Words: Ivan Deasy
Crayonsmith began almost a decade ago as the solo project of Dubliner Ciarán Smith. Following the self-released Stay Loose, he signed to Out On A Limb Records, who put out White Wonder in 2008, featuring the expanded lineup of Ruadhan O’Meara and Ronan Jackson, in contrast to the more lo-fi one-man-band approach of the debut. Five years later, with a new lineup (Richie O’Reilly on bass and Wayne Dunlea on drums), Crayonsmith have just released their new album, Milk Teeth, again on Out On A Limb. We caught up with Ciarán and Richie on the eve of their Cork album launch gig to have a chat about the new record.
It’s been five years since White Wonder, what’s been going on in the intervening years?
Ciarán: We did a lot of touring for White Wonder, from 2008 to 2009. There was a lot of, eh… the enjoyment went out of it a tiny bit, because you were gigging because you felt you had to gig as opposed to it being more natural. I love gigging, but because it was my thing, I was funding the whole thing and I didn’t like that. Expenses went up, bringing a van with a band and drums and stuff. I knew then I wanted to go in a band direction. I took a step back and just wrote and listened to music for a year. I moved in with you then, wasn’t it?
Richie: Yeah.
Ciarán: I dunno, was it 2010?
Richie: 2010 I would say, yeah. In Drumcondra there. That famous house.
Ciarán: It was Ruadhan and Ronan used to play with me, and they did Jogging and Magic Pockets, obviously. I always stayed in touch with Richie and I always stayed in touch with Wayne, and I don’t think they really knew each other beforehand. So I said to Wayne, “I’ve got these songs, do you want to work with them?”, and Wayne was like “yeah, yeah”. And then Richie and I, because we were living together, we listened to a lot of records together. We developed like a shorthand, and I was like, “this could work”. So I said “will the 3 of us get together in a room and see how it goes?” And the first practice was so funny, because they were so shy. There were microphones for them to sing and Riche was like [breathy exhale] (laughs).
Richie: A lot of it came from that house, living in that house. You’d done a demo with Wayne and then you needed a bass player. And you were like “who’ll I get? Oh, there’s someone upstairs”.
Ciarán: No, it wasn’t like that, I’d been listening to a lot of what you’d been saying for a while.
Richie: And then I was playing with one of the other girls in the house, Niamh, in a band called Koalacord, so I guess that was the only thing I was doing at the time. All of us were living together in that house, so it was easy for us to jam and stuff. When you’re working on something, it’s easy to get an opinion or bring someone in, and once you’re already getting opinions off somebody it’s very natural to go “well stick a track down on that”, or take it from there or whatever.
Ciarán: To get back to your answer; we went into our practice space and we were jamming once a week, and there was no gig deadline or anything. It was like “let’s write for six months and get to know each other,” because the lads obviously listen to different stuff. There’s a few records that we all agree on, but there’s all the different tastes coming together. For the record we decided on 10 songs, but there were about 17 or something.
Richie: It was probably more than that. We would have had songs, and we were just constantly throwing them in the bin, maybe two dozen songs.
Ciarán: There’s 10 on the album, there’s 30 in the bin (laughs).
Richie: So it was quite a long process.
Ciarán: So yeah, that’s what it’s been for the last five years. That was the great thing, your profile goes down so you’re not trying to keep anything afloat. You go back to the drawing board and slowly start stepping out again.
Is the album a collection of songs that have amassed over time, or is it, maybe in the process of choosing them, a set of songs on a coherent theme?
Ciarán: The first thing we did together was a 7”, it was a song called “Heaven in an Aeroplane.”
Richie: It was a split with Elk.
Ciarán: It was a split with Elk, yeah. That was kind of, I had done the chord progressions on it, and Wayne had done a drumbeat and Richie had a bassline. After that, I purposely underwrote songs or he’d bring in bits or Wayne would bring in bits. No one arrived with a fully formed song, that’s what can be said about these 10 songs.
