As Something For Kate edge closer to two decades of making music, Paul Dempsey – the band’s face, voice and chief songwriting linchpin – can’t cast his memory back to his first act of music making.
“I don’t remember one single earliest memory… I can remember hitting a piano or strumming a guitar – making noise. [But not] specifically when it started to sound musical as opposed to just noisy.”
He might not be able to pinpoint the origins of the creative endeavour that eventually became his livelihood, but 36 years on, with exactly half of that time taken up by the band – he can certainly tell you where Something For Kate are at; “at this point we’re just doing this because we can and we want to.”
“We don’t have anything to prove, we don’t have anything to worry about, we don’t give a shit about the things we used to give a shit about,” he replies coolly.
Looking over a crowded café’s patrons with his piercing, blue-eyed gaze to some middle distance before adding. “We each are lucky enough to have other livelihoods, Something For Kate now is this thing we can choose to do.”
It might sound like rock star braggadocio, but Dempsey concedes that the choice of being in a band is “an extremely lucky” one.
When pressed if he saw ever saw himself making music full-time back when he was simply ‘bashing’ on instruments in a childhood home strewn with them, he replies “I certainly hoped that would turn out to be the case, but it doesn’t stop you from feeling incredibly surprised – like you’ve won the lottery – when it does turn out to be the case.” “We couldn’t make records the way we used to, even if we wanted to. There just isn’t the time…”
While his original goals were modest (“at first it was just about getting a bass player!”), here he is, 18 years and six albums later, seven if you include his 2009 solo excursion, Everything Is True.
Even now, Dempsey admits that “you still feel like you’re feeling your way, easing into it… and still sort of learning.”
Still, surely the writer of one of Australian music’s most enviable songbooks and penman of subtly esoteric humour must have seen the humour in the lead single for the band’s first single in five years being named ‘Survival Expert’?
While some of the Melbourne trio’s contemporaries have fallen by the wayside (most notably Powderfinger and Silverchair), Something For Kate have arrived at their sixth studio album, Leave Your Soul To Science with a sound that strikes with the familiarity of their classic work, but with a far more adventurous sense of sonic adventure.
The subtle redrafting of their aural blueprint however, was not the result of months of painstaking construction – but instead written in half of the time of their previous albums – and recorded in just three-and-a-half weeks of the six booked at a Dallas, Texas studio.
“We couldn’t make records the way we used to, even if we wanted to. There just isn’t the time,” explains Dempsey. “We all have other things going on.”
Namely, Dempsey and his bassist wife, Stephanie Ashworth, saw the arrival of their son, Miller, one year ago; while burly drummer Clint Hyndman has his own partner and two restaurants, Yellow Bird and Woods of Windsor, to think about.
As such, they “literally haven’t had time or haven’t taken the time to second guess, procrastinate or nit-pick the way we used to,” declares Dempsey affably.
Leave Your Soul To Science finds the band simply trusting their instincts more than ever before, and helping them keep on track was Texan producer John Congleton. A hands-on desk jockey who has helped bring records from St. Vincent and Okkervil River to fruition.
A man who “made something like 26 records last year” marvels Dempsey.
“That’s insane! That’ll give you an idea of how quickly he likes to work… he doesn’t like nit-picking or over-analysing things,” which made Congleton “the best possible producer for where we were at because that’s exactly what we wanted.”
“I think it’s actually been a weird blessing,” reflects Dempsey, “being time-poor has fed Something For Kate this whole new sense of urgency. Everything’s coming out more raw and immediate, and that’s a really good thing.”
While their older laborious approach has shifted, some of Dempsey’s habits remain unchanged. Chiefly, his deeply articulate lyricism that balances brow-furrowing concepts with lung-baiting sing-a-longs.
Even the title of the band’s latest belies deeper concepts, the physical versus the metaphysical, an idea echoed in the closing number ‘Begin’, and its image of “an angel in a white lab coat.”
