Bio

"I change my mind every day about most things and this LP was certainly a result of that way of thinking."

David Kilgour's been changing his mind for a long time, and who can argue with the results? His first band The Clean changed the face of rock music when they kick-started New Zealand’s pop underground in the early 80s. His records — 'The Far Now' is album number six — are monuments to good old-fashioned song craft tinged with a becoming modesty. If you hunger for gorgeous melodies that’ll never make you sick, singing that puts across an emotion without hitting you over the head with it, and guitar playing whose effortless eloquence and virtuosity doesn’t make you want to fine him for playing too many notes, Kilgour’s your man. If you’re looking for a man in single-minded pursuit of rock and roll success, well, that’s another story; he loves music, but he loves life more, and while that attitude hasn’t put his face on too many billboards, it’s probably got a lot to do with why he’s still making records after 25 years.

In the late 70s a teenaged David traded in his surfboard for a guitar. Inspired in equal measures by the punk rock explosion and their Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Velvet Underground, and Beach Boys records, he and his older brother Hamish started The Clean. After a couple years of unstable line-ups and sketchy gigs (I know one guy who first saw them at a Sunday afternoon youth concert sponsored by the Dunedin police department) the brothers hooked up with bassist Robert Scott (later of The Bats) and got terrifyingly good. 'Tally Ho', their first single, sold thousands in their native New Zealand without the benefit of commercial airplay. But after a couple years that yielded some brilliant homemade EPs and concerts that people still talk about, David got sick of the pressure of being a guitar hero and quit to be a painter. Or something. He’s carried on in an episodic way ever since, fronting some bands (Stephen, Pop Art Toasters) and backing up his friends in others (Snapper, Yo La Tengo), starting and stopping The Clean, and pursuing a solo career.

'The Far Now' is his second album for Arch Hill Recordings, and his third album for Merge Records. It takes some cues from its predecessors, the shimmering, trippy 'A Feather In The Engine', which was mostly recorded in a wooden shed behind David’s house, and the lush, soul-tinged 'Frozen Orange', which was mostly recorded in Nashville with members of Lambchop, without sounding quite like either of them. It’s certainly not the record that Kilgour set out to make. “I thought at one point that this one would be a lysergic guitar heavy extravaganza. It’s actually ended up being quite mellow and reflective. The songs sprung into my lap and pretty much decided how they wanted to sound, and I followed their direction.” The first sounds you hear are a spinning lattice of nimbly picked acoustic guitars. “I splashed out and bought a new Gibson acoustic about a year ago and that guitar has really left its mark. Looking back now, it really has dictated the sound, feel and composition of the lp. It’s a gorgeous guitar; I’ve never owned a "good" acoustic before. Buzzing synths cut across 'Sun Of God's' surface and echo-bathed vocals swirl around the mix. It’s lysergic for sure, but hardly an electric freak-out. Next up is 'BBC World', the first song to feature David’s band The Heavy Eights. Acoustic slide licks, pillow-soft synths, and Tane Tokona’s crisp drumming usher in a graceful melody and a lyric that veers uncertainly between exuberance and dread.

The rest of the album alternates between layered solo extravaganzas and loping full-band excursions. “About half of the LP was recorded by myself here at home and the other half was with the band. I had the luxury of recording solo versions of songs and band versions, and then picking the grooviest one. The Heavy Eights made a huge contribution. They are dear friends and we all share a great love of music, so their input comes in many ways. Not just musically and technically, but emotionally and physically.

“A lot of the Heavy Eights sessions were really done on the fly. Sometimes the band knew the songs, but sometimes they had no idea what I was gonna do next and either did I. For example, the track 'Too Long From Me' was cut live with me yelling out the stops to Tane. I gave the Heavy Eights the impression that we weren’t in a serious recording situation and we didn’t have to produce anything worthy from the recordings. This makes everyone relax, but it also keeps everyone wondering what’s next, and I like that! We actually have little or no memory of recording some of these tracks. We would keep the machine in record mode and just record stuff all night.”

Once David got his hands on the jams, he added layers of synthesizers, vocals, and on three songs strings played by Alan Starrett. “At one point I thought the lp was gonna be synth heavy. I’ve had an old Roland Juno and a Yamaha DX7 in the house for a year or two and they just kind of got in. I have been looking for new textures, mainly by trying to mix sounds together to make new ones; just having fun really, no grand plan at the end of the day, although after making 'Frozen Orange' I did think I’d make this next one a fully blown over-produced freak-out. Some of the songs sounded this way until we mixed them; we certainly tamed some tracks down. 'I’m Gonna Get Better Lately' is probably the only one that comes close to being untamed.”

Kilgour is already thinking about his next album, and true to form, he wants it to be different from the last one. “I’m now determined for the next lp to be the guitar heavy LP. I’ve actually been recording some ideas towards this one already and hope to have the bulk of it complete by the end of our southern summer.” That is, unless he or the songs change their minds. In the meantime the rest of us can spend some time getting close to 'The Far Now'.

Links

• Artist Website
• Bandcamp Page