I’M ON A BOAT
Creative bands will find all kinds of clever places to record outside the standard studio. Garages, sheds, bedrooms, fields and forests – musicians and microphones have graced these locations at one point or another with unique results. But boats? Or it was until melodic folk-pop duo Busby Marou decided to take their unrecorded third album,
out to sea. “The Shell House is a place on Great Keppel Island [Queensland] and it’s one of the most amazing places in the world,” Jeremy Marou recalls fondly, speaking about working with his old friend Thomas Busby. “We were in our space, fishing during the daytime and recording at night on the water. That’s an extremely tough way to record, but we seemed to make it work. We actually took a little studio, set it up on the boat and recorded there. It doesn’t get much better than that!”
Look, odds are, isn’t the first ‘boat album’, but it’s a cool story nonetheless – one that was born from a desire to get off the road and just settle down for a while. Their second album,
culminated in a recording trip to North America just so they could say they worked in a Nashville studio. And while the journey was all good fun, the pair weren’t tempted to run across the world again. After giving themselves the chance to slow down and take stock of everything on familiar soil, they found the confidence to move forward creatively.
“We co-wrote with other people this time, and we were kind of scared, y’know, because it’s a big thing to throw your songwriting out there,” he explains, although the writers they managed to wrangle put their nerves at ease. “One of my favourites was David Ryan Harris, John Mayer’s guitarist – he was sort of like my idol growing up. And Jon Hume, the lead singer from Evermore, he co-wrote a couple of songs with us too! We didn’t keep ourselves in a box, but we did set out saying that we didn’t want it to be a love song album.” Hume wound up becoming an integral part of
Recording on a boat is cool and all, but it’s also pretty impractical. Some parts required a studio, so the pair set off to The Stables, a setup owned by Hume on the outskirts of Melbourne, where things remained just as relaxed as they were at sea. Where songs were once penned on the fly and recorded as soon as they sounded good, was the product of a purposely prolonged writing process and longer, stress-free stints in the studio.
“We’ve matured as musos, and we got the live [style] album out of our system,” he explains, referring to the sessions. “Even things like, on the first and second albums, I would never use a plugin and record an electric song, or even touch samples and loops. But now, it’s like... Let’s be realistic, you can’t tell the difference [ So we weren’t always amping – sometimes we would just go straight into ProTools and pull down the plugins.” Not only did Hume help write and record
he even let the guys use a few of his six-strings, including a big old Falcon that Marou seemed particularly chuffed with. Takamine guitars handled the rest of the work, save for a few moments that required that little extra something. A little extra something that an old friend of theirs just happened to have on hand.
“Pete Murray has this really nice collection of old acoustics, and he let us use his guitars to record,” Marou says. Their debut, as it turns out, was recorded in Murray’s Byron Bay studio. “There was a really nice, old, piece of shit Martin that we never play live because you’ve got to tune it for every bar, but it’s one of those guitars that just sounds perfect when it’s recorded. There’s some really nice old Gibsons in there, too – I couldn’t tell you the year off the top of my head, but they’re vintage!”
Marou’s attitude to making music is so laid back, it’s almost perplexing. How can someone create such beautiful, textured sounds that leap out of the speakers, without knowing which guitars they used? That, however, is part of Busby Marou’s charm. While their music has the alluring – and often calming – tone of tunes improvised around a campfire at dusk, everything is meticulously crafted around their guitars then rehearsed to the letter, until they can pull it off onstage.
“A lot of people record the guitars, sing and then play with the sounds after recording,” says Marou, “but we do it the other way around. We make sure we find the perfect guitar sound first, acoustically, and then make sure it works with the vocals. Then we add everything around that, mainly because when we do them live, we’re an acoustic band – we’re two guitars – and even with a big band, we’re guitar driven.”
Amidst a world of change, there’s always some old habits like this that just don’t die. But sometimes it’s best to stick to your guns and return to what you know after pursuing the grand adventure. For Busby Marou, heading back to their homeland and setting up shop on a little island off the coast of Queensland was all they needed to move forward. And by the sounds of things, it worked.