Ezekiel RodofiliSomewhat recently Last Earthfall released their album, Bad Guys in Good Guises. I was fortunate enough to talk with David Farmer of Last Earthfall about the album and Last Earthfall things.
Last Earthfall’s launch show for the album is this Sunday. Tickets are available here.
—
Ez: Last Earthfall. That’s your band.
David: That’s my band.
Ez: Is this really gonna be the last time that Earth falls?
David: So in true arty form, Last Earthfall is taken from a poem that I like by Adelaide Crapsey, who was an American poet in the nineteenth century, I think. It’s taken from the end of a poem which is very much about loss and relationships, things like that. The last lines are:
Is it a still quick love that hear, oh hears,
The last earth fall, the sound of vanishing feet?
So it’s pretty final, but we’re very much at the beginning of this thing that’s starting. I recorded the album two years ago and I’ve always had that name, that moniker in mind for this stuff that I’ve been writing for a long time.
I recorded it immediately before my son was born, and the recording was very much precipitated by the imminent arrival of my son cause I was like “When am I gonna do this? I need to get these out”. I was still writing at the time.
The songs range from when I was twenty-four. “Taking up Smoking” was written when I was Twenty-four. “Far Beyond Wide-Eyed” was written in 2022 or ’23. My son was about to be born and I just thought “Now is the moment and I’m gonna do it” and I did it with the help of some amazing engineers, masterers and musicians, and that’s evolved into this piece of work that I’m pretty proud of and I think hits home in a lot of ways I wanted it to hit home.
It’s gonna be launched with a live show which I wasn’t sure would actually happen because, among other reasons, I wasn’t sure how my life would change after my son was born. I recorded the album because I wasn’t sure how my life was gonna change. The fact that I’m still making music and working towards live shows and writing is very gratifying, so… yeah. It’s Last Earthfall, and the vibe is one of finality and resolution. But in contrast, we’re very much at the beginning, I would say.
Ez: What has it been like carrying this for as long as you have, both before and after your child was born?
David: I’ve been writing music a long time and that’s often been in collaboration with other people, but broadly speaking, although I’ve been sitting on these songs for a long time, I’ve been pretty active as a musician, but I’ve always been active in other people’s bands. Most recently I played in a band called DriveTime Commute which is like a math-punk band. They were very active in Melbourne for like five, six years from 2012, 13 onward.
I was never the person who was synthesising the music. I was always the person coming up with arrangement ideas, or really coming into the fore in the studio and contributing to the presentation of the music rather than the ideas of the music.
So I guess there were a couple of things: There was having the music and recording setup at home, and just chipping away at things of my own design and trying to get them sounding better and better, and then of course there was lockdown where there was just a period of “Well I’m in my house and I have a bunch of music equipment and I have these songs, so I could actually just demo it”. That was when it kind of first came to light, I guess; doing it as a thing, as a unit. It became a case of not just “Oh, I’ve got these songs and they’re written on guitar and I’ve got some demos”. It was “Okay let’s write the demos now so that they are set out to record so I can export the stems so we can go into a studio and actually record them”.
When my son was about to be born, it became a case of… I mean, it’s quite an existential kind of time, when your kid’s coming. Like I said before, I wasn’t sure how my life was gonna change and I felt like I had this thing I just had to get out of me, so carrying it before my son was born was kind of slow and it kind of ramped up. It was exponential. Right when my son was born it kind of tipped into the next gravity pit.
It was mixed and mastered in the early months of his life and I sat on it for about a year, just because that was a pretty intense time with other priorities, but as soon as we kind of peaked our heads above the parapet to try and live a bit again, it was on the top of my mind to get this thing out. I was talking to Jared Roberts, who is the drummer on the record and in the live band, and he was very keen to be involved with the recording of the album, and when the album was produced he was very keen on starting the live act.
So it’s kind of morphed from this noodly thing to an intense, existential thing, to this thing that was done and I didn’t know what was going to happen to it, to this quite exciting, open-ended thing that I’m not sure what’s going to happen next.
When I was getting mixes, that was immediately after my kid was born and the two things were so tied up in one-another. The record was mixed by Steve Durose who’s based in England, so I was getting mixes at weird times, so I’d be getting up at 2 or 3 in the morning to get a bottle and I would have an email with a mix in it, so I’d get my headphones on and making a bottle and listening to this mix and getting excited about it, and then going back and doing the baby thing, and then sneaking out to listen to the end of the mix. It was very cool.
Ez: It was kind of heavy up until a point, and life congealed with it but it became easier to handle, even though it was weird.
David: It was weird and existential and that precipitated the making of the art. Now that the art exists, I’m just so excited about the fact that it exists and that we can spring off the back of it to do a show and maybe more shows, and getting back in the studio with musicians again has been fun.
