Final Note: Dope Lemon
LIKE A HEALTHY DOSE OF (CITRIC) ACID STRAIGHT TO THE FRONTAL LOBE, DOPE LEMON’S NEW ALBUM – THE SUAVE AND SPACEY SMOOTHBIGCAT – TELEPORTS ITS LISTENERS TO A TRANSCENDENTAL NEW DIMENSION. AVERY JACOBS GOES ONE-ON-ONE WITH THE MAN BEHIND IT, ANGUS STONE, TO LEARN HOW THE MELLOW NEW MECHA CAME TO BE.
When he’s not churning out toffee-sweet jams with his sister Julia, Sydney-native folklord Angus Stone has a fondness for quirky, one-of-a-kind solo projects.
First, there was Lady Of The Sunshine, his only release under the moniker (2009’s SmokingGun) defined by its luminescent electric-acoustic juts and crisp, reverb-slicked vocal hooks. Then, in 2012, Stone went by his real name for BrokenBrights: a thumping collection of slick and smoky pseudocountry anthems inspired by the likes of Bob Dylan and The Eagles. And most recently, there was Dope Lemon, with which Stone stepped into the role of a funky, haze-drenched master of the psychedelic.
If there’s one thing that’s remained consistent between all three projects (aside from the fact their sounds certainly haven’t), it’s that they’ve all been one-off experiments, each concept fleshed out with a single album that stretches Stone’s imagination with its style to the edge, and then laid out to pasture to let the next idea flourish independently.
Well, at least as much was true until a few months back. With the drowsy and dazzling SmoothBigCat, Stone is breaking the pattern. Dope Lemon is back – bolder, buzzier and more hallucinogenic than ever – and gearing up to send stoners around the world through one more trip of a lifetime.
“There’s something about this project that’s just really special to me,” Stone declares. “When we released [the first album] HoneyBones, the reaction it gathered totally threw me for six. Y’know, we didn’t really market it too much or tour it too hard, but over the years, the fandom around it just seemed to keep growing. The love from the fans has been overwhelming, and that really made me want to step back into that world; when people come up to me at shows, they talk about HoneyBones and the connections they have with those songs, and that’s a really powerful thing for me. That drives me to want to keep being involved in it.”
Wielding a swagger so hot it could single-handedly
melt the ice caps, SmoothBigCat is almost rebelliously mischievous; Stone is otherwise so laidback and rustic in his artistry that an album like this – dense and dreary and all shades of intense – feels akin to Miley Cyrus’ leap from HannahMontana to “Wrecking Ball”. As he explains to Australian
Guitar, its title – reflective of the life-altering weirdness that lies within the LP’s every twist and turn – came from deep within Stone’s imagination.
“Smooth Big Cat was a fictional character I made up for one of the songs on the record,” he says, “And he became this sort of mythical creature that popped in and out of the record over the duration of making it. He doesn’t have any stakes in all of the nonsense in the world – he just likes to chill out, have a whiskey and listen to some good tunes. And for me, he became this totem that represented something true and real – when I listen to the music on this record, it reminds me of what he stands for.”
Especially impressive is that, in spite of the earnestly massive spate of sounds to explore across the album, Stone took a fully hands-on approach to crafting Big Smooth Cat. The album was recorded on-and-off over three months at Belafonte – the rickety cottage-cumhome studio on Stone’s Byron Bay ranch – with Stone in the front seat for all of its wackiness to unfurl.
“I played all the instruments on the record,” he says. “No one touched anything but me, which is cool in a way because when you listen to the music and you take in the mood that each song has, it’s 100 percent my own brushstroke. It doesn’t get more concentrated than that when it comes to making a record, y’know? I can hear all the techniques that I’ve been developing over the years, and I can hear the years that I’ve put into my craft. And I just really enjoyed that process; it was a lot of late nights, hanging out with the producer, drinking whiskey and really just feeling it out.”
With a monolithic arsenal of toys at his disposal, Stone used a solid handful of guitars to bring Smooth
BigCat to life. He rounds off a few of them – a solidbody Gibson LS5 and a vintage ’68 Telecaster at the top of the ranks – but notes that his secret weapon was a nondescript solidbody beast that doesn’t even have a brand name to boast.
“It’s a little 12-string guitar from an old department store that used to exist back in the ‘60s,” he expounds. “It’s kind of a shitty guitar, but it just had so much character! For me, it’s all about how you draw the sounds out of what’s in your hands. Something can look really shitty and sound really limited, but that’s where you have the chance to show your true colours in the way that you make something work. If just anyone picks it up and strums on it, it’ll sound quite dead; but if you put your heart into it and you focus hard enough to see beyond its limitations, you can make something really cool out of it. A lot of the instruments on this record fall into that category.”
One guitar Stone would never dare part with is that aforementioned ’68 Telecaster – which, as it turns out, allowed Stone to give SmoothBigCat a personal link to his family’s musical history.
“The very first guitar lesson my dad had when he was a kid,” he says, “The teacher he had sold him that guitar. And that was an old guitar for [his teacher] as well, so I can’t imagine where it would’ve come from before that. But dad really liked this guitar when he was a kid, and he held onto it for his whole life. He passed it down to me for my 21st birthday, and I used that on pretty much every song [on LP2] – it’s basically the cornerstone of this record. It’s just this beautiful, really brittle, honey-toned electric sound.”