Recently touring the country celebrating the 10th anniversary of their debut album Divination, Byron Bay heavies In Hearts Wake celebrated their game-changing 2012 release in full alongside a sweltering lineup that included America’s Stay From The Path, as well as locals The Gloom In The Corner and Diamond Construct.
Fresh off some sold out shows and a raucous reception from crowds around the country for the Decade Of Divination Tour, In Hearts Wake vocalist Jake Taylor takes a deep dive into the album that started it all.
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WHAT DIVINATION MEANS AFTER ALL THIS TIME
I don’t have kids, but if I had children, Divination feels like the first born. Or perhaps the class of 2012 when you graduated something. And there’s a nostalgic, beautiful thing about us getting together to relive those parts that we had written together and played together then in our skin 10 years on. And then having people there that are part of that reunion too, it’s not just nostalgic, it’s also a celebration! It’s like honouring a person that doesn’t feel like it’s us. I can’t truly explain it, but we’re honouring the deer and the character of that record, and what that record, experience and time gave for all of us.
PERFORMING DIVINATION IN FULL 10 YEARS ON & CELEBRATING THE ANNIVERSARY WITH FANS IN A LIVE SETTING
It’s one hell of a privilege. I remember one of the days during the tour just walking to the venue, the show had already started and our hotel was just around the corner. I get out of the hotel, it’s an hour to showtime, and I’m walking past buskers on the street who are playing the most incredible music – and nobody’s watching them! And I was like: “wow, in my mind – that’s a musician.” We’re just making noise in there, it’s music of a different kind.
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But then I walked into this show, it’s a sold out show, and the fans were going crazy for Stray From The Path and it was just….wow, the privilege isn’t lost on me that we can turn up in Melbourne and play a record that came out 10 years ago. I had this trip out moment, it was me being momentarily out of the band and out of the experience, then stepping into it passing those buskers that made me realise how much this is a privilege and an opportunity.
And also to see those faces at that shows, some of them I hadn’t seen in 10 years, just crowd surfing and singing like Divination had just come out. If that record came out today, I don’t think it would be the same, it’s not of the time. But it speaks to a time that was special to people and to us.
THE ONGOING IMPACT OF DIVINATION ON THE IN HEARTS WAKE JOURNEY
The conceptual themes are definitely something that carried over for us, we’ve always been into that stuff. But when something works on a first record, you become more inclined, or it’s like a nudge because your creative choices were well received, and that’s encouraging. So, then the next time it feels like, “oh, we can lean into another theme that speaks loudly to us.”
In fact, “Winterfell” on Divination speaks about the earth speaking back to man, and it goes through this whole journey. I don’t think I’d listened to many songs where they’re speaking from the perspective of the Earth. It was a cool thing to explore for us at the time, and we really unpacked that theme on the record Earthwalker, carrying the theme of songs that embodied more of the feminine, the yin instead of the yang. Divination’s very yang with the stag, and it’s very punchy, apart from “Inertia” which has some down moments. Overall, Divination was encouraging, I won’t call it a push, more of an encouraging nudge forward to step into conceptual stuff.
THE ARCHETYPE TAROT CARDS DRIVING DIVINATION
The lyrics and the stories dictated what tarot cards were chosen for Divination. For each song, we looked at what the underlying archetype for each story was, or what was being said. With tarot cards, there’s things like the Cups and the Swords, it’s not your typical deck of cards. And then there’s the Archetype cards, which is what we went with. With the Ace Of Swords or cards like that – those get into the nitty gritty. For the Archetypes – you can see them in so many things. Look at Star Wars: The Magician is Luke, for example, and The Hermit I suppose would be Obi-Wan, and The Devil would be Darth Vader, representing fear.
These Archetypes can be found in almost any movie, and also in anything that we do in life to be honest. And they can be flavours of the two sometimes, but that’s what dictated which cards we included in Divination. And that also extended to our film clips, the Archetypes dictated the visuals for each song.
