Ceres
Subscribe
X

Subscribe to Mixdown Magazine

Ceres

CERES General Use Image.jpg

“I think there’s a lot of ambiguity in the songs,” Lanyon admits. “There are some explanations that could bode well for the listener I guess, if I had the chance to speak to them about it. I did this Rolling Stone track-by-track list this morning, and I really like those. I like when my favourite bands do them, although I don’t like to give too much away. I like hearing a little bit more, like liner notes. In saying that, we purposely didn’t want to print the lyrics to the record. There’s some dark and personal stuff in there, but I feel like printing lyrics is almost like giving someone a cheat sheet for the record. It’s too easy. I don’t want to just give people stuff on a plate. I want them to find out for themselves if that particular word really is what they think it is. I’d be pissed off if my favourite band did that to me. I love working out lyrics just when I’m listening to them. So now I’ve screwed everyone else over into the same thing.”

 

He laughs. “You make it your own. If I just say ‘hey, this is what the song is about,’ it kind of cheapens 
it. You should be able to make it your own thing. You mishear something, or maybe you just want a word to be some other word because it means something more to you. I really like that.”

 

The sentiment of each listener making a song their 
own – finding their own meaning and significance – is, curiously, something that may even apply to the song itself. While Lanyon doesn’t exactly treat each track as some anthropomorphic creature, struggling at the bit to break away from its makers meaning, he feels very strongly that musicians can often get in the way of
 a song. While the album was being written, the band imposed no boundaries on where each song would lead, and the results were a revelation.


 

“I’m a little surprised at how proud I am of it, because…” Lanyon searches for the right words. “I always feel like we’re not in control of the song. It has to weave its way, find its own end, and the record is just fourteen instances of a song trying to find its way. I was speaking to someone [who said] they could find a thread that winds through the record, and I hadn’t written it as a concept or anything, but they do seem all tied together. It almost tells a whole story. And maybe that’s not a complete accident, but it wasn’t something I ever set out to try and do. But I love that about songwriting. How there’s a fragile ecosystem
 to a song, and if you fuck just one thing up, it’ll ruin the whole. The record is the same. Our decision to put fourteen songs on it is kind of odd nowadays, but we felt that it holistically completed the record, and the feeling of the record now, the surprise, is that I can feel this nostalgia. It sounds and feels old to me; the themes are nostalgic things, that melancholic thing of something past that you can’t get back to. And all of that only crystallised late in the piece. So it’s one of my great delights that I get to make records and be surprised by what I nd at the end of it.”

 

At its core, Drag It Down On You is an often dark, but deeply personal record. With much of the content plucked directly from Lanyon’s life in Richmond and surrounds, it was always going to be a testament that sat exceptionally close to the skin.

 

“I think if you’re writing about something that really happened, and it’s honest, you need to place where it happened. I think that’s super entwined in my memory; where I am, the feeling of a place, that energy. It’s something I feel I want to write about all the time. It might be hazy in your memory and coloured wrong, but that vision of a place and the vision, I love that. I love artists who do write about place. It can put you there straight away, even though mine is more ambiguous… More than ever, the record totally represents us and 
the music that we want to make. There wasn’t a lot of compromise or peer-pressure. Like, the last record was definitely skewed by a lot of stuff, and this is our first second record ever,” he laughs. “And we wanted to have a really good crack at it. I just think we’ve all grown up together a bit more as a band, and songwriting-wise, I know what I like and what I don’t like now. I think we’ve arrived at a place we’re proud of, and we’ll stay here for a while.”

Drag it Down On You is out now via Cooking Vinyl Australia. For more details, head to dragitdownonyou.com