A good number of the songs are written from third-person perspective: Midlife Crisis, Stop Messing Around, It’s Easier to Harden a Broken Heart . . . You stand outside of a situation as a critical observer. Is that simply an easier viewpoint from which to write?

GD: The omniscient third person . . . Yeah. It’s one I’ve this year been quite taken with and have been using quite a lot. So the next album will have quite a lot of songs written from that perspective.

DS: You talked about the God-camera, didn’t you. And not preaching . . .

GD: Yeah. It’s a nice way of doing things because you don’t get involved, you just lay the person or character out in front of you. It’s Easier To Harden A Broken Heart was an observation of someone that I knew and that’s exactly what happened to her – she got dumped and just started sleeping around as if it were easier to harden her heart than to heal it. And I think that’s one of the things you’re always looking for in a song, something that’s universal. Maybe we all do that in some measure when something goes bad – we beat ourselves up in some way, shape or form for a period of time. That’s that thing about emotion – you should be able to quantify it if you have a decent think about people you know who’ve had crises in their lives. Do they beat themselves up? Sure. They beat themselves to death, sometimes. And that’s in the album, too. With Tragic Boy, the intro and outro were actually written in 1981 and I kept going to Stu [Harwood] ‘You weren’t even born when I started writing this song.’ So again, it had sat around for years because I couldn’t figure out how to finish it. It was one of those symphonic-ish numbers in the way it’s organised. It was kind of only by doing research for the book I’ve been doing about the Dunedin Sound that I started analysing my own music again, going ‘OK, this is how you managed to get It Was Raining to work and that was a symphonic thing, so you need to do something similar with this if you’re going to finish it’, which I did. But it’s about people who, back in the day when the Dunedin Sound began, couldn’t work out why all these bands were getting all the attention while they weren’t. That bitter and twisted thing you get with the also-rans in the music world.


How did the cover artwork for the album come together? It’s an interesting image to have chosen.

GD: There’s a bunch of silly reasons for choosing it that university people will probably pick up on. What I was thinking of doing also was getting a Teen Advisory thing, one of those stickers to put on it, but I never got around to doing it. But that was part of the whole theme of acknowledging that I’m a grandfather, for God’s sake, and my world view is my world view about certain things, and it is cynical and grumpy about certain things. But I’ve lived long enough for a whole lot of horrible things to have happened and rather than sweep them under the carpet somebody musically has to try and come to grips with them and make a piece of music that responds to some of those things. That doesn’t necessarily make for palatable listening – it’s not entertainment, so to speak. And the music’s hard work. It’s intended to be. Again, working on the book I’ve been writing, the Dunedin Sound music is hard work, it’s complicated compared with most pop music. It’s all bent out of shape, for a start off. It’s not easy-to-digest four-bar phrases that you can dance to – it’s all over the show. That’s the tradition I came out of and it’s the tradition I still work in. Music that is hopefully going to provide some challenges because there’s plenty of music in the world that doesn’t. The whole theme of the record is really that we can’t be who we’re not. We’re not 19 with shitloads of time on our hands any more. We can’t tour America and we can’t do this and that. But it’s about saying let’s not let all the can’ts mean that we don’t. Let’s objectify all the strengths that we’ve got – and I’ve got quite a lot of strengths in terms of arranging and thinking about stuff away from instruments. It has lots of advantages because you don’t get locked into default settings with your fingers on the guitar lines. They’re considered on the basis of how they should be compositionally, not how easy it is to play them. That’s all good. That’s a strength. Darren and Russ can read which means we can do a certain amount of stuff remotely – good. That’s a strength. Let’s see how far our strengths will take us. And they’ve taken us pretty well far, and now we’ll sit back, listen to it and reassess and go ‘OK, do you want to do another one?’ Yeah. Russ is up for it – he’s already working on rehearsing the bass lines for a few different songs. Darren’s up for it. We’ll do a few things differently but we’ll be doing a lot of things the same, at least in terms of the initial writing in virtual land to begin with because I think it works well as a writing process.


It’s fascinating that we’re not only having a discussion about the first Verlaines album proper in 10 years, we’re also talking about the next one. Why the wait of 10 years? Was it purely that you had a bad experience with Hammers and Anvils?

GD: Well, it slowed me down a bit. But to be honest, getting the course up and running in those first years was pretty hard work. It took up so much of my focus. And no matter what happens the students take a lot of your creative energy because you’re creating with them all the time. You’re helping them to write songs in the studio and a lot of that creative energy gets dissipated, I guess. They take it from you, which is fine.

DS: It’s also inspiring, in its own way. I mean, interestingly enough all four of us ended up being teachers in some way. But it also keeps you in the loop and keeps you working. I ended up playing with some of the students and it’s kind of a rebirth, being in a band and being 12 years older than everyone else in the band. They just treat you like one of the guys, which is really nice because you feel like a bit of an old prick.

GD: The culture of the city because of the course is not at all ageist. Stu from the Tweeks did the engineering. Anthony Lander did backing vocals on a couple of tracks and Libby Hamilton, a third-year student, sang some vocals on a track. We’re trying to build a research cluster, really, whereby us and our alumni keep in contact with each other and when it comes time, like at the moment when the Tweeks have just sent me a demo of their next album, I can send some criticism. It’s the hardest thing to access in the world – decent criticism from people who can offer it. Hopefully, in the future we’re going to be able to set up a thing whereby people like Simon Comber and the Tweeks guys and Tom Healy and Hannah Curwood, people who are all active and making records, can share ideas and keep that whole criticism thing going. It’s such an important part of the creative process. We all get it, you know? Let’s face it, this record’s going to come out and it’s going to have one to five stars. It gets rated. Every song on every record is either an A, B or C-list song. It’s the flagship you’re going to do the video for, a good solid album track, or it’s filler to make up the numbers. We’re constantly in the process with every record we listen to of categorising songs that way. And we don’t do it just on no basis whatsoever. There are criteria somewhere. My job as a teacher is to try and codify as best I can what some of those criteria are. A lot of the time, they’re very vague things because they are square-peg, round-hole things. It’s just the nature of the creative process.


OK. But I’ll ask the question again – why now? Wasn’t there ever a time in your mid when the Verlaines didn’t exist any more?

GD: No, not particularly. I did Hammers and Anvils out of convenience because I was in Auckland, Darren was overseas . . .

DS: Which is why we kind of dissolved after Over The Moon. We all did end up going our geographically separate ways. We looked at it and we thought, you know, how many reasons do we have to keep doing this? We all had to get on with our lives, really. We’d put our lives on hold to keep doing it but then you sort of had to get on with it, really. We were getting to that stage.


Related artists: Graeme Downes, The Verlaines

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