When asked about his noted fascination with science – phsyics, astronomy, cosmology – his belief in logic, he corrects with stern affirmation, “logic doesn’t require belief.”
These concepts remain preoccupations for Dempsey because “I don’t understand it,” he says. “It’s fascinating to me in the way ancient cultures are fascinating to other people.” “I basically think that religious belief is a lack of critical thinking. Sorry.”
“I basically think that religious belief is a lack of critical thinking. Sorry.” Before the pitchforks can be rallied though, Dempsey clarifies: “I’m absolutely not saying that those people are unintelligent or stupid or anything like that, it just seems to me like if you really, really look very hard at it…”
While he’s interrupted by the arrival of a plate of sardines, which remain respectfully untouched for the course of the interview, (“I don’t like talking with my mouth full…”), the conclusion is that if you look at the facts, according to Dempsey, spirituality is illogical.
“Some people take a leap of faith and choose to believe something that requires them to believe it without any further proof or evidence,” he continues.
“I’m fascinated by that because I’m not built that way. I was raised that way… in an incredibly strong Roman Catholic family, I was an altar boy, rosaries – all that stuff. I sort of came out the other side.
Yet, in something like ‘Miracle Cure’ and its desire for “a cure for miracles”, his songwriting seems like the work of a man who wants to see something extraordinary – beyond logic, despite all the evidence telling him to expect otherwise.
“I’d love to!” he enthuses, “Fuck! I would love someone to prove the existence of a higher power… of magic, of miracles, or an after life. Fuck – they’re all wonderful things.”
Describing them as forms of ‘wish-making’ – the promise of outliving the body, of leaving the soul – not to science – but to the hope of something beyond, Dempsey questions rhetorically: “Who wouldn’t get behind it?”
“That’s why religion is the best-selling product on the face of the planet,” adding curtly that it’s “an easy product” to sell.
“I think I get the attraction,” explains Dempsey “but it asks you to pay a pretty high cost as well, because you have to suspend your critical faculties if you’re going to embrace this product. If someone could make that deal of a lifetime actually look as good as it sounds, and actually prove it’s ‘as advertised’ – I’ll buy.”
While he may not subscribe to that line of thinking, “because all the evidence at this point is to the contrary,” Dempsey is not ‘down’ on religious people.
“I certainly don’t want to come across that way. I respect everybody’s right to rationalize their own existence, so in that respect… I can’t buy into it against my better judgement. Not without proof that this incredible deal does actually deliver and that it’s not a fucking Ponzi scheme,” he laughs.
While it would be churlish to suggest that songwriting is Dempsey’s religion, its one he certainly practices – at great length, “it’s a way of exercising my critical faculties.”
Putting his fascinations, withering observations and emotionally complex thoughts on paper and setting them to music is arguably Dempsey’s way of making sense of the world, what he calls “having an internal dialogue.”
One that externally, if the sizeable, supportive (sometimes obsessive) fanbase that have flocked to it over the years has proved, is a conversation that many are having outside the confines of Dempsey’s mind.
“If it came out of my head, it’s autobiographical… to a degree,” teases the Something For Kate scribe, feeling a certain responsibility to his songs and their subject matter; but conversely, he’s “not a songwriter 24 hours of every single day.”
The latest set of ruminations on Leave Your Soul To Science is populated by characters that aid in carrying out Dempsey’s heady structures. “It could sound potentially creepy but – Steph’s my wife, Clint’s my best friend… We are like a family.”
The Anna of ‘Miracle Cure’, “looking up at horses in the clouds” and dreaming of escape.
The crestfallen protagonist of ‘This Economy’, once “doomed to succeed,” now pleading to ‘John’ about his financial downfall, confusing the size of his bank statement as success in love (“my money ain’t what she used to be”).
The Yolanda of ‘Deep Sea Divers’, begging for change, however, is not a vehicle for Dempsey’s lyrical explorations at all, but an actual “transsexual homeless person,” who haunted the singer’s local subway stop. S/he, “even in real life, was too good a character to not use,” Dempsey chortles.