Richie: And sometimes that was frustrating, because it took a lot longer. Sometimes you’d kinda just say ‘bring in a song and we’ll do it’. But we kinda wanted to do it ourselves, with each song written in three ways.
Ciarán: So it was very much, you’re going through your archives of little licks or things you’ve recorded on your phone over the years and showing it to him, or me and him would work on something because we lived together and then show it to Wayne. And Wayne would be like, “I like one of those chords” (laughs).
Richie: “I like one of those chords,” not even “one of those parts”. So four-and-a-half parts would go in the bin, and we’d start with one chord and move on from there. It was kinda painstaking but it was definitely a democracy, it had to be unanimous decisions.
Ciarán: The thing is, there’s no part of a song where someone’s going “I’m gonna tune out for this bit until I get back to the bit I like”. So it wasn’t a big load of songs I’d been sitting on, or he’d been sitting on. It was all people bringing shards to the practice room.
Richie: Hopefully it comes across that way, that there’s a good bit of thought gone into the songs, even if they are quite minimal.
You mentioned minimalism there. The change in the lineup that’s obviously changed the sound of the band from, say, White Wonder, is that purely just in terms of the instrumentation used or…?
Ciarán: Yeah, yeah. I think when Wayne came to it, he was like “if you listen to any song from the 60s onwards, the song is in the bass and the drums”. Like, in the rhythm track. For my part, I always kept it in my head that the melody has to be in what Richie’s doing, and the space in what Wayne is doing. Where you can pull back for verse two and I’m not even playing anything. That there’s a strong enough arrangement there to house the vocal. Would you agree?
Richie: Yeah, when you’re doing things on your own it’s very easy to put down a loop and build on top of that and build on top of that, and that’s the way loads of people are doing it these days. So it’s kind of going against the grain, just being a three piece, not really a rock thing or a synthpop thing. In a way, it was kind of a brave enough move for yourself, because there was a real kinda 80s synth revival, and you used to play with a lot of synths and you could have gone down that path very easily, and it would have been in vogue.
Ciarán: It would have been white noise as well, just adding to the plethora of synth bands out there.
Richie: We were looking at guys like Cass McCombs and stuff like that, when we were starting out. That was the kind of thing we were going for.
Ciarán: The bass and the live drums, that was definitely the organic thing, and how my keyboard sounds fit in with that. The record wasn’t done to a click, it was just live takes. Being true to our own tastes, you’re not gonna be in vogue, in terms of … a lot of other records seem to be done to a click. It’s deadly in one way to be just three lads playing in a room, but then to do overdubs and stuff, it can be a bit of a nightmare if it’s off the clock, because you’re playing along with something and it’s wobbling out of time or something like that.
Richie: Hopefully, it has its own floppy kind of charm (laughs).
Ciarán: In the chats with Riche and Wayne beforehand, a lot of the stuff we were agreeing on, hanging out listening to records, was more organic sounding stuff. Like the Grizzly Bear drum sound, or Cass McCombs, just the space in the songs, where there’s not loads going on. In the White Wonder record, that was a big wall of sound in parts, but this time we were very true to the idea of three lads in a room, with tiny little flourishes added later.
Richie: Even just the mastering, we didn’t want it pushed up. It kinda permeated the whole thing, the decision making, that we weren’t really trying to grab people’s attention, it was more …
Ciarán: Just letting people come to it, as opposed to banging them over the head with it.
You recorded it with Spud [sound engineer based in Guerrilla Studios in Dublin], how was that?
Ciarán: It was deadly!
Richie: Great. He’s a really good guy, he really understood us. He would downplay his own ideas, but he was very much like “I hear this or that in the demos you gave me, and I’m looking forward to doing it”.