STANDOUT MOMENTS FROM THE DECADE OF DIVINATION TOUR
There are two things that are standouts for me from the tour. The first one was having the Master Chief from Halo onstage, it was so ridiculous. And we’d have a different Master Chief every night, friends getting in the outfit, so they all had different moves. And there’s no strict cues for when to go off stage, so that was always a laugh and quite funny and silly. You could only get away with that in our genre. Or maybe dubstep, or in some weird rave. That was just hilariously moronic.
And another moment was having Adrian Fitipaldes part of it. Fiti and I have been on the stage together so many times, we toured with Northlane back in the day around Australia a fair few times, so it wasn’t new to us to do that together after 10 years had passed. It was really an appreciation of how…I don’t wanna say “temporary” the moment was, because it wasn’t temporary, but we knew that it was not gonna happen like this again. Maybe, but unlikely ever again.
So, it had a special, unique rareness to it, and that definitely wasn’t lost on both of us. And it felt so natural and normal, largely because we’ve done it all before. And also, I wasn’t looking over, maybe in 20 years I would, but it wasn’t a weathered, grey headed, can-barely-move guy. We were both just like, “has any time passed at all?!” It was just special that we can pick up where we left off as friends and collaborate in that way on stage. And the crowd also actually knows all the words too, that’s cool!
FAN FAVOURITES DURING THE DECADE OF DIVINATION TOUR & THE ALBUM AS AN INADVERTENT 2012 TIME CAPSULE
All the songs were pretty equal, but for “Inertia” it was cool to hear how loud the crowd was singing, because you could actually hear them singing when the music was so quiet. That was really special. The songs later in the album weren’t written to be played live, and yet when we played them live – people still knew them all! It shows, I believe, that the album comes from a time when people would buy a CD or vinyl and listen to it as a full album. Nowadays it’s like: “what’s your most popular tracks?” And I may not have heard the end of an album because my Spotify probably goes out of the algorithm and doesn’t play it.
But with the shows, people knew what the flow-on effect of the next song was. And the album has this transition that we kept in the live show. The Divination release was around the end of the era of CDs, and it was a special time. We didn’t have iPhones, the iPhone 3 just came out, I think, and we couldn’t afford them. We were still on our Nokias or whatever. And there weren’t any maps apps, it was right on the cusp of having to pull over at a service station and say: “hey, how do I get to this venue?” And then the guy shows you, he draws it out for you. It was right on the edge – literally a year later we’ve all got iPhones and there’s Google Maps and streaming services all starting to come in.
It’s interesting how we miss those times – but we also don’t. We realise what it gave us, in some ways, having those conversations with strangers about how to get places. It is laboursome, and it’s frustrating, but it would make the adventure all the more satisfying when you got there. It’s an interesting one for sure.
A PEEK BEHIND THE CURTAIN MAKING DIVINATION
We did so much creative stuff making Divination. We went to a thrift store and we bought whatever we could get that would create cool sounds. We bought an old TV. How could that make a cool sound? Well, we bought golf clubs and bits and pieces that we could break. Then we put them in the garage, put microphones around, I had the golf club and we would drive it into this old TV and record the sound of it. And that sound ended up on “Shapeless”.
I remember our drummer at the time Caleb [Burton] did a drum take, stopped, turned on the drum stool and it made this squeak. And we were like, “a squeaky drum stool, we’ve gotta fix that! Can’t have that coming through in any of the takes if he moves accidentally.” The microphone had picked it up, and just for a laugh our engineer says, “let’s slow this down like 300% and tune it down.”
And that’s what ended up being in between “Departure” and “The Unknown” – it’s actually a drum stool! It sounds like the belly of a whale in hell or something. And nothing was done to it other than it being slowed down and dropped. But it’s literally just a drum stool! We got Caleb to do it again, we’re like, “just keep spinning on the stool and don’t stop!” It’s that kind of creativity, the “let’s try it, could work, might not” that is truly the fun of it. And I love that part of making music.
