S E N O E D L I W THE ear, album of the y d n o c e s ir e th ase ds he Wildes rele T y Denise Hylan d B n ’ a t. n c a je ry ro B p e Lachlan writer’s scienc a ‘singer song
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hen I spoke to a hopeful Lachlan Bryan about the year ahead and everything coming back to life things were looking for the live scene. But just a few days later we were in and out of lockdowns with only a glimmer of hope. Lachlan Bryan and his band The Wildes, who we featured just a couple of months ago with a new live album, have just released a new studio album recorded just before the craziness, appropriately titled As Long As It’s Not Us. “We recorded most of it and wrote most of it in 2019, and the very start of 2020,” says Bryan. “In fact, we finished tracking a few days before COVID became a reality. We’ve since messed with it a bit, so some of it is actually very recent. The good thing is, we had a break from it and coming back and listening to it in the mixing and mastering process, it feels fresh to us. Some of the songs have kind of taken on new meaning.” Is it like listening back in time? “Yeah. I hate to lean on the cliche,” he replies, “but this was a record that was kind of written, or at least my contributions to it, were written when I was kind of going through some stuff. And in a way, having a year and a half of standing still, it’s helped deal with personal things. But there’s some hopeful things in there as well. Out of all the records that we’ve made, this is probably the most hopeful and the most hopeless” Bryan has called this album, ‘a singer songwriter’s science project’.
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“There’s some things that we experimented with, that we haven’t before,” he explains. “It’s been a bit of a ‘get in the room and play the songs’ kind of album band. Whereas this one, I think the arrangements are a little bit more complex: we’ve used drum machines, drum loops, and we’ve explored the depth of our effects pedals a little bit more than we have before. I love country music, but I think that we’ve sort of stretched the definition of country music or Americana music or whatever we do, with this one, for sure.” Bryan has also said that he is “inviting people to experience the highs and lows with us.” “When I say I want the listener to share the experiences, I certainly don’t want to depress them,” he says. “There’s got to be a little bit of hope or a little bit of humour in there somewhere, otherwise I wouldn’t get through those waves myself, and I think most of us are like that. “It’s a really strange phenomenon too, as a listener, that when you feel sad, putting on happy music doesn’t work. When you’re low, you have to listen to other people. I don’t know. Maybe we just want to know that other people have felt as bad as we feel right now. And at the same time, the other thing works as well when you’re on a high. When you’re feeling something, you kind of want a soundtrack to match it. It’s not to change what you’re feeling, it’s to kind of heighten it. Introduce us to The Wildes.