Ciarán: The guitar, bass, drums and keys we tracked in Cork. It was a last minute thing, because his new studio wasn’t ready. I loved that, because you’ve got like 48 hours in Cork, and we were in there 12 hours a day. Time was ticking down, and you write the 10 songs on a blackboard, and you’re wiping things out, “that’s done, that’s done”, and then you pack up the gear.
Richie: It was done very quickly. Maybe too quickly. But that was the way we wanted to do it, that was the plan. Even just for money constraints, we kinda had to do it that way. Spud was a guy we admired, especially from his work with Katie Kim, and Wayne knew him well, and knew what he was about. So that was kind of a unanimous choice.
Ciarán: So, then we did the vocals at Christmas. We had a big hug, like “yeah, the last vocal!” It was the mixing then, that’s where Spud as kind of the fourth member, that’s where the tastes come in. He’s meticulous with the details of like … he’s got a high end reverb and a low end reverb for the one sound, and it got a bit technical at times. Not in a nerdy or boffin way, it was to serve the sound. To enhance the room sound or the expansive sound.
Richie: I guess a lot of it was done after the fact, in terms of vocals, overdubs, mixing. And it kinda had to be done because the basic tracks were done so quickly. It kinda took us a full year since it was recorded.
Ciarán: I was saying to Richie, that’s my next step, in terms of upping my game in music, is to learn more about recording. We bring a laptop into the practice space, so we record everything and send mp3s on so everyone’s always coming the next day with ideas. And just the sound of the initial take, it’s there, that’s the energy and if you can record yourself, you have a better chance of capturing the magic at the source as opposed to trying to recreate it at another time. If you can keep it within the three people in the band, to get it to such a point where you don’t get lost along the way of “what’s this meant to sound like?”
Richie: I think a lot of bands kinda record as they go, and it can be a lot less headache, but it’s not really how we do it. We kinda like to feel out a song in the practice room, and it’s a lot more time consuming. But hopefully there is a gain to be had from it at the end of the day.
I mentioned briefly earlier on, the idea of a theme to the album, is there an overarching theme, or series of themes?
Ciarán: Richie and I wrote the lyrics to Chrysalis together, and I think looking at it, and the lyrics to the other songs, if you wanted the whole thing in a sentence, it was hitting 30 or 31 and becoming more accepting of life and developing better coping mechanisms. Stuff that you would have freaked out about at 22 or 23, you’ve gone through enough life experiences to say “Well I was in this situation before and I did this and that didn’t work out, so what about this?” And the whole thing of friends and family, and I don’t say that in a fucking religion book kind of way. Like, living with him, when I’d come back from work and he’d say “Do you want a glass of wine?” and it’s like, that’s just what I needed to hear. Do you remember the house was being done up? We lived in a building site for six months. And at different points, one lad was cracking up (laughs) … But we would kind of sense off each other, a cup of tea or a whiskey before going to bed, and just constantly debriefing. It is that thing of “a problem shared is a problem halved”.
Richie: A lot of is kinda still feeling like you’re growing up after you’re already supposed to be grown up. For me, that’s what a lot of the songs are about. Sort of worrying about yourself and worrying about your friends. You still kinda feel like a bit of a teenager. I do see a lot of that throughout the lyrics on the album.
Ciarán: And the other thing is sense of humour, just by talking with your mates, you could be talking about something really serious, and someone makes a pun or says something, and you’re like “Jaysus, that’s a bit irreverent”, but it’s cathartic and it lightens the mood. And the stuff I wrote about this time is possibly even darker than the White Wonder stuff, but it’s because I’ve got space from the issues, or I’m more mature to talk about it, but a laugh is just around the corner. Does that make sense? That’s where “milk teeth” came from. Milk teeth are the first teeth you get, like a rehearsal set of teeth, then the ones after that are your permanent teeth, and they’re the ones with the stains and everything, and they’re a document of your life from then onwards. So it’s that kind of loss of innocence, replaced by experience and how you deal with it.
Milk Teeth is available in record shops now or online from http://www.outonalimbrecords.bigcartel.com/.
