“I never really set out to start making a record,” says Kim Salmon about the creative process that led to his new album,My Script.
It’s Salmon’s first album since Kim & Leanne’s 2014 release True West, and the first record Salmon considers to be a genuine solo album.
“I knew that I wanted to make another record, and I knew that I’d done a few collaborations – with Darling Downs, with Leanne [Chock] and with Spencer [P. Jones] – and they’d just happened the way that they’d happened. But with this record, it wasn’t the case that I decided that I wanted to do this, and I was going to do it this way.”
My Script came together in collusion with producer Myles Mumford. Salmon worked with Mumford as part of his collaboration with Waleed Aly on the The Key Of Sea project in 2012. When Mumford approached him about doing another record, Salmon realised he had enough song ideas to create an album. “I knew I had probably half a dozen sketches on my phone that could be used, and Myles seemed like he had a lot that he could add as a producer,” Salmon says.
But while many of Salmon’s previous records have been built around a particular conceptual idea, here he was simply working on the basis of some vaguely formed song ideas. Once it became apparent he was embarking on a solo project, this had an impact on his artistic process. “I thought [the album] had to redefine me to people who know me,” he says. “It had to be something that was current so that I could go out and work it. It had to push some boundaries and explore ideas so that I’d be in a different place after it, and it had to encompass things that were me.”
Salmon spent the first few months of the project working only with Mumford in the studio, keen to develop his fledgling musical sketches into properly formed songs.
“I tend to be very impatient and like to get things done quickly so I can move onto the next thing, but if it’s not right, it’s not right,” Salmon says. “Part of what I like about the album is that there are ideas that went down in a day, and there are ideas that took months. There’s a couple of songs that use this 808 drum app from my iPhone. I made a pattern with that, and I used that as a bed. The first thing I came up with was this funky beat, and I tried something else, which turned into ‘Sign Apps’. But I liked that funky rhythm and that became a guitar rhythm [for] which I eventually came up with a bassline, and that became ‘Its Sodistopic’.”
On ‘Client JGT683’, Salmon revisited the track he’d written originally with Aly for The Key Of Sea project. With the prodigiously talented Aly’s musical interests more inclined to Pink Floyd’s progressive rock era, Salmon knew he was going to be exploring new territory. “It’s got an almost AM radio sort of feel, and it’s not something I would normally have done. It’s slicker and tidier, but it’s still got a place on the record.”
Salmon found the challenge of working with the cerebral Aly a positive experience – and not just because Aly taught Salmon about the Mixolydian scale, a tonal sequence that can be traced back to Ancient Greece. “I knew he was very erudite and what was I? A rock’n’roll buffoon,” Salmon laughs.
Drawing upon Aly’s legal and political background, Salmon suggested they use the anomalies of Australian refugee and immigration law as a creative starting point. They spoke to a barrister friend of Aly’s, who explained the euphemistic discourse of refugee law – refugees as unnamed ‘clients’, electric fences as ‘energised courtesy curtains’ – and ‘Client JGT683’ took shape.
Beyond exploring the disconcerting aspects of Australia’s immigration policies, Salmon says there’s an autobiographical aspect to some of the lyrics on My Script. “It’s a pap line, but it definitely came up during this process – all autobiography is tainted with some fiction, and all fiction has some aspect of autobiography. On this record, because it’s a solo record, it was always going to have an autobiographical element.”
As an example, when Jen Anderson (Weddings Parties Anything) approached Salmon to write a song promoting hepatitis C awareness, Salmon drew loosely on his own success in overcoming the disease a couple of years ago to pen ‘Making Me Better’.
While Salmon says there was nothing contrived about the songwriting process itself, he was adamant for the album to be more than a linear aggregation of songs. “On one level it was all over the shop, and I don’t really like albums that are like that – I like them to have an idea. So the challenge was to come up with something that was cohesive. If it had an identity crisis, it was going to sound like that. I find myself thinking, ‘What would Scott Walker do? What would Todd Rundgren, David Bowie or Harry Nilsson do?’ Because I guess these are people who are very eclectic and iconoclastic – they completely disregarded any expectations.”
Salmon admits he needs more time to genuinely evaluate the final product, but he thinks he was successful in leaving his comfort zone. “There’s definitely things on there that I wouldn’t have done on any other record.”
My Script is out now independently.Kim Salmon plays theUnion Hotel on Saturday April 9, with The Holy Soul.
