Ghost Wave's Matt Paul gives us a track-by-track insight into the band's new album, Radio Norfolk.
Photo: Supplied
This is part of a regular series which sees local artists break down the stories behind their music. For more, click here.
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Honeypunch
Radio Norfolk is kind of a love record, so this opens up that theme a bit. There’s a lot of layers of percussion, some thumb piano, horns, and guitars. I also wanted to tip the scale towards some hip hop and dubby type sounds. Stylistically, the vocal was pretty inspired by Rihanna, if I’m honest about it (minus the lyrical under/overtones).
Whosdointhetalkin
This song’s for the Ghost Wave bros who’ve played with us over the years. I guess in a humble sense, when we hang we’re kind of shocked that we ever managed to make music at all, let alone go and play overseas. We had some good times, so this song’s just like “here’s to the spirit of the band and doing music”. It’s like a biography of the band in a lot of ways.
Blues Signal ‘79
This song used to be called Jazz Style and it sounded really different. But we just thought it sucked when we recorded it so we wrote this super quick. It was weird how it came together: I was trying to mix the sounds of samples and electronics with the vibe of a more traditional psychedelic band like Can or The Electric Prunes. There’s a bunch of Nintendo samples in there too.
Don’t Ask Why
Had to keep the jangle alive a little longer. This song’s got our boy Mike playing bass, and he really took it away with this one; he wrote the bassline super quick and that was it. Basically, the vibe was to do something really pretty sounding and sweet. After Ages I wanted to move away from the stand off-ish vibe of the lyrics and just do something that was real.
All U Do Is Kill
Rock jams feat. violins. I like doing the vocals to this one live since we have this didgeridoo sound in the background that really sets it off. It’s buried deep in the mix, but you can hear me going “jeah” – Jay Z style – on every bar. Did that for a laugh.
Julia Knows
This song’s for my girl Jules.
Slow Cone Descent
This one’s our little advance on krautrock styling. It was one of the first songs we wrote after Ages and we were heading towards a different sound, so it’s got traces of that time in it.
Spaceman
This song only features on the digital version of the LP because it was too long to fit on the vinyl – it’s about eight minutes long. Basically we’re just getting our roll on. It’s a good one to play live, especially when we had a full band with us. The vocals were super tricky to do, but really I think this is kind of our version of a teenage pop track or something from the ‘80s. It’s really just about weirding out and doing your thing.
If It Was Up To Me
You know I’d break it down, so we did.
Playin’ Lines
This was originally called Revolution but I didn’t want to have songs called Spaceman and Revolution on the record especially with Peter Kember (Spaceman 3’s Sonic Boom) on mastering duties (who totally pulled this LP out the water). This song is like, man I love music, it keeps me up and keeps me on the right track, but sometimes it’s easy to get caught up, and get things twisted. Give me some lines to play, I like to play lines every day. It’s about guitar notes, keyboard notes, and also a skateboard reference. I’m super proud of that breakdown and build up in the middle there, too. We had so much fun making this song.
Radio Norfolk is available now through Flying Nun Records.