Band finds new ways to harmonise

On the wistful opening track of The Broken Heartbreakers new record, Rachel Bailey asks how long is too long. Given their last album was more than 10 years ago, fans of their well-received previous four long-players might well have been thinking it’s definitely been long enough. Still, they’re likely to be well pleased with the band’s new disc, Imagine If We Could Just Keep Driving, out just last week. It reprises the band’s educated arrangements and thoughtfully choreographed playing, its picture painting from carefully chosen palettes. And there is, essentially, Bailey’s delicately commanding singing, often taking the lead but also wrapping subtle background notes around the songs fronted by her partner in life and music John Howell. It’s a trump card, and it might be that with the new record, it’s never been put to better or more inspired use. While it is Bailey’s instrument, this is a development for which the two of them can share the credit. It’s also not unrelated to that long stride between records. Some of which was down to the Covid-19 pause, when spanners undid all sorts of plans, but life more generally played a part too. The businesses of work and family. So, when it came time to focus back on the album, certain decisions were made, as Howell puts it, “out of necessity”. Not always a bad thing. “It’s just like, when you have limited time, you need to, ‘oh, s . . ., I’ve got three hours. I’ll go into the little home studio and we’ll lay down some stuff’.” Except, they might not both have those three hours at the same time. Enter the Mellotron, the old-school sampling machine, of which Howell is a fan. “There’s a lot of Mellotron on there,” he explains of their new album. “A lot of sampled strings, some of them sounding a bit broken, some brass, sampled brass and so forth that are, again, a bit manipulated and put through various things.” There is also, Bailey. She takes up the story. “You know, any kind of partnership, you quickly realise if you’re going to get everything done, that you actually need to divvy up the tasks. And so that includes being in a band together,” she says. And Howell had realised he could similarly sample Bailey’s voice, through the Mellotron, to get some of the textures he was after within the envelop of availabilities. Bailey wouldn’t have to be there in the room every time he needed a backing vocal. “So, he sampled my voice for three octaves.” Bailey performed all three octaves in both “ahs” and “oohs”, covering all the semitones, so Howell could deploy them as needed — as standalone additions or layered one on top of the other. Like Mr Sandman, Howell says. “One of the songs actually has that kind of idea. And I really love it,” Bailey says. “I found that really exciting, hearing somebody else playing my voice.” It starts with necessity, Howell confirms, before becoming its own thing. But it was never going to dominate, he says. When it needed to be just Rachel singing, that’s what happened. After all, they were both always going to be there making the final production decisions. Otherwise, there was no particular grand plan for the new album, Howell says. Back around Covid-19 they’d released a new lockdown-inspired single, We’re All Looking Up, and made some touring plans but the virus had ultimately derailed that train. There was nothing for it but to go into “album production mode”. “And that’s been the last three or four years, we’ve just been chipping away at that.” The pair’s process is largely unchanged, each writing songs individually, but also writing together, on guitar or piano — or, in Bailey’s case, while out walking. Howell often creates a bed of music on top of which Bailey can embroider a melody. But the balance this time has tipped towards collaboration. “That’s, I think, when the magic really happens, in my view anyway,” Howell says. “I feel like we bring something greater than the sum of its parts when we do a co-write. There’s things that I would never imagine coming up with and vice versa, you know.” The album certainly has signature moments, drawing confidently on the alt-folk templates with which the band is associated. But there’s also a great diversity of styles and treatments going on across the 11 tracks, Brit pop sensibilities from various decades rubbing up against Americana influences. The Broken Heartbreakers curate music that evokes the precious moments from across an eclectic record collection. PETRA PAIGNTONPhoto: Petra Paignton “I think sonically it’s a bit of a departure in the fact that we’ve been historically quite purist about only playing analogue instruments,” Howell says. Those samples and some more adventurous production and manipulation has broken new territory. “So, I think it’s still identifiably a Broken Heartbreakers record, but there’s a bit more going on.” It demands a little bit from the listener, Bailey suggests. “Even if you say, ‘oh, you should check out this band’, then you’re kind of like, ‘OK, which song should I tell them?’