“It’s sinking in” says Ben Von Fürstenburg, referring to the metaphoric dust settling after the release of the new record in october. “And we’re getting some good feedback.”
A. Swayze & the Ghosts have been riding their own wave of punky, new wavey, post-punky rock for a few years now. Instantly identifiable from frontman Andrew Swayze’s vocals, their new record Let’s Live a Life Better Than This further certifies this sonic identity, and we get into the weeds of writing, recording and mixing the record with guitarist Ben Von Fürstenburg.
“It’s sinking in” says Ben, referring to the metaphoric dust settling after the release of the new record in October. “And we’re getting some good feedback.”
We speak for a moment about how, now that the record is out, the band can’t change anything and need to accept it for what it is. Often bands and artists are adjusting and re-thinking ideas until the eleventh hour, even making minute mix changes to the songs into the mastering stage!
“I feel like we’ve done everything we could do to them?” muses Ben. “So I didn’t have a lot of that nervousness going into this one. I loved it, and I know the other guys loved it. So, I don’t think we thought about what the perception [would] be.”
A. Swayze & the Ghosts don’t have a tried and true songwriting process though.
“I feel like [songs have] started in every way possible. With the first album (Paid Salvation, 2020), we were be rehearsing three, four times a week. So we would just be in a rehearsal room, someone would play something, we’d build off that.” Ben explains.
“Whereas I think we started writing [for this album] over Covid, and while Tasmania’s lockdown was nowhere near as bad as other lockdowns, we all liked being home by ourselves, so we took that as an excuse to not see anyone,” Ben laughs. “Or just sending ideas back and forth. Y’know, “He Is Dead” is a really good example: I hadn’t picked up a guitar for a couple of weeks, and I was like ‘Alright, I need to write something.’ I jumped into a room, and I pressed record and played the first thing that came out of my hands for 20 seconds. That was the “He Is Dead” riff, and then I did that four more times, and I think there’s two other songs that ended up on the album that came out of those little 30-second riffings.”
“That was really good because I sent that through, and was like ‘Here’s a bunch of nothing, but let’s just keep it in a file.’ And Andrew (Swayze, vocals) was like ‘Oh my God, I love that!’, recorded vocals on it, and “He Is Dead” was written straight up from that.”
It was around this point in the writing process that Ben moved to Melbourne, everyone else remaining in Tasmania, so their new workflow was perfectly suited to long distance writing and producing.
Ben speaks for a moment about how the writing process can sometimes have him exploring multiple versions, options, revisions, only to end up back at that same original idea.
“But I’ve spent so many years overthinking things, and I’m kind of at that point where ‘That sounds great’, definitely massage it, play around with it, but not go overboard. If you like what you’re doing to begin with, that’s probably the right answer.”
Let’s Live a Life Better Than This was self produced, the band choosing to keep those executive decisions in-house.
“There was definitely talks,” Ben explains. “We worked with Dean Tuza on the first record, and I learnt so much from him, definitely in a recording sense and a songwriting sense. I think we were all thinking ‘Oh, it’d be great to get Dean to do it again!’, but myself and Zach are both recording engineers, sometimes producers over the years, so we know know how to plug a microphone in, get a sound, ‘Lets’ just give it a go.’”
“If it didn’t work out after a couple of songs, we probably would’ve got someone in,” Ben says with a smile. “But we were just really happy with what was going on.”
Producing yourself can be complicated as a songwriter, engineer and producer, you can carry the baggage of the songs, and the process can become murky, as Ben explains.
“I will mention as well, it was us producing the album, but we did have Kieran Daly and Chris Wright in the studio, engineering and having their hands in it a little bit. I wouldn’t want to miss mentioning them.”
“As far as songwriting goes, we did a lot of that before recording, but once again we would be throwing loop-based version of songs back and forth and playing with those heaps, but then we’d get in the studio and it’s like ‘Oh, now you’ve got the sound of a real drum kit.’ and that kinda changes things a little bit?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever worked on songs as hard as we did on this album.” states Ben with confidence. “There was tiny little… like changing the tambourine to off beat, like so much detail in the pre-production that there was a lot of changes [in recording]. It would be like ‘Oh, I’m playing a bassline and ‘Now I’m playing to a real drum kit, I can lock in.’”
Speaking to mixing specifically, Ben explains that they got Andy Savours (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Rina Sawayama, Arctic Monkeys) to handle that end of things – to great success!
They made sure they got sounds right at the source, also printing effects as they went so Andy could work with the sounds that the band had concocted.
“When we sent it to Andy to get mixed, he did a lot, but not a lot at the same time? It still sounds like what we sent him, but bigger and better and I think that’s a great way of doing it.”
“Again, everyone gets so lost, myself included, in spending so much time changing out snare samples, all that stuff. Especially ‘cause we (the band) aren’t in the same state, we don’t have time for that.”
Andy Savours
We dive a bit further into Andy’s mixing as the mixing process, thanks to modern technology, can have a greater and greater effect on the final sound.
“He definitely added his flair to it, which is great. I think “Anthropology” is a really good example, there’s a lot of subtle effects going on, I think transitioning between parts,” begins Ben. “We had a conversation with him on Zoom, and talked influences, and he’d heard some demos of the album, and within five minutes, we were like ‘Alright, he gets what we want to do.’”
The sonic aesthetic and ethos of music like A. Swayze & the Ghosts’ is such an important thing to retain, their punk roots could easily be stamped out with the wrong mixer.
With minimal notes to Andy, “Everything just came back amazing.” Ben states, beaming.
Finally, we speak to the overall process, asking about happy accidents that might’ve ended up on the record.
Ben grimaces as he begins to explain his own magical mishap.
“So, the last track on the album, “Before I Left”, has this big, almost techno outro, this big… can’t remember if it was 808, some classic dance kick drum comes in, and then it’s a noise-scape.” Ben explains.
“I was originally planning on playing an actual melodic part on my guitar, but I build guitar pedals, and I had messed something up in a reverb pedal. I kicked it on, and basically some wires crossed themselves, and I had this big huge oscillation thing, kinda like when you dime a feedback knob on a reverb, but just a lot more ethereal sounding, and that kind of informed that whole last section of that song for me.”
“It’s literally just a guitar through a somewhat broken reverb pedal. I ended up figuring out what was going on, putting it on a switch, kick that on and off, I’ll have to figure out how do it live.”
Let’s Live a Life Better Than This is out now. Keep up with the band here.
