HIDE AND SEEK

Snowy Mountainsbased duo Montgomery Church team up with an American producer

By Michael Smith

Scouting around for the right producer for their second album, Where the Quiet Can Hide, the Snowy Mountains-based duo Montgomery Church – Cielle Montgomery and James Church fortuitously discovered that their choice was far more accessible than they’d expected. “We recorded the album just as we all went into lockdown last year,” Church begins, “and so we ended up doing all of our parts at home and send them out remotely.” “When we first tried to make contact with Erick, he was still based in Nashville,” Cielle adds. “We were just admirers of his work, so we had intended to go to Nashville and record with him there and a few weeks out we sent an email to him and he replied ‘I’m actually moving out to Australia in a few months’ time and I’d love to work with you.’ He now lives in Victoria and so we got to record it here, though we didn’t expect to do it remotely of course.” Born in smalltown Minnesota, the multiple Grammy nominee Erick Jaskowiak moved to Nashville in 1999, where he produced artists as diverse as Shooter Jennings, Crooked Still and Alison Brown, as well as The Waifs’ 2007 album Sun Dirt Water, Colin Hay’s 2009 album American Sunshine and, as he notes on his website, “In January of 2016 amidst a Nashville ice storm I produced and recorded this gorgeous album with Australian folk band The Mae Trio,” 2017’s Take Care, Take Cover. While the rest of the musicians who came on board the recording are Australian, Jaskowiak hooked the duo up with 12time IBMA Fiddle Player of the Year, blind American bluegrass musician Michael Cleveland. “When we spoke to him about wanting a fiddle player,” Church continues, “he actually gave us a list of people and we spent a fair bit of time going through them seeing who we liked. So it took a while to find Michael but he was easy enough to contact and was keen to do it. So he was the most remote remote! He played exactly what we were after.” Also contributing fiddle and strings to one song – ‘The Cowboy Song’ – is Gabi Blisset, while Rachel Johnston plays cello, Paddy Montgomery mandolin and cittern, Isaac Gunnoo double bass and Syd Green, who produced the debut Montgomery Church album, 2018’s In the Shadow of the Mountain, added percussion. Together they provide really subtle musical textures to the shimmering, bittersweet sound of Where The Quiet Can Hide, a collection of songs “written in our little house of stone,” as they say in the liner notes, “inspired by our surroundings, our heroes and our little boy, Arlo.” Listening to the record, it’s obvious how deeply Montgomery and Church have imbibed of the deep well of contemporary Americana, but there’s one song that is obviously inspired by their Snowy Mountains home – ‘The Great Divide’. “There are definitely some mountain themes and the wind, fields and seasons,” Cielle explains, “that are all very much part of where we live, but I guess they could relate to anywhere. ‘The Great Divide’ is very much about the Snowy Mountains scheme and ‘What I’ve Come to Know (Arlo’s Song)’ is about our life in our little house of stone. That was probably one of the hardest things we’ve written.” “Most of the time one of us will get most of the way there,” says Church explaining the Montgomery Church songwriting process, “and then present it to the other person to approve of, and then hopefully edit it until both parties are happy. Sometimes things come together pretty much on your own, but generally it’s so useful to have someone who hasn’t heard it and aren’t attached to come in and say yes or no.” “We both have our strengths and weaknesses as songwriters,” adds Cielle, “so it’s helpful. James can play a lot more chords on guitar than I do, so we bounce things off each other and that helps the process.” “At this point I feel that females can access an emotion and can express it without having to explain it,” Church admits. “I’m a much more wordy songwriter and generally what Cielle will do with my songs is chip away at them and get rid of the things that don’t need to be there. She gets to the heart of it. Sometimes what I want to do to her songs is to make something more complex where the emotion is sitting right there for you,” he chuckles. “If that makes sense. That might just be us. “I started ‘Louise’ and the path I was going down was a lot more like songs that had been written before about a guy who was sitting in a bar rueing his lost relationship, but Cielle heard a different angle on it which ended up being the way it’s drawn now. It’s not about someone we know, but we’ve drawn on all different parts of people we do know, so it ends up being someone that everyone knows.” While Montgomery Church are as keen as any musical artists to get out there and perform Where the Quiet can Hide, they’re quite content to accept the strictures on live performance due to the pandemic to enjoy a bit of home life with baby Arlo – keep an eye on dates when life returns to some sort of normality.