. Because they can be quite different.” “It would probably be easier for us, if we were smart, just to have one sound and stay with it, you know what I mean?” Howell adds. “But we’ve kind of always done this,” Bailey says. “Maybe we’re just carving out a unique space.” Among the unique touches is early single, Imagine If We Could Just Keep Driving, which began, as commonly, with Howell laying down an arrangement to carry Bailey’s melodies. It’s a trip, together with the video that travels through a kinetic diary of South Island landscapes. It also has just one sung line, repeated, “Imagine if we could just keep driving”. “We’ve never done that before,” Bailey says. It’s a meditation. “The phrase comes from a conversation we had over 20 years ago, on a drive home from an out-of-town gig. The phrase can be taken literally or metaphorically. Imagine if we could just keep going … imagine if we could just keep playing music … imagine if we could just keep this car on the tracks … imagine if we just didn’t stop … imagine if we just keep driving and the road ends. “There’s also something about not needing a destination,” she adds. “There’s actually a line in another album track, Count Us In, which also rings true for this song: ‘There’s nowhere to get to, it’s just the getting through’.” Imagine If We Could Just Keep Driving, the song, hosts further adventures in sound, lots of Howell’s layered guitar parts and sampled strings. “My favourite sound on this song comes in halfway through — it’s a tuba put through a fuzz box,” he says. “This mangled-up brass reminds me of the sound of the Salvation Army band driving past on a flat bed truck playing Christmas carols. The most achy, sad sound of all time.” There are more lyrics elsewhere, dealing often with the internal lives of the songs’ protagonists, but also moments when the band squares up to the world they’re playing in, notably in Dangerous Age. It’s one on which Howell takes lead vocals, unleashing on the careering wreckage of the modern world. “I absolutely felt that one had to acknowledge what was happening before you could start writing about your individual feelings again,” Howell says. “We had to say something to acknowledge that, before we could do anything else. “The lies are getting bold, you know,” he says, quote a line from the song. “And, you know, late stage capitalism, they’re not even pretending anymore. They’re not even trying to hide the lies anymore. “I had hopes, quite naive in retrospect, that the lockdown and Covid might have made people question the whole structure of capitalism. I felt like people were coming alive to different ways of being, potentially.” But that dawn came and went. “I feel like reality broke a little bit after Covid and we’re all just pretending it hasn’t.” Not that the song is all politics though. The “dangerous age” also references the perilous mid-life period men go through, that some don’t survive. “But it’s ultimately a rejection of it. Like, ‘f . . . you, dangerous age’. We’re not having it. “It’s meant to be triumphant. It’s trying to reject and rise above it.” Howell and Bailey had a little help from their friends to pull off that posture. A couple of years back, at the band’s annual fundraising house party, those assembled were recorded singing the chorus line: “F . . . you, dangerous age”. “Drunkenly. In tune, maybe, maybe not,” Bailey says. “Having them in that song and on the album just means so much. You know, like having 40 voices of our friends on there.” They’re credited on the liner notes as the “James St Community Choir”. The album is in good company in other ways too. Imagine If We Could Just Keep Driving is The Broken Heartbreakers’ first album on a label — Nadia Reid’s Slow Time Records, joining its exclusive coterie of Reid, Anthonie Tonnon and Ebony Lamb. Reid’s partner Angus McBryde supplies basslines for several tracks, recorded before they shifted to London. Drummer Paul McLennan-Kissel, who has been playing with The Broken Heartbreakers since the beginning of 2020, provides the rhythms again, while Craig Monk contributes viola and electric guitar solos. Otherwise, the instrumentation is Howell’s handiwork. The album was mixed at South Link Productions, with engineer Nick Roughan in the driving seat, sharing producer credits with Howell and Bailey. “And Nick Roughan is, I think, a real master of finding space in a stereo field,” Howell says. “He can do wonderful things with drums and stereo fields and just giving everything their place in a way that I could only dream of.” The band will be back driving in September, though stopping periodically to play gigs. There are dates lined along State Highway 1 as far north as Auckland. In Dunedin, they’ve opted for the intimate comfort of Hanover Hall. Their newly expanded sound will travel with them, courtesy of Alex Gilks on synth. “That’s a departure for us as a band, sonically, but it’s sounding great and it definitely gives us a lot more sonic scope, having that additional instrument in the live line-up,” Howell says. But live, they’ll still be delivering harmonies in person. “I mean, Rachel does the harmony, I just sing. That’s my confession. I’m not harmonising. I’m just trying to hold a note, man,” he says modestly. After that it’s up to the audience, but the Broken Heartbreakers are content they’ll be delivering their best work yet. The album, their first on vinyl and carrying its new experiments in sound, might be breaking new ground, but they’re not chasing anything, Howell says. “And that’s very freeing.” “Yeah, it is really nice,” Bailey agrees. “We’re not trying to get anywhere. We really like where we are.” [Missing Credit][object Object] The gigs • Friday, September 4, The Grainstore Gallery, Oamaru • Saturday, September 19, Hanover Hall, Dunedin