TRUE COLOURS

LIVING COLOUR Shane Nicholson’s new album was recorded in his home studio over the past two years. By Brian Wise

“I can’t think of any worse situation it could be for musicians at the moment,” says Shane Nicholson when we meet on Zoom to talk about his new album, Living In Colour. Nicholson, who is based on the central coast of New South Wales, was commiserating with me about the lockdown in Melbourne but just a few days after our conversation he was in the same position. “There’s just nothing you can do. It’s good that everyone was trying to be positive and hope for the best, book in more tours in the last six months when it looked like it might open up a bit. But it’s just a mad scramble now to cancel, postpone, reschedule all that stuff. I feel bad for all the managers around the country right now. I know my manager’s just about to have a nervous breakdown.” Nicholson was supposed to be hitting the road from August to December for a string of headline shows, playing at festivals including the North Queensland Rockin’ Country Festival, Gympie Music Muster and Deni Ute Muster. When we talk, all of that is still up in the air. “I’m still swamped. I just don’t have clients here,” adds Nicholson about his production work. In fact, as we talk, he is sitting in his home studio where he can work on musicians’ files sent to him in their absence. “I had one here from Queensland and she had to quickly down tools and fly home before she got locked out of the State. There are no clients here at the moment obviously, but I’ve still got three or four albums underway with other people and we’re just working remotely now. “I’m in it now. It’s on the bottom floor at the rear of my house, where I live. It’s connected to the house. It’s just one large space at the moment - one large room, I have everything in there which is how I like to work, with everything set up. I try and eliminate the technical side when I’m working. Everything is set up and turned on and I can just record anything at any one time. It sort of looks like a music store. It’s just got everything, everything all in one room.” “There’s some really cool stuff happening,” he adds, mentioning that he has been listening to a lot of music sent to him and that he has found online. “I guess that everyone’s maybe at home writing. I’ve found that just about every producer I know is completely swamped and it’s a really good sign that it’s all being made. It just worries me about how it’s all going to be sold.”

“It was just pretty much done in isolation, and I couldn’t really have a lot of people come into the studio.”

Things have certainly changed since Nicholson’s career started in the late 1990s with his first band in Brisbane. Since starting his solo career in 2002 with the album It’s a Movie, he has released another eight albums, including 2015 ARIA Award winning Hell Breaks Loose and two ARIA Award winning albums with Kasey Chambers -Rattlin’ Bones and Wreck and Ruin. He also has eleven CMAA Golden Guitar awards and ‘The High Price of Surviving’ (on the new album) has also won an APRA 2021 Song of the Year award. Nicholson has also gained two nominations at the Americana Music Association awards. The other side of his career is as a producer and Nicholson has been busy working with Michael Waugh, Alex Lloyd, Tori Forsyth, Beccy Cole, Jason Walker, Ben Leece and Camille Trail. Nicholson recorded his new album at his studio and when his band members, (most of whom are also in his touring band The General Waste), couldn’t make it into the studio they would send files which he would add to the mix. The isolation gave him time to write and there was the added pressure of the Song Club, the online writing community set up by Nashville-based expat Sam Hawksley, where songwriters had to produce and post online a new song every week. “It was just pretty much done in isolation, and I couldn’t really have a lot of people come into the studio,” he explains. “I worked on it, got it finished and then right at the last, the end of the last quarter of the match, I sent it all to Matt Fell who’s produced my last few and just got him to finish it, to mix it, because I think at that point I kind of lost objectivity. I just got his fresh ears on it to do the mix and let him do whatever he wanted really at the end. “I kind of accidentally just did it myself and produced it myself because it was just done in little fits and bursts. Because I was doing other sessions and other artists, it would be usually a matter of knocking it off after 14-hour session. Artists would leave and then I would get an hour or something before I’d hit the wall. And I would do a little bit. It sort of became a bit of an accident, the record. It just slowly built over time and I just chipped away at it. Which is kind of cool because I’ve never made a record in that sense of mind. I’ve usually like devoted a block of time to it and focused hard and just done it. This was interesting, just spacing it out over the course of nearly two years.” The first single from Living In Colour was the great ‘Harvest On Vinyl,’ an ode to Neil Young’s classic album and other music that affected Nicholson in his youth. The album ranges across a wide range of concerns. ‘Simple Man’ is a reflection on fatherhood. ‘A Million Angels’ deals with mortality and lost friends. ‘The High Price Of Surviving’ could be applicable to the present pandemic and the effects it has on our mental state but was written earlier. ‘This Is War,’ the most uptempo song on the album, sees Nicholson rocking out while dealing (maybe) about politics and talkback radio. There is even a song about cookie-cutter songs emanating from Nashville and the musicians who write them in ‘That’s How You Write A Song’. (‘You can write in a room and torture yourself/Or head off to Nashville like everyone else/Rip off your heroes/Keep playing dumb/ Until you get enough for a whole album’). Of course, most of the songs are about relationships: as on ‘And You Will have Your Way,’ ‘Life Ain’t Fine’, ‘Ain’t Been Loved, ‘The House Burns Down’ and ‘Helena.’ All the while, Nicholson has the knack of adorning his songs with memorable riffs and melodies. It is hard to imagine a better local ‘country rock’ album being released this year. “Nearly all of them were written before the pandemic,” says Nicholson. “Or just at the start of it, because of the song club thing that we were doing. The song club threw up a bunch of songs and that was just before it all kind of happened. I think the songs were pretty much written before we were really impacted at all. It’s not a Covid record in any sense.” ‘The Hard Price of Surviving’ sounds as though it was written during the pandemic and contains the line, ‘It’s better than taking the other way out.’ “Well, that actually is the oldest song on the record,” responds Nicholson. “That was released in 2019 or something but it was written really early 2019, maybe the year before. I was at this place, the sheep station in Nundle called The Dag. I go there every year as a songwriting tutor and tutor young, or even older, budding songwriters. Myself and a few other artists, Kevin Bennett, Felicity Urquhart, Jeremy Edwards and Luke O’Shea. We all go up there. Every year. It’s like a little family thing.” Another song on that same topic, ‘A Million Angels’,was inspired by some recently departed friends. “A Million Angels is a collection of people I know that were going through a bunch of pretty full on, different things at the time,” explains Nicholson, “and I remember that song being a bit of a summation of that situation. Feeling surrounded by people who were experiencing some really big losses in their lives. I’m not sure whether it was me trying to understand it or just sending a message to them. I’m not sure. I remember this weird period when it seemed like every week somebody close to us had a major life changing tragedy. It was just one of those things when you start getting so weighed down and the only way through it is to write about it.”

Living In Colour is available now through Lost Highway Australia.