Ez: When you’ve been listening back to it, are you hearing the time that it took to create?
David: I think yes and no. I was concerned about that; the time span these songs were written was so long, and the person that wrote a lot of these songs was so different at various times in his life – that person being me. I was concerned they wouldn’t sound cohesive, and I think by virtue of the fact they were recorded over a short period of time in the same place with the same tools, kind of lends itself to sounding like a complete album.
When it came to getting the mix done, I think so much vibe was brought to it at that stage and so much unification of the songs happened at that stage.
More conceptually, I think I can hear – certainly lyrically – the fact that I was a different person when I wrote a lot of these songs. I’m a strong believer in the cohesion of the album; there being some kind of common thread through everything, and I think there’s some of that in there even though it’s a guy at different a different point in his life, I think there’s an element of cognitive dissonance in every song. By that I mean there’s an element of someone believing that they are a certain way and then being presented with the reality that conflicts with that, and having to deal with that. That I think is a fairly constant thing throughout the album, lyrically, if that makes sense.
Ez: It does, and that comes with realisation through age, right? When you’re in the present you think you’re a certain way, and when you get older you reflect back on that time and you think “Oh, I’m better now”.
David: But then ten years later…
Ez: *laughs*
David: I definitely think that. When I listen back to the record I hear the different phases of me, but at the same time there was a temptation to revise the lyrics and make it all about now, but I thought “No”. This was written by me at a certain time. A snapshot of that time and the sentiments being expressed was real, and I hope it comes across that way and people vibe with it for that reason.
Ez: Let’s talk about the sound of Last Earthfall, which I believe is described as – if I remember rightly – somewhat indie, somewhat post-rock, somewhat Americana?
David: Yeah. I think the way I pitch it is it’s the progressive Americana album that precisely no one in the world was clamouring for.
Ez: So how do you think it compares, relative to the work of Scotland’s favourite band, U2?
David: That would be Ireland, wouldn’t it? *laughs*
Ez: Sorry. I couldn’t resist.
David: Are you familiar with the urban legend of U2 playing in Glasgow? The finger snapping?
Ez: I am.
David: If my music ends up in anything as apocryphal and zeitgeisty as that story, I’ll be very pleased. Let’s put it that way.
Ez: Could Last Earthfall have formulated and happened in a place like Glasgow?
David: My background is a bit weird. I was born in Glasgow but I lived in America until I was about ten. My parents split so I had one in Scotland and one in America, so I moved back to Scotland but I was back in America every summer ’til I was about twenty-three, twenty-four.
So could Last Earthfall have come about purely in Glasgow? Maybe not. I find Glasgow sometimes quite unforgiving of people that, say, change the way they speak when they leave. There’s almost a badge of pride if you went away elsewhere and you came back and you sound the same, despite the fact that for the intervening years you need to be understood by people and may need to change the way you speak to get along well in life.
So I don’t know, because for me the American influences are quite strong, sound-wise and certainly lyrically. America for me because it occupied such a formative period of my life, is almost synonymous with nostalgia to me in some ways. Hence the reason you’ll hear right now, my accent is quite Scottish, but depending on who I’m talking to and what about, it can become quite American as well, and the American accent features quite a lot on the record. Because the songs span a broad period of my life and some of the themes are nostalgic and some of the spoken word elements I often adopt the American accent just because it feels like the character of the thing that’s being expressed at the time.
I don’t think that big American influence would have come across in the same way.
Ez: How was the process of finding the right sounds?
David: I’m a strong believer in limiting options. I think art within limitations and art outside of limitations is the difference between the Star Wars original trilogy and the prequels. I’m a strong believer in art through adversity.
I almost let the sound be guided by what I had available to me, and what I had was a nice American-made amplifier and guitar, and my voice and expertise in finding the sound. It was very much a case of “here are the tools that I have and I’m going into a studio at this period of time, this is the period of time we have to do this. Any problems we have that that are going to blow out the timeline, we just deal with and do what we can do in that time”. The sound was very much a product of that kind of process. We didn’t use amp modelling or anything like that because I wanted it to be limited. I wanted to use the tools that I had to solve the problem in front of me in that moment.
So the sound was very much a product of that and the people I was privileged to work with.
Ez: So you didn’t spend much time thinking about it.
David: Yeah. Get in, get out, and from a guitar perspective… the secret to good guitar tone is often take good guitar. Plug into good amp. Play. So I kind of worked within that ethos as well.
We played with sounds for maybe half a day to find something that was gonna work ’cause we were going to be working concertedly for I think ten or twelve days. Once we had something that sounded good it was like “Alright let’s do it. Let’s go, and we’ll just deal with problems as they come up.
Ez: What about vocals? Because if I were to bet, you were most self-conscious about your vocals.
