A NEW LEASE ON LIVELINESS

ALEX LAHEY UNPACKS THE EXCITING NEW WAYS SHE MADE HER THIRD ALBUM, THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS YES, LEADING TO SOME OF HER BEST MATERIAL YET.

There’s no other artist quite like Alex Lahey. At once bubbly and boisterous, she rounds out her palette of prickly indie-pop flavours with a uniquely punchy, tinnie-swinging larrikin spirit. Rarely does the Naarm/Melbourne native take herself too seriously, with songs often (gently) self-deprecating and almost always steered by her staunch keenness to have fun with her music. Nowhere clearer is this than on her crash-hot third album, The Answer Is Always

Yes, where she riffs on the trials and tribulations of being a queer stoner in your mid-twenties, stumbling up the staircase that modern life in Australia.

But while it is a quintessential Alex Lahey album,

The Answer Is Always Yes feels distinctly cultured: it’s more daring and explorative in its sound, mixing fleshed out by layers of contrast and more colourful production. This came thanks in no short part to a new perspective on songwriting – where she used to thrive in solitude, only leaning on producers to execute her visions, The Answer Is Always Yes saw her open up creatively with new minds.

Among them were American heavyweights like Jackknife Lee (perhaps best known for his work with the likes of R.E.M. and U2), Brad Hale (of Now, Now), Jess Abbott (formerly of Now, Now) and Jenny Owen Youngs, as well as local legend Chris Collins. But even when she linked up with longtime collaborators like Oscar Dawson (of Holy Holy) and John Castle (with who she worked in her old band, Animaux), Lahey took a new approach to creating – one looser and more curious, never shying away from answering the most daunting question any songwriter can ask: “What if?”

As she gears up to embark on a yearlong world tour in support of it, Lahey sat down with Australian Guitar to peer deep into the kaleidoscope that is The Answer Is Always Yes.

As the woman that made it, do you see this record being a reflection of your growth as an artist?

Absolutely, yeah. I really consciously wanted to have a different process going into it, partly because I wanted to make something that sounded different to the first two records – I wanted to get off the beaten path. But mostly I just wanted to be around more people while I was doing it. Maybe that was a response to having spent quite a bit of time in isolation, and kind of wanting to push back against that. Because you know, the first few records I made, I made them very staunchly alone.

The whole reason this project exists is because I wanted to make music by myself – I was in very collaborative projects growing up, and that was really fun when I was in my first few bands, but this project was my way of response to that and being like, “I want to see what happens if I just do it all by myself.” And so I thought that was kind of, like, the ‘premise’ of this whole thing. But then, you know, two records and six or so years into it, I’m like, “Actually, I wonder what it’s like to push those boundaries in the other direction.”

I wanted to see what the other side was like again – and I’m really glad I did. I felt like I knew what another Alex Lahey record, made in the same way as the first two, would sound like, and I just wasn’t really interested in that.

Did you find that linking up with those collaborators reinvigorated your creative spirit?

Yeah, the only challenge is that it’s hard to get any work done – you just end up gas-bagging for hours. But yeah, it’s totally reinvigorating. And it’s really exciting, with those people I’d known for so long – when you do have those longstanding relationships both in and outside of music – to see how each other has grown.

When Oscar and I first started working together, for example, we were in this tiny, tiny room in Abbotsford that he was renting with a friend of his, and we recorded everything in that room. It was tracks like ‘You Don’t Think You Like People Like Me’, which sounds great, but it’s funny now because when we started working on this record, so much had changed.

He’s built a studio in the back of his home, down in the Peninsula, and I remember just taking a moment with him and going, “Dude, you did it. You did the thing, isn’t that crazy? And now we’re making music that’s reaching so many more people than it did when we first started working together.” It was so beautiful.

What did it mean for you to relax control? Did you find it daunting to let other people into that world, or was it kind of freeing?

I think it’s always important that the artist is steering things, even when I’m working as a collaborator on another artist’s record. And as the collaborator, you have to learn how to let that happen – unless you’re in a scenario where the artist is trying to find something particular and they’re looking for that help, then you can sort of get a bit more involved. But I think when you’re a bit more established, you want to feel like you have that agency and make sure your voice is always coming through.

So in terms of who I collaborate with, I’m really selective. I make sure that I’m always working with people I either know or have a good feeling about – people I can trust will let my voice through. I’ll always start by listening to other work they’ve done to see if I’m still able to hear the artist in that context.

Were you surprised at all by what you were coming up with in the sessions?

That was one of the really cool things about Jackknife – I only realised this recently after we started playing it live, but ‘Good Time’ ended up being really close to the original idea, in a surprising way. I had this riff that I’d written on this janky little acoustic that I’d tuned into some variation of open D. And I was like, “Oh yeah, I’ve got this little three-chord riff,” but I had no idea what to do with it. And he was like, “Great, there’s a song!”

To me, it was really awesome to have this little thing that I felt didn’t have any meaning or worth, and for him to sort of see the value in it, and help me turn it into something bigger than it started off as. And it’s pretty much just those three chords through the whole song, but it sounds so angular and innovative. He was able to sort of push me to that limit without taking it too far.