Interview with Michael Brown (Tracer)

MER:

Your debut album, Spaces in Between, is due for release in early October. You must be looking forward to finally getting your first album released worldwide …

Michael:

Yeah, of course! We have been playing together for nearly 10 years, and I’ve been playing guitar for 20! The culmination of hard work has come through on this album. It’s really exciting for us. We’re just three guys who love our music and have put everything we’ve ever had into it and it’s great to see it finally paying off. Well, not really PAYING, because we’re still broke! Ha ha!

MER:

How long did the writing and recording process take?

Michael:

We had a bunch of songs ready to go from the road and our back catalog and then we wrote a bunch more when we got back from our 2010 European tour. After 2 weeks of rehearsing, pre-production, and writing all day, we had about 15 of our best songs ready to record. I think we tracked all of it in about 2 months and the mixing was done on and off for about 2-3 months. We all still had jobs then and had to record around work schedules but we got it all done (over-Christmas as well) in about 5 months.

MER:

Is the album made up of mainly songs that you’ve been playing live for a few years now or did you write some specifically for the album?

Michael:

We constantly write, whether it’s in rehearsal, jams or on the road, so there is always a back catalog of complete songs or half finished songs or riffs. A few we had been playing for a while. “Too Much”, “Devil Ride”, “Voice In Rain”, “Dead Inside”, and “Save My Breath” were all songs that had been written earlier and we were playing them live.

“Walk Alone” is a song off our very first EP that we decided earned the right to be re-recorded, but tracks like “Push”, “Spaces In Between”, “All In My Head”, and “Won’t Let It Die” were all written in that two weeks before we were booked into the studio. It was a really great time where we could hang out every day and the creativity was just bouncing off the walls. It was the quickest we’d ever written and some of the best songs came out of the pressure of having to write because we were booked in the studio! Some of the lyrics I was re-writing as we were tracking!

MER:

For those that have been in your live set for a while, did you end up making many changes to the arrangements in the studio?

Michael:

We put all our songs through a rigorous pre-production stage before we ever play them live and that usually irons out the boring bits and keeps the vibe of the song throughout the full length of a song. We did try to cut down some of the epic jams that sometimes manifest themselves live.

We do like to have a little bit of a guitar hero solo or bass weedle every now and again live and sometimes I don’t think it comes across as good on record, so we trimmed the fat a bit and tried to keep the guitar wank tasteful. The thing we were conscious of was never losing the bones of the song under a mountain of overdubs. We still had to play the songs live and wanted the sound to reflect the power of three dudes cranking it up to 11 instead of an orchestra of guitars and Queen-like vocal overdubs.

MER:

Do you have much material written and ready for future albums?

Michael:

Yeah, there are a few songs ready to go and a few more in the pipeline. I’ve got some new guitars that I used on the recording that I’m trying to explore and there’s a bunch of riffs just itching to become songs on those suckers! I think the band learned so much after recording that we’re getting super eager to jump back into the studio and test out all our new recording theories or change the processes we used to get certain sounds that we can start writing immediately! I can’t wait to get back into the studio and hopefully we can keep upgrading studios, engineers, and producers until we get the ultimate Tracer album!

MER:

As well as playing, writing, and co-producing the album, you also designed the artwork for the cover. Can you talk about the design concept?

Michael:

We were after something simple and iconic, but also something thought-provoking. A “more than meets the eye” type of thing. We’d also settled on the name of the album being Spaces In Between and we kept coming back to the vast spaces of the Australian desert. We tried to create or search for an image that reflected that.

I used to waste as much time as possible in my old job and thechive.com was perfect for that (until they blacklisted the site ha ha!) and I found the sand sculpture that is now on the cover. It’s by a guy in the States called Carl Jara and when we first saw it we all just knew that it was the one. The title of the album is kind of like saying look beyond the obvious and we didn’t want the cover to be too obvious as to what style of music we were. We wanted people to think that looks and sounds cool but there is more to it than just the obvious … plus it looks fuckin’ cool!

MER:

Listening to the album, there’s certainly elements of Stoner bands like Queens of the Stone Age in there along with a more traditional Classic Rock feel. It’s a very different sound to the other bands from your homeland. Who were your main influences when you were growing up?

Michael:

That’s a huge list! Leigh and I started listening to Blues all the way back to Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. That led to Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix and that went onto Cream and Led Zeppelin. Then we started to go through high school and we were hearing Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

It didn’t take us long to link that 50’s Blues, 70’s Rock, and 90’s Grunge stuff together. The thing I remember most about my guitar teacher and maybe more so from my Dad’s love of music, was music HAS to have soul. If it isn’t from the heart, or an emotional outpour of some kind, it usually fails to connect and I think all those bands have that soul. I mean “Rain Song” by Zeppelin can make you cry before the vocals even come in and something like “Fell On Black Days” by Soundgarden can get you depressed as shit!

