Having well and truly kicked off 2016 in style thanks to the release of the band’s sophomore EP Miles Away, Tully On Tully have just wrapped up their national tour.
Miles Away came after an intense period of song cultivation. Th EP was written whilst the band were abroad in New York City and represents their experiences in the metropolis and the tyranny of distance. Upon their return to Australia Tully On Tully retreated to a recording studio in the Victorian highlands to put their new work to wax.
To celebrate the EP release, the band have kindle penned a track by track run down of the record which you can check out below (along with the album stream). Check out the EP below and if you like what you’re hearing be sure to visit the band’s Facebook page for more info.
HONESTLY
Lyrically ‘Honestly’ draws inspiration from the New York City streetscape. Natalie wrote a lot while wandering around the big apple on her own when we were on tour.
Musically we wanted to try and create something understated that wasn’t too ‘up’ dynamically so the few peaks in the song had more of an impact on the listener.
Thanks to this a lot of the song is just bass, drums, vocals and a few looping drones in the background. We also teamed up with “Around The World In 80 Music Video’s” and created a stop motion video that explores Melbourne CBD in a really interesting way.
ALL THESE WORDS
‘All These Words’ is a coming of age story about the experiences that open your eyes to new things and shape the way you are today. It’s about those times when inhibitions fade and sexuality knows no boundaries.
We got together with producer Tony Buchen (Andy Bull, The Preatures, Montaigne) for this track and he really took us to new levels that we had never experienced before.
He liked the original vocal loop that Nat did in this so much that we kept the original take of our first demo instead of rerecording them!
TWO BIRDS
When we wrote ‘Two Birds’ it actually had a dueling male vocal line in the verses, which we decided to remove at the last minute!
The track is about a couple trying to keep the romance alive and go to drastic lengths to fix their relationship only to realise that what they do could potentially destroy them. The track is filled with floating synthesisers and simple vocal melodies that make the even simpler lyric “I only wanted you” so much more poignant. When we were trying to think of a song title for this song, we wanted to steer clear of using a lyric.
We were all really into Mac De Marco at the time and drew some inspiration form his song “Ode To Viceroy” and named our song after a beer. We were literally sitting around our backyard drinking Two Birds Golden Ale (a favourite at the time) trying to come up with a good name and it just seemed to work with everything about the song so we went with it.
COLD HANDS
Cold hands came about while we were playing around with a bunch of vintage synths and its working title for months was actually ‘Juno’.
We wanted to write a song that conjured up a really strong visual of creepy isolation so Natalie created some dark as lyrics and we got to work producing a soundscape to match. Like most of the songs on the EP MILES AWAY ‘Cold Hands’ has a pretty solid ’80s pop styling.
Rather than imitate the 80’s outright we tried to take bits and pieces of its signature sound and blend it with modern Australian music. Which was kinda easy when you’ve got a group of Aussie musicians playing instruments that were cutting edge thirty years ago.
MILES AWAY
We wrote 90% of ‘Miles Away’ in the course of one session at our studio in Melbourne. We’d just gotten back from touring in Nth America and were trying to churn out as much material as we could.
It came together super organically and what was a simple guitar part snow-balled into a fully fledged song in the course of nine or so hours.
We drew a lot of inspiration for this one from pop/rock production of the 1980s hence the chorusing guitars, gated drums and a bit of phaser on absolutely everything. We got together with Jam Nawaz and shot a video inspired by the lyric in the song “I could be somebody else”.
