Faster Louder How Empire Of The Sun learned to stop worrying about EDM and love Mother Nature
by Jules LeFevre 24 October 2016 [excerpt]
http://fasterlouder.junkee.com/empir...-nature/867855
Were there any surprises in recording Two Vines?
Well, maybe the collaborators were a surprise. It was wonderful to work with Lindsey Buckingham. I’ve been working with Henry Hey and Tim Lefebvre for quite a while now and it just felt very natural to bring them into the fold. Lindsey, however, you never think you’re going to work with someone of that calibre. It’s crazy. If someone said to me today, “How does it feel to see your name on a thing next to his on songwriting credits,”…it’s bizarre. But if you meet him it feels completely natural. He’s the nicest person. He’s a lovely, lovely guy. He brought his son to the studio. We all just hung out and made music together. It was crazy. It was beautiful.
How was that introduction get made? How did he get brought in?
We send out a lot of emails out to people we’d like to work with. Some come back, some are too busy, and occasionally someone will come all the way through, and he just drove down. We had a studio in Downtown Los Angeles, which looks a bit like Mexico, in old rag trade building. And he just walked in one day with his guitar, and there he was: Lindsey Buckingham.
I’m glad you brought it up cause it’s a real dream team of collaborators on this album. There’s Lindsey, but also Wendy from the Revolution.
Yeah, Wendy came in right at the end. We were working in Jim Henson’s studio which was actually built by Charlie Chaplin and then Henson bought it off him and now it’s the Muppets, basically forever, I guess. Wendy has had a studio there for about 15, 20 years. She was in the building and maybe she liked us or something so we ended up in her room saying “Hi, we have this song, it’s kind of good but we can’t quite …” We left the song with her, we hadn’t quite finished it. She came down and she said “Come upstairs, I have something.” She prefaced it by saying, “I wouldn’t put something on here if it didn’t feel it right, I wouldn’t do anything …” But she played this thing to us. It was just wonderful.
What track is that?
It’s on a song called ‘Ride’.
Do you have any particular favourites?
The song I wrote with Lindsey, or rather, we wrote with Lindsey called ‘To Her Door’, I think is my favourite song on the record. I always like the gushier ones, I’m quite emotional like that but that one, for me, is really special. It’s simple, you know?
There’s a big vein of simplicity on Two Vines. Which I think is really nice. Even though I loved Ice On The Dune but it was definitely… a volcano of new sounds.
It was, it was little bit volcanic.
What’s been the biggest evolution for Empire Of The Sun?
We’ve been fortunate enough to reach people on a large scale and now for the first time I feel like I have something to say, and I want to tell people to look out for the planet. I know it’s not a new message but it’s really important to me. That’s the biggest thing is that I’m seizing the moment to actually talk about something important and it doesn’t matter what country we’re in, there’s always some ****ed up **** the government’s doing to the planet.