Wild Nothing

However, for his third record Life Of Pause, Tatum worked with a handful of collaborators. Brad Laner from Medicine contributed some guitar and John Eriksson from Peter Bjorn and John played most of the drums, as well as marimba on the single ‘Reichpop’. Named after minimalist composer Steve Reich, ‘Reichpop’ opens in a shoegazey haze before the marimbas come in and signal a shift into a much more 1980s pop sound, complete with synth.

A lot of the songs Tatum wrote for Life Of Pause changed dramatically while he was working on them, somewhere between his bedroom and the studio. “There are quite a few songs that started in my house in a pretty different form,” he says. “Part of that was due to my own limitations of not being able to add some instruments that I wanted, but part of it was just that you start something thinking it’ll be a certain way, and it’s not until later – maybe once you’ve introduced a new part or you’ve introduced a new instrument – where you realise this is actually more appropriate for the song, this is a more appropriate arrangement, this is a more appropriate production style.”

Tatum is interested in the way the demo version of a song can be radically different from the completed one, and one of his favourite bands from which to track down obscure demos is Australia’s own The Go-Betweens. “You can go and find a lot of demos for songs that ended up on their records,” he says, “and it’s fascinating, it’s fascinating that a song and a melody can really flourish in a lot of different forms.”

Tatum calls The Go-Betweens “kind of a constant presence for me, definitely one of my favourite bands”. Their influence on Life Of Pause shows most strongly in ‘Lady Blue’, with Tatum’s doubled vocals serving as his own backing, as if he’s both Robert Forster and Grant McLennan simultaneously. He says it’s a shame the two songwriters aren’t better known in the States, and he only stumbled across them himself thanks to Mike Sniper, who runs Wild Nothing’s record label Captured Tracks.

“He is just like an obsessive record collector, it’s not uncommon for him to always have doubles of things laying around,” Tatum says. “He can’t help buying things. I think he gave me Before Hollywood and that was my introduction to The Go-Betweens. I really fell in love with them because I felt like they had a very natural evolution of their sound, and to listen to their early work, which really is a bit more angular, and from that to 16 Lovers Lane, which is just like this very beautiful pop record, I related to that a lot. I liked seeing that forward motion and seeing from one record to the next how they changed.”

The forward motion of Wild Nothing is reflected across his albums too, with 2010 debut Gemini being the kind of mopey guitar pop that unites singer-songwriters in bedrooms across the world – whether in The Cure’s Crawley, The Go-Betweens’ Brisbane or Wild Nothing’s Blacksburg, Virginia. 2012’s second album Nocturne benefitted from an actual budget, adding string sections and a drummer who wasn’t a machine, as well as more production polish. To ensure that Life Of Pause feels like another step forward, Tatum took his time with it.

“I had a lot more to prove with this record,” he says, “and I think by that I mean that I wasn’t content to just quickly make another record that I didn’t feel would be an accurate statement, not only of where I was currently but where I also hoped to go with my music.”

Life Of Pause took longer to record than both of Tatum’s previous albums, and there was also a longer gap in between when he wasn’t working on anything. “I did take a lot of time off after the last record and was writing a bit more casually. I think because of that, the casual nature of me slowly working on things, I ended up trying out a lot more ideas than I had in the past. Especially with Nocturne it was kind of like – really Gemini and Nocturne were the same way – once I felt like I had the songs, then that was it. I didn’t really explore too much.”

Instead, Tatum’s exploration and experimentation found a home on Golden Haze and Empty Estate, the two EPs he released on the back of Gemini and Nocturne respectively. Even though he felt freer to explore on Life Of Pause, he says there’s something about recording EPs that feels looser, like you can get away with more, and he’d like to experience that again.

“I certainly, with regards to the last EP, felt much less pressure to make this really grand, concise artistic statement. It was really more about feeling that itch to write and record again until I did it, and that EP happened so much more quickly than any of the other records in the past. But I think that will maybe be a trend with me. I like the idea that I have this opportunity to not freak myself out so much over a release. I feel like I can get that with an EP.”

[Wild Nothing photo by Shawn Brackbill]