Flesh & Blood (2014)

Get this album: CD Vinyl Record Music Playlist 9 Videos Spring To Come (Official Video) 4:19 Livin’ In The City (Official Video) 3:36 Only One (Official Video) 3:58 How You Sleep At Night (Official Video) 4:20 Flesh & Blood: The Songs / Part 1 2:48 Flesh & Blood: The Songs / Part 2 2:06 Flesh & Blood: The Songs / Part 3 3:18 Flesh & Blood: The Songs / Part 4 3:03 Flesh & Blood – The Songs Part 5 3:11 Tracklist & Lyrics 1. Spring to Come – 4:132. Livin in the City – 3:283. Cold Wind – 4:574. Bullet Girl – 5:205. Devil Woman – 3:006. Blame It On Me – 6:087. Only One – 3:398. Young and Wild – 5:369. Wings Are Wide – 5:5110. How You Sleep at Night – 4:1311. You’re Free – 5:33 Credits Recorded The Compound, Fremantle – 2013 John Butler – Vocals, Guitars, Wurlitzer, E-BowBryon Luiters – Bass, Vocals, Moog bass, Synths, Organ, Wurlitzer, Clavinet, Upright Piano, RhodesNicky Bomba – Drums, Percussion, Vocals, Steel PansGrant Gerathy – Drums, Vocals on track 10 Additional Info Recorded at The Compound, Butler’s studio in Fremantle (Australia), FLESH & BLOOD took a mere 20 days to record and though beautifully structured in sonic terms there is a rawness and honesty to the album that reflects the brevity of its laying down. There’s something really exciting about that moment when you’re writing a song and it’s flowing and you stand back and look at it and hear it and feel like it explains things that you’ve been trying to explain all your life, or it expresses something that feels universal. After contributing a large portion of work towards the album, Nicky Bomba eventually left The Compound and the Trio to focus on his own Melbourne Ska Orchestra project and was replaced by Grant Gerathy. Flesh & Blood was produced by Jan Skubiszewski and features a vocal duet with Ainslie Wills. Butler spoke about the song process in an interview during the band’s US tour:But a lot of these songs on this album I kind of magpied. Magpies are this bird in Australia that takes shiny things from anywhere and builds its nest, and so that’s kind of what I do. I’ll take a little of my own experience of having some heavy party time with certain friends, and then I’ll hear some other stories about addicts or other intense relationships. I’ll put them into the mixing pot and make up these characters to explore different possibilities and emotional landscapes.Of the approach, Butler saysWe wanted the grooves to get deeper and thicker and as a songwriter I wanted the songs to be a lot more guttural and fleshier. I wanted to smell it and feel it a bit more. And my voice to be more convincing. JB’s Track by track introduction to the songs on “Flesh & Blood” Blame It On Me started out as Lay It on Me, as in ‘give me your truth’ but I couldn’t get enough traction with that to reveal the bones. So it changed to Blame It On Me and I kinda wrote from this point of view of a deity speaking to humans going, ‘how is it that you believe in me when it’s all working for you but when it’s not, you blame me? When really, you make your own bed and you need to sleep in it’. Bullet Girl is about a couple who are in that stage of their life where everything is hot and heavy. And dramatic. And angsty. When it’s good, it’s good and when it’s bad it’s bad. But at the same time they are catalysts for each other; the chemistry between them is like a hot fire. It burns bright and it’s exciting… but it’s destructive and they look back with some regret. Cold Wind was inspired by a 4WD trip I took from Freo through the guts of the desert to Uluru, where we stayed in an Aboriginal community called Mutitjulu near Ayers Rock. I’d seen footage of a man named Uncle Bob Randall, an indigenous elder who is a great thinker and philosopher who was a member of the stolen generation. We met Bob and his wife Barbara and stayed in a caravan for a couple of nights and listened to his stories, of being taken away from his mother, the hardship and things that he came up against as an individual, of indigenous inequality and injustice. A really cold wind would come across the camp every morning at 8am – really hard and relentless. And he would say, ‘leave! Pack up and get out of my country!’ (laughs). The mixture of those two things made Cold Wind. Devil Woman sprang up from a jam period we had for a month where I didn’t bring any of my songs to the table, we just threw musical ideas into a very open and fresh pot. Nicky came to this one jam with these Ethiopian rhythms and instantly Africa was in the room. It blossomed into this African/R&B/bluegrass thing. Devil Woman? I found another guy in the bed and this woman is killing me. I want her to get away from me before I do something I regret. How You Sleep at Night is probably one of my more exciting songwriting moments. I wrote it and was having one of those, ‘this is one of the best things I’ve done’ moments. I was quite chuffed with myself. Then I had a dream where I’m playing the song to my manager Phil, just on GarageBand, but there’s a full video with it and the production is completely different, there’s the same melody, but different chords. So I’m listening to this song that I was so happy with, that I had written over the previous three months completely flipped and I just wake up and go, ‘wow, that was cool’. So I got up and worked out the chords. So the next day we’re at rehearsal and we were going to do the original version but Grant and Byron were like, ‘no man, let’s do the dream version first’. Four takes later it was done. It came up like the dream and where it didn’t, it was better. It never happens like that; I worked on