MER:

You and Leigh, you are brothers who played together in Blues bands in the early 2000’s. Do you still look to those classic Blues artists to provide the basis of your music?

Michael:

Yeah, the Blues will never die within us. I still listen to SRV in absolute wonderment at his power and emotion in his guitar playing. Then Howlin’ Wolf might come on my iPod and I can’t get over the passion in his voice. Rock ‘n’ Roll owes so much to Blues and if you look at bands like The White Stripes and Black Keys, their sound is steeped firmly in the Blues, but they’ve taken it to another place and it sounds killer!

MER:

You manage to combine very heavy riffs with strong melodies, which some other heavier bands seem to overlook. Was retaining a strong sense of melody important in your songwriting?

Michael:

Yeah, that’s definitely important in our song writing. To me there’s nothing worse than hearing a massive Stoner riff that gets your head nodding on the “rock fingers” in the air only to be followed up by a melody that falls flat. It’s the quickest way to ruin a wicked riff. I love the way Josh Homme uses these cool kinda quirky melodies with QOTSA and Kurt Cobain has really poppy and almost beautiful melodies in Nirvana. I think it might come from listening to a lot of Beatles stuff … or maybe just getting bored with the same old melodies. We like to hear something different and we don’t ever say “that’ll do.” If something doesn’t completely rock then we work on it until it does!

MER:

Being brothers in a band, you’ve obviously grown up together and know each other inside out. You can basically throw ideas around free in the knowledge that you’ll get an honest reaction and without feeling inhibited. Do you think that this helps you with your song writing in that you can discuss musical ideas without holding back?

Michael:

We all have a good dynamic with each other … not just us brothers. I mean Leigh and Andre will be the first two people I’ll call up if I want to go out for the night. And when we write it’s all three of bouncing ideas around. No right or wrong answer and we make sure to at least try every idea because you never know when you’ll strike gold. It’s the only way it can work! If you’re not into the song or hate a certain part, you’re never going to give it 100%. Sure there are times when we disagree or one of us gets stubborn on a certain part of the song or the song goes to shit for one reason or another, but we all work together really well and usually we’ll come out the end of it with a really cool song.

MER:

Were you parents supportive when you made it clear that a 9 to 5 job was not for you?

Michael:

Ha ha, our parents are great! They still let us live with them because we’re all broke (ha ha)! Both our parents are behind us all the way and I think they can see how hard we work to make the band become our full-time job! We all still have jobs that pay the bills, though, and until it becomes financially viable to just work in the band full-time we’ll have to keep working for the man.

MER:

You’ve got a huge UK and European tour lined up with Royal Republic. How did this come about?

Michael:

Our label has a great booking agent who has really done some great things for us. One day we got an email saying “How’d you like to tour with these guys?” We said, “Fuck yeah!” I’m sure there was a lot more to it than that, but we were stoked to be playing such a cool act at some really great venues.

MER:

You are quite different musically than Royal Republic, who is more of a Power Pop Rock’n’Roll band, yet you both seem to complement each other. Do you think that this will help to attract a wider audience and expose you to more fans than if you’d toured with a similar act?

Michael:

Yeah. We’ve found that European audiences are a little more open-minded to accept different genres, so I think it’ll be cool with them to hear a little Heavy Rock! Hopefully we get some Heavy Rockers that come to the show and also dig Royal Republic and hopefully some of their crowd digs us too. All we can do is get up on stage and do what we do best … rock the pants off the place!

MER:

Are you going to get anytime to take a look around while you’re there?

Michael:

I’m not sure. The itinerary looks pretty action-packed with shows and promo, but I’m sure we’ll see plenty of nightlife. We like to party after the show, and the day time will give us plenty of time to sleep. If the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben are still there at 3 in the morning, I’m sure I’ll cast a bleary eye over them! We got a good chance to be tourists on our 2009 and 2010 tours, so it doesn’t really bother me if we don’t see a great deal of the touristy stuff.

MER:

What have you got lined up after the tour is over?

Michael:

We get back to Australia in December and then I think we’ll do some Aussie touring in early 2012 and hopefully we’ll be back to see the lovely Europeans in your summer! I think at the end of 2012 we’ll start looking to record again and maybe we’ll expand our touring to other countries. So watch out for us, we’re coming for ya!

Tracer’s new album, Spaces In Between, was released by Cool Green Recordings on Monday October 3, 2011.

Check out Tracers new video, Too Much: