Are You Haunted? asks the title of Methyl Ethel’s new album but it isn’t a sincere question; it’s rhetorical, with the Perth band’s leader Jake Webb aware that everyone has been, in some way or another, haunted in these past few years. If he were to remove rhetoric and turn that question inward, though, Webb might have some crystallised thoughts in response.
His fourth album comes after the tight triptych of his first three records, concerned as they were primarily with heartbreak, and marks his first release for a new label in Future Classic. It’s more widely philosophical and less pinpointed in the personal, pop with purpose.
Having spent the last several years of the COVID-19 pandemic back in his home state of Western Australia, recording was marked by a resounding burst of memory as Webb returned to Fremantle Recording Studio, where he first recorded Methyl Ethel songs many years ago. Was it disorientating at first? “So often – and I suppose COVID has enhanced this a lot – people are forced to return home because things didn’t work out so well for them,” Webb considers over Zoom from Mantra, just outside of Perth.
“The person, say, going off to the big city to become a star or something. At least that wasn’t the feeling for me though. I felt I was returning home and was ready to do more on my own, which was a really nice feeling. To be able to have gone back there after having felt like I’d earned my stripes, shall we say, it was a good way for that to happen.”
Mortality and time are infused in every corner of his new album – how could they not, when the owner of that very studio (and a dear friend of Webb’s) passed away very recently. When I ask Webb if these themes were also informed by the uncertainty of the pandemic, he insists it wasn’t a “conscious” choice. “I think all of those feelings definitely subconsciously find their way in,” he says. “The only song that’s very directly about the pandemic is ‘Something to Worry About’.
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In 2019, I didn’t read any news in a self-imposed act of purging news! My folks were going away somewhere and I was saying very literally to mum there’s nothing to worry about, you’re getting paranoid watching too much news. The irony is how wrong I was (laughs). Apart from that song though, there’s not much that’s directly related (to the pandemic).”
A lot of the songs on Are You Haunted? are intentionally upwardly poppy, a counterpoint to the often dark material held within them. There was another simpler reason for such stylistic choices, Webb tells me. “I’m having fun when making music so that’s what it should sound like,” he says. “When I’m playing the drums, for example, I’m enjoying playing the drums. I’m the luckiest person because I love doing all this stuff. That’s where the pop and the lightness comes from. I never want anything to be too heavy.” There’s a brief pause before Webb adds with a laugh, “and I’m not ready to be in my adult contemporary phase yet!”
Listening to the album, some immediate influences appear apparent – Webb is able to conjure and construct haunted visions similarly to an artist like Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox – but it turns out his inspirations were a lot less contemporaneous. “I was only listening to classical music,” he says simply, as if this should have been the most expected answer in the world. “A lot of Jean Sibelius and Alexander Scriabin. A little bit of (Robert) Schumann.”
There was a reason for this choice of music. “When I’m producing music, I can’t listen to anything new as I don’t want to accidentally make anything sound like something else. Obviously I do listen to new music, but I would rather not lean on other people’s music. If I sit down at a piano, for example, I can’t play anyone else’s songs. I’ve never played covers at all. It just means that I find my own way to go.”
However, Webb did bring in an additional artist for the very first time on this album in the form of Stella Donnelly, his old bandmate. “The song (‘Proof’) definitely called for it,” he argues. “Stella really was the perfect person to ask and it worked out really well.” Although Webb had already written the song, he felt it needed that extra voice. “The song just felt like a real call-and-response piece, with person A and person B. It really needed this other person and Stella was definitely the first choice. As the song grew into what it is, Stella’s character – she’s someone who really is a truth-teller and who is direct and upfront – just worked so perfectly with the themes of the song.”
Cinema is something Webb turns to frequently in conversation. The intensely alienating monochromatic music video for ‘Proof’ had some weighty filmmaking antecedents. “There’s that opening scene in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona that was a really big influence,” he reveals. “It was this deeply Freudian, psychoanalytic look at things. Then I also looked at some other great black-and-white films that I love.
I watched Eraserhead the night before we started shooting the video, and also a lot of the early Wim Wenders films like Wings of Desire and Kings of the Road. The decision to shoot it in black-and-white went from simple necessity to perfect synchronicity. “I first wanted to shoot it that way because I don’t have a particularly good eye for colour,” Webb concedes. But the black-and-white actually tied in well with the theme of seeing things in black-and-white anyway.”
So long a notoriously singular vehicle for the artistic pursuit of Webb, I ask him how personal the songwriting is on Are You Haunted?, or indeed, any Methyl Ethel album. “You’re kidding yourself if you think you can be that honest in describing how you are,” he says after a moment of thought. “Sometimes it’s the people around us who know us better than we know ourselves. There are things that are too hard to say out loud that can be the impetus for writing music and that’s certainly been true of the band starting out.
I think it was on our first record that I realised I could say all these things in a coded way and it was cathartic for me but then nobody had any fucking idea what it was about and I wasn’t going to tell them because that wasn’t the point! There was this weird dance that happened on the first three records and I got tired of doing it. I’ve grown in confidence in a way that I do feel now I can really write about anything and that’s ok. It doesn’t have to be personal and as a matter of fact I’m just as interested in the story behind how other things are.”
Our chat takes place a few days after the controversy over Damon Albarn’s comments about Taylor Swift, when he dismissed her songwriting abilities in an interview. For someone so well-known as a solo songwriter, I was curious if Webb had any sympathy for Albarn’s view that working alone as an artist was vastly different – and superior – to working alongside other songwriters. “It’s a really interesting question, isn’t it? I think even the idea of the “auteur” is a myth. I just don’t know that it’s real. Even in the most micro sense, there are always external influences. I think I’m learning how murky credit is.
He returns to talking about cinema again. “If you think about filmmaking, I keep forgetting her name but there’s this female film editor who worked on that Baz Luhrmann film Romeo + Juliet (Jill Bilcock). The thing is cut so quickly and there’s so much energy in the edit but that film is always mainly credited to Baz Luhrmann as director. There’s just so many people who have their hands in things that have made them what they are.
From that example all the way down to someone sitting in a room writing a song, I think there’s always going to be some external influences involved.” Considering where people like Albarn may be coming from, Webb interjects: “Perhaps it’s easier to believe that art is all coming from one person though.”
Other notes of the solo artist opening up more are becoming evident. Webb is working with ABC on the second edition of Collab Camp, which gives rising artists the opportunity to work with established Australian names such as Methyl Ethel. Webb selected five artists from his WA to participate in the enlightening recording sessions. “It’s super exciting,” he says.
“After having worked alone for so long, I search for interesting ways to do things. I can never do things the same way twice and I really like seeing how other people do things. If there’s a mistake that I’ve made that can help somebody do it better next time, that’s so great. That’s what it’s all about. It makes music more of an organic and human kind of endeavour.”
Ahead of the album’s release, Webb says he’s been watching Peter Jackson’s new documentary on the making of The Beatles’ Let It Be. Watching that band go through the tribulations of making their final album, it becomes clear that it was the right time for The Beatles to break up. Will it be as obvious when time is up for Methyl Ethel?
“It’s funny because when Methyl Ethel first started, I’d quit this all the time (laughs). Definitely after some gigs! With The Beatles, it’s so nice to watch it play out so openly. When it happens for us, I won’t let it drag on. Just succumb.”
Methyl Ethel’s Are You Haunted? is out now via Future Classic.
