Iwas born in Bulli, a few suburbs north of Wollongong, so when Jordie Lane sings, “She’s a black diamond from Bulli” on his new album,Glassellland, well, it’s like he’s known me all my life.
Sure, he might have got the genders confused, but you can’t blame such a busy guy. While we’re on that tune, ‘Black Diamond’, actually, it’s worth noting that though Lane started writing it in NSW, it was finished on a distant toilet in Tennessee. Evidently the musician is no stranger to roaming the lands in search of song, but given the rigours of cutting an album, his boots haven’t been quite their usual dusty selves recently.
“They’re not as dusty as they have been,” Lane agrees, “but only because we realised, ‘OK, we need to make a record,’ and that the one problem was spending way too much time being totally addicted to being on the road and touring. I could write songs on the road, but getting into the space to pull an album together and record it was impossible.
“So finally, late last year, we had a little gap in the States and put aside all November, but that was the first time we sat down to start writing and recording. We’ve had a couple of small tours in Canada, Australia and the US, but nowhere near as many as we used to. That gave us the time to really spend as much of it as possible making this album, which was really cool, but also scary at first. I hadn’t really done that for real since 2011, when the last full length came out. Now that’s all I want to do: be in these little cubbyhouse studios and hide in there making sounds.”
I’ve had the fortune to catch Lane perform many times over the years – last time, in fact, he sang ‘Black Diamond’ and I swear he looked me dead in the eye – as he has roamed from festival to festival. It’s a beguiling lifestyle to dedicate oneself to, thriving on the momentum and on the applause. In some ways touring is like a drug, one that must be abruptly weaned off when it comes time to settle into the studio.
“It’s completely, hugely addictive, and it’s not the real world. That makes it like a drug. First you get addicted to the movement, of having a real reason to get out of bed in the morning. I’ve always struggled with that,” he says. “I should have more respect for myself and others around me that I should get up on time anyway – but having a plane to catch gets me up, and I get a real rush from that. Getting that instant gratification from an audience, whether that’s 5,000 people on a festival stage or five people in a bar: you feed off that praise. I’m a sucker for attention and for seeking approval. So it’s been hard to come off that drug.
“We got really good at touring: knowing how to get through security quickly, weight allowances, little tricks like that,” he continues. “So coming off the road and recording was daunting, because there’s not that fast-paced adrenalin rush. For this, it was just myself and Clare Reynolds, so it was learning to be OK with things being a lot slower and quieter.”
Glasselland is not only the culmination of five years of writing and refining: it also marks a shift in the way Lane composes. A solitary writer by nature, here he’s been joined by Reynolds – a seasoned collaborator – in writing and playing all that we hear. The result is not a breakaway from a sound he’s spent a lifetime developing as much as it is an evolution.
“A lot is still storytelling, is still folk and blues driven. But quite a bit of it has a different stylistic sound. The live shows are going to feel a bit more rock’n’roll. But I think the storyteller always wins. I’ve worked years finding my voice, and telling those stories through that and through my style of guitar picking, and I’ve worked really hard on that.
“But in the end, I hope it’s the stories that are more important to people,” Lane says. “They’re more important to me. How a story’s told is definitely what gets it over the line, but growing up in a family of performing parents, a mum who could turn any boring story of her day into a thrilling, epic tale, that’s what really inspired me as a kid. And there’s definitely heaps better guitarists and singers out there, but none of them are telling the exact story that I’m telling. Someone like Paul Kelly, who delivers his so well and uniquely: he’s telling his own stories.”
Lane powers on. “Paul Kelly talks about having a trick on the road with making coffee in a little espresso pot with running shoes while you balance it on an iron, heating it up on that,” he laughs. “We did it last night. We tried it out. Got my little ASICS runners, grabbed the iron, got the espresso things, and it was perfect coffee. So to come up with something like that, that’s a seasoned touring musician right there. Thank you, Paul Kelly.”
Jordie Lane appears Thursday November 10 at Newtown Social Club.Glassellland is out now through Blood Thinner.
