As the sun shines in Sydney, so the rain pours in Melbourne, and as children play outside in the glorious weather, The Panics’ Jae Laffer is sat at his 200-year-old piano, watching the world through the window as he sips on a coffee, engrossed in creating music on a dreary morning.
The contrast in surroundings between Laffer and this fair interviewer is a point of delight and interest for the indie frontman. On hearing the sounds of Sydney in the background of the call, the singer is inspired. “I’m having a good day: of all the times to be alive, right now, it’s kind of a perk to be able to share in someone’s atmosphere, to hear their world. It’s pretty cool.”
Laffer draws creative strength from the world around him in an unashamedly natural and childlike manner, delighting in the sounds of the world at large. “You get a general feeling over time when you’ve had a life in writing,” he says. “You gain perspectives on situations and atmospheres: that’s when you have fertile periods of making stuff.”
With four years between their last release and the upcoming album Hole In Your Pocket, The Panics are evidently a band that don’t like to rush things. Laffer argues that time to stew on a work is necessary, an important part of a practice that sees the group only turn out work they’re proud of. “The Panics have had a few years’ break between records and I can feel a far busier period coming along. I have a plan for the next few years in the writing department: write lots, record lots and give it away,” Laffer says with a laugh.
“The cool thing about the album in one respect is that by having a few years off, it means the record has got a pretty good energy. It’s relentless the whole time, so it’s exciting to come back firing hard both in terms of purpose and meaning. I’m looking forward to communicating the songs to people. We want to start small: we just want to play to sweaty clubs and I think these songs are going to play pretty easily to that environment. The whole album is really.”
Though the band are currently experiencing a creative renaissance, it wasn’t that long ago that the members felt as though they were running low on steam, unable to produce much fruitful work. “We had a very busy first decade of our life with the band and then we had periods where we felt maybe we were treading on old ground,” says Laffer.
“We live creative lives and it’s not always about music: some of the guys do art. I’m the same. It’s really about the energy and the time. It’s about when we feel like we have something to say. For me it might be a certain pile of lyrics that comes along and that’s the time to work. We’ve been really busy at certain times but it’s only from a careerist perspective. Sometimes you veer off but we use our instruments to create when the time is right.”
As Laffer tells it, “veering off” from songwriting and embarking on other endeavours was necessary for the The Panics’ musical well-being and ultimately assisted the fresh, funky new feel of Hole In Your Pocket.
“A painter might not always want to be working on another oil painting, so for me, I spent a couple of years working on stories, working on a book. It’s just a thing that can take up my time. You realise you’re gravitating toward things that aren’t writing songs: you have no choice in the matter but to appease what your overall sense of well-being requires.”
Laffer is fascinated by the interest others show towards his writing habits, and speaks in tones of amused disbelief when discussing how he crafts songs. “People wanna know how you write stuff. They’re always curious about how it comes about for me. It’s such a loose mysterious thing: most songwriters hardly remember the song coming together. It’s a lifestyle of writing a bit and meditating then suddenly you’re drifting off… You can find yourself talking about it but it never feels quite right.”
To that end, Laffer allows inspiration to lead him rather than the other way around, and particularly while writing Hole In Your Pocket he felt it was important to take the most relaxed attitude possible. That kind of effortlessness has manifested itself powerfully on the record, one that reeks of a kind of unforced ease.
“In some ways it was about avoiding [our] normal struggles. The way we found of making it was to write and record it in the backshed of one our houses. It was all about zero struggle, zero pressure. It was about recording those first takes and being happy with the vocal, not cringing at what we were creating. There really was no part of it that was a struggle.”
Laeffer laughs. “I don’t really tolerate struggle these days. The only time struggle occurs is when people are trying to make hits, with unfair pressure on them. Making noise: there’s no struggle in that.”
[The Panics photo by Ian Laidlaw]
The Panics play at Oxford Art Factory, Friday October 14.Hole In Your Pocket is out Friday October 7 through Universal.