In fact he admits that the entire song is “one of the most literal songs” he’s ever written. A snapshot of the Brooklyn neighbourhood he and Ashworth lived in for two years, right down to the “old guys in their folding chairs, Yesterday’s News – the actual name of a store, and there were constantly catering trucks outside because there were constantly films being shot…”
“I guess I took all my memories and favourite things about that neighbourhood and put it at the bottom of the sea,” he deduces with a comforting laugh
Speaking of the relocation to New York, Dempsey notes it was a result of the necessity to continue touring his solo record once he’d exhausted the touring map of his native country: “I was basically just looking for somewhere else to go so I could just play.”
In fact, the plan is to head back to America for another solo record, “I need to be busy [and] keep playing – it’s good for my writing, it’s good for my health, I enjoy it.” Thankfully though, he’ll spare us his album on fatherhood, “I don’t think that’ll happen.”
Having approached their return to the music scene in the traditional way – album, press, tour, festival season – how have the core trio of Something For Kate found juggling their newfound familial commitments? “Really hard, really difficult. But we’re making it work because we want to.”
Interestingly it’s a fellow Australian musician who “keeps proving to [them] that it can be done,” gushes Dempsey. “We are constantly inspired by our friend Clare Bowditch, who has three kids and has managed to tour Germany with her family; and constantly tours Australia.”
“She’s amazing,” he continues, “Clare makes it look easy so we can do this… because we love to tour and we love to play live… we make time for it because we love it. It’s hard to make time for it, but we do, because it’s a very, very important part of our three lives.”
Of course, having spent exactly half of his adult life as part of Something For Kate, Dempsey concurs that his musical career and his personal life overlap and coalesce. “Absolutely. I don’t know if there’s a band out there who’s closer.”
“Obviously Steph and I are married, but we each have our friendships with Clint as well,” after a long, ruminative pause, he adds, “it could sound potentially creepy but – Steph’s my wife, Clint’s my best friend – he’s like a brother. He’s like a brother to Steph as well. We are like a family. We can say anything to each other and we’ll all still be there next rehearsal.” “…I can’t answer how long Something For Kate is going to go for, I don’t see it ending,”
Even as the turbulence of their own lives puts time pressures on the band, Dempsey doesn’t see them putting Something For Kate aside at any point, as he proclaims “I don’t see it ending.”
While admitting “a lot of bands have gotten shittier over time,” Dempsey remains positive that the attitude of rock being a ‘young person’s game’ is shifting.
Pointing to the enduring careers of Radiohead, Neil Young, Nick Cave and Paul Kelly as examples of artists that are “proving that ‘no’ there shouldn’t be some expectation that you need to get out at a certain point… [that] you should give it up and age gracefully.”
“So I don’t know, I can’t answer how long Something For Kate is going to go for, I don’t see it ending,” reiterates Dempsey. “We might make a record next year, we might just do that because we feel like it, or we might not make another record for ten years.”
“But I know that the three of us are never going to be out of touch with each other, so the possibility of making a record is always going to be there, so I don’t know – we’ll see.”
For the close-knit trio, it’s simply a case of “slowly adjusting the goals each time” as new opportunities or changes enter their collective lives.
So while Paul Dempsey can’t isolate his earliest act of making music and can’t predict what’s next for his beloved outfit – he can tell you what’s happening now.
Much like ‘Begin’, his “secular hymn to the moment” that closes Leave Your Soul To Science, Dempsey is simply praising the moment he happens to be in right now.
“When I talk about how the goals move and change. The goal for Something For Kate now is to just enjoy making records together and going on tour together, and that’s a sort of relatively easy goal to fulfil,” his mouth forming a gentle grin as the words exit his mouth, “so we’re all feeling pretty relaxed about that one.”
Leave Your Soul To Science is out now through EMI, you can read the Tone Deaf verdict here. Something For Kate are currently on a national tour. Full dates and details here. They also play the Queenscliff Music Festival, Golden Days and Homebake before year’s end.
