Got His Mojo Working.

A few months back we decided to ask a few artists to write about the experience of making their current album. Along the way we’ve heard from Chris Pickering and John Kennedy. Now we get to read the thoughts of the very accomplished Andrew Petersen. Andrew earned his stripes in bands such as Indigo Husk and Shutterspeed. Now he’s about to launch his debut solo album, The Universe And Its Sense of Humour.

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Andrew Petersen and I write songs. Some are pretty good. Some don’t stack up too great but hey  -  you can’t win ‘em all right? I do try though; sometimes some songs get ruined in the writing of them if you know what I mean. Maybe it’s my own conscious involvement in the song’s construction that’s the problem, who knows? Anyway, regardless of how, the end result is that sometimes, something between the original germ of the idea and the finished outcome goes...awry. Not long ago I finished making my first solo album. It’s called The Universe And Its Sense of Humour. Basically the one goal I had before making it was to assemble a bunch of songs that didn’t somehow go... awry. I made lists of the songs in contention  -  endless lists, I trawled through old demos and working tapes, I compiled CD’s of tracks and sent them to my friends to get their opinions of what songs they thought were worth pursuing. I tabled their replies. And I wrote. And I discarded. And wrote some more. Before I went anywhere near a studio or a microphone I wanted to know that I was creating a record whereby the finished entity was going to be made up of individual songs that I, in the future, would never want to skip past.

I failed in that.

There are 11 tracks on Universe. One of them is a cover of a great 60’s tune called ‘Soul Deep’. I wrote the other 10. At the time of writing this there are two songs I know I would probably skip over. But I’m not going to name names. Of course I knew that what I was trying to do was near impossible (CD’s themselves just make it so damn easy to skip tracks - unlike old vinyl releases) because, well, personal taste means you just like some songs more than others. Hell, I even skip tracks on Beatles records from time to time. The point is I wanted to make a record I at least would be comfortable hearing, no matter when or how I encountered it in the future.

But tell us something we don’t know right? Surely everyone thinks that way. Well I’m sure most folks who are bewitched enough to want a make a record do, but...sometimes you think you have the material and it’s not until much, much later you find out...you really don’t or didn’t. Personal experience taught me that. In fact, I hated the record I made before Universe so profoundly, so God damned profusely, that pretty much every step in the making of Universe was undertaken to ensure it was the polar opposite of the junk that had preceded it. Thus, the new album was to be more acoustic in nature, more human, warmer sounding. I wanted it beautifully produced (and Ian Thompson sure did a fantastic job of ensuring that). Apart from the drums, everything was recorded in a bedroom in Ian’s apartment. Save one bass part, I’d never worked with any of the musicians involved before. The same goes for the artwork side of things. It was mixed at Magoo’s house in Fernvale and mastered in Nashville. There’s no pick slide on the first track. Instead of trying to please others, I was trying to please myself and myself alone. And while the previous record that shall remain nameless was done in about two weeks, Universe took well over two years to make.

Now I’m not the world’s most patient individual, so I did find the time we took to make the record rather...erm...character building. But Ian and I figured that while the budget was decidedly less than shoestring, we could make up for those restraints with time, diligence and attention to detail. We slaved over it. And the end result is, to my ears, a record that - sonically at least - sounds nothing less than wonderful over its entire 44 minutes running time. So there are a couple of my songs on the record that at this point I might not like as much as the others  - still, eight (great songs) out of 10 is a damn good strike rate. I plan to make another record later this year and the goal will be the same  -  great sounding and all killer no filler. So I’m writing again and the results are pleasing thus far. But there’s a long way to go. Writing a song is easy, but writing a good song is hard. And of course writing songs and then recording them in a way that I’ll want to listen to well into the future is much harder still. It’s challenging. I find it exhausting sometimes. But man, I just damn well love it.

The Universe And Its Sense Of Humour is available now from Rockinghorse Records and Egg Records Brisbane. You can also purchase downloadable copies from iTunes and CD baby.

ENDS