David: That’s a fair assessment. We recorded guitar first because I was most confident about that. Then we moved on to bass, and we did vocals last. I’ve sung and I’ve sung live before, and I’ve sung confidently at times. I was self-conscious about vocals going into the recording because I’d never sung that concertedly for it, so I think we’d done two or three days, so I was concerned with getting the level of intensity required without blowing my voice. I also didn’t want things to be too “crotch-grabby” in the vocal delivery. I didn’t want too many Hetfield “Yeahs”, or David Lee Roth-isms, not because they’re not amazing performers, but there was something…
I think an influence for me would’ve been the earlier, mid-era Porcupine Tree stuff. There was this kind of sad geek to Wilson’s delivery in those songs that I really like and admire. Similarly I’m a big fan of Tom Waits, who can have a kind of laconic, rooted delivery that’s very story teller-ish. I was trying to capture these things, but you’re absolutely right; it was the element I was most worried about.
Ez: Are you happy with how it turned out?
David: Yeah. I’m happy with the work I did, for sure. It was a process and that was probably the more fraught part of the process, but it came out the way I wanted and I had a lot of reassurance from the people around me which was very helpful. I worked with a really good engineer called Julian Renzo in Melbourne, and he was very encouraging.
Hopefully it’s something distinctive and cool, and hopefully it sits in there with everything else.
Ez: In coming to actually record and perform them, were you concerned about the dichotomy between the existence of them in the present and in a sense returning to the past and trying to bring forward the legitimacy of those feelings as an older person?
David: When I performed the vocals in particular, I wanted to honour the sentiment of the person I was. With a song like “Taking up Smoking” which is very earnest and was written when I was twenty-four; I’m now forty. I didn’t want it to come across as ironic or anything like that. I wanted to express the sentiment of that person.
I wanted to honour the sentiment that was present in the songs when I wrote it in the first place. I needed something to unify, conceptually, the album and that;s probably the thing I tried to do that with. Honouring each of these phases; these little moments of truth as best I could.
Songs about relationships, cognitive dissonance where an image of you that differs from the way that you feel is presented and you have to deal with that; I thought that was worth honouring and I thought it was more interesting to honour it that way than try to retcon it as something I planned all along, as a concept album.
Ez: We’ll touch on performing live.
How many blast beats?
David: With Jared, you never know.
Ez: How many solos?
David: A lot of solos. Drum solos, or real solos?
Ez: If we’re talking about real solos, it’s all bass, right?
David: *laughs* Yeah! Yeah yeah yeah. “Derek smalls on the bass, he wrote this”.
Ez: Are you gonna pull out the bagpipes at any point and then just start aggressively blasting at people? Mic it up with a metal zone and then just drone drone drone at the audience. Just a full bagpipe drone solo.
David: Yeah. Just absolutely no touching of the chanter whatsoever; just drone. I like that idea. I mean, I can’t stand bagpipes, but I believe that’s a legitimate use case.
Ez: I don’t believe that you can’t stand bagpipes. You’re from Scotland.
David: I can’t stand them. They make me think of tartan and shortbread. They make me think of that clichéd depiction of Scotland. I hate them. I don’t think they sound particularly nice, and they are loud. They are loud, man. Bagpipes are loud and twee.
They have a place. If you’re organising a wedding, or if you’re trying to terrify your opponents in battle, then they have an absolute place. But I don’t put a lot of bagpipe music on my stereo in the evening when I’m doing a bit of cooking and having a glass of beer.
Ez: Well, you know, playing a gig is a bit like a battle between you and the audience. You need to win the audience, so why not just whip out the bagpipes and start droning?
David: Oh yeah. Terrify them into submission.
Ez: So, cultural offense aside, are you planning on doing the songs exact, or changing it up?
David: Largely they’re pretty faithful to the record. The reason I’m able to do that is a fewfold. One of of the contributing reasons is that Jared Roberts is my drummer and there’s no question of him not being able to do anything because he can play everything. Standing on his head, actually. He’s a great musician. He learned the songs within a period of five weeks. He learned the drum parts very quickly, and he can do it live and he has a great ear and a great contributor.
We’ve got a great bass player, Basil Yu who used to play with me in DriveTime Commute, he’s great. The last piece of the puzzle is a guy called Thomas Baud, who plays electric acoustic guitar, and piano. He’s a dynamite guy and an amazing musician, and it’s not an underestimation to say that he’s become the backbone of some of the live arrangements. We’ve got him switching from acoustic electric to piano in the same song. He’s learned the parts in a short period of time, and he’s enabled me to be doing whatever it is I need to be doing in that moment.
They’re arranged a little bit as as it stands I’m doing most of the lead guitar and the vocals, and doing those simultaneously is occasionally challenging. But largely it’s pretty straight, because I have great musicians on side and we have the luxury of doing that, so we’re gonna do it.