imagine Larz Randa rapping on this. I want to do more of that in future.’’
For now, though, she has a superb new record out via Flying Nun, and more importantly, a stable home at last.
‘‘Once I found my place in Morningside, I finally felt in control again and I could finish everything.