Georgia Fair came to life in high school. Jordan remembers a bright faced kid coming up to him after drama class in grade 8. Ben Riley, wearing a big smile on his face, seemed set on the fact that they would become friends. As Jordan explains, “he’d got word that I played guitar and was talking up the Nirvana record.”
It wasn’t long before they were jamming every weekend in the basement of Ben’s home, playing every song that they loved, listening intently to their favourite artists, and spinning yarns about how they would escape it all one day. “When we finished school it became clear that we didn’t want to do anything else but play and write music. We were recording demos in a mate’s attic and trying to get gigs wherever we could in Sydney,” explains Jordan. “Finally we actually mustered the courage to share our music with the outside world – a phobia that taunted us all throughout high school.”
With their sophomore LP Trapped Flame out now, the boys take us through a track-by-track description of the entire record. Have a read and a listen below.
Plain Girls
This is an elusive track, the lyric came as a series of images that seemed infinite, the more I tapped into them the more images that proceeded. The overall feeling was that there was someone trying to speak to me. Ben and myself had an intense two-week writing session at a country studio just outside of Sydney; it was the fusion of dual pent up creativity that ended up shaping the vast majority of this album. On one particular day Ben was playing a piece of music that seemed beautifully shaped yet sparse, the lyrics for “Plain Girls” came rushing out and the song was born.
Fiery Night
The song mainly flowed from the exploration of a beautiful woman that sat before me. I had spent some time in Suburbia and it had started to take its toll. “Fiery Night” was the release of the pent up sexual energy that I could sense all around me. The contrast of a dark fiery night, set against the image of a suburban kitchen table stirred a very restless feeling that resulted in “Fiery Night.”
Gloria
The name “Gloria” stands powerful and grandiose in all of its femininity. It evoked a gospel type of feeling that seemed to flow like hallelujah to me. The song itself is worship to some degree, yet also a cry, a cry to a person who is their own worst enemy.
Trapped Flame
The eponymous track seems to embody the spirit of this record. It seems as if it’s a desperate attempt to get something that’s deeply within, out. The deep yearning that lies within everyone that will one day be set free after our physical form perishes. The song seems to walk on the edge of the vast beauty of the great unknown and the deep frustration in not always being able to see it’s magic.
Love Free Me
This is the urgent pursuit of one’s dream in the face of everything the world has to throw at you. There’s a certain sense of new gained awareness of one’s own right to live, that is met with the fall from grace that is experienced from boyhood to manhood. Always a fight, but noble in the search for one’s higher purpose
Comin’ Back
I remember Ben playing that riff over and over in the room next to me when we were living together just outside of Melbourne. It was floating round the back of my head for a few days in a hypnotic kind of way. When Ben and I finally sat down to play through some stuff I had this story of longing and unfinished business that I’d been sitting on for a while and the song was pretty much already finished before we started.
Old Friend
This is a long slow shadow that no matter how fast you seem to be moving or how many boxes you tick you can’t escape. The song itself is a surrender, the process of becoming continually reacquainted with a feeling that you thought just maybe you’d rationalised, or kicked for good. Though the spirit cannot be rationalised, attained or tied down and this shadow is just a certain transient colour in life’s palette.
Someday Soon
One of the rare songs that Ben and I laboured on, and one of the rare songs that we worked on on the road. I think it’s birth while we were touring in North Queensland typifies the song. The dreamy guitar lines seem to float along effortlessly throughout, while the yearning lyric seems to suggest the hunting down of a feeling that is almost surreal, much like the feeling of touring.
Broken Wings
‘Broken Wing’s is a prayer, to what or who is not important or even explored. Much like the rest of the album it seems to evoke the feeling of growing pains, stripping back the morality and virtues that have been inflicted upon us since birth and realising for one’s self what is real and what isn’t. We deliberately let the song almost find itself, never over explaining the structure to Tedd or the band, we wanted the song to pour out of us. Subsequently I can hear an almost desperate cry for help, yet a real beauty and strength in the vulnerability of asking.
Wrong Side
This song is the process of ripping down walls, the necessary destruction out of which new life is born. The perfect illusion, a song so desperately sung about another, yet hauntingly self reflective. A walk through town on a grey day, hoping to find some of the cities magic, yet entrapped by everyone around you and the mundanity of the streets that once felt pure and simple.
Are We Not
A tiny speck in the vastness of humanity, a grain of sand out of which the entire ocean unfolds. This is a song of courage, taking all of life’s heaviness and light-heartedly plunging into it with all the energy of youth. The song bounces along almost with a cheeky grin, with the guitar providing the the perfect canvas for an Australiana coming of age story.
The River
There are a few images out of which this song spawned. A tyre hanging off a gum tree, a rusty gate leading up to a suburban home and a river running through the back of a country property. A pulsing feeling of longing and a childhood lost, it almost feels like chasing after your younger brother, yet he’s got to learn for himself. Written at a similar time as ‘Comin Back’ where Ben and I were living together with only cardboard like walls separating us, I discovered Ben’s childhood passion for clarinet and pretty soon after that the picture was complete.
Georgia Fair 2013 Tour Dates
Friday 29th November – MELBOURNE – Howler, Brunswick – tix through https://howler.ticketscout.com.au/gigs/1947/GeorgiaFair
Saturday 30th November – SYDNEY – Hibernian House, Surry Hills – tix through oxtix.com.au
Sunday 1st December – SYDNEY – Hibernian House, Surry Hills – tix through oxtix.com.au
