“You gotta work that pain right out of your gut” St James
Deaf Side Songs by Fletch - Listen here
Looking back to 2004, I still wonder why I wanted to write, record and release my sophomore album, barely a calendar year after my debut album.
But clearly grief can be an unusual motivator.
My mum died of breast cancer in the middle of 2003, while I was recording my first album Peach in a Pickle and that album deals a lot with loss (and the onset of the Iraq war).
See here…
But even before Mum passed away, I had pretty much isolated myself to a simple, adolescent life (early 20’s) in the river suburb of South Perth. My older brother and sister had moved out by then, so I looked after a big family home with two dogs for company (Booty and Bassie) and a nursery full of plants in shade houses and hot houses out the back (which needed almost daily watering - oh boy, what a jungle). I also had the best room in the house to make music and live a self-inflicted, lonely existence.
You could say I was clinically depressed. I never had a medical diagnosis, unless you count Mum slipping me one of her anti-depressants at one stage.
Mum had passed away at home, with all of us around her. And for a year - the year I wrote Deaf Side Songs - Dad and I continued living there. Eventually, we’d realise that wasn’t healthy for either of us.
And while it might sound strange, I can look back with a fondness to that last year in our family home and the freedom I ultimately had to write and record another album of songs, albeit with the hazy impact grief has on my memories.
And little would I know that this album would play a direct part in how I’d meet the love of my life, Bernadette (Bern) Young.
The more I understand the process of songwriting the more I see that it can be such a creative balm. It’s like one’s very own private therapy session, a unique mental and/or spiritual reward for making some creative sense of the world. Deaf Side Songs was born from my need to distract myself, maybe to listen to my right ear for once, you know… the one that does not work.
It is also an exploration of different stories and characters that I collected from my travels around America. Rather than each song being a conduit of grief, mine were a diversion, as I looked to other people’s lives or even forgotten aspects of my own.
The songs are opaque, poetic and I will admit,“wordy”.
Upon hearing this album, my good friend Adam Weiner (Low Cut Connie) in New York suggested I “maybe use less words”. I think that I have only just started to listen to his advice after all these years!
In hindsight, I wish I had given myself more time to develop these songs and maybe with time I could have also written new songs, after all, songwriting was a new thing for me in my mid 20’s.
As I reflect on this album today, I gotta say, I still don’t know what I was trying to say!!
“In my waking life, did I recollect a dream or just believe in some recreation of a memory” The Haunt That Dreams Me.
But the true legacy of this album was the people I worked with. Matt Willis played double bass once again and introduced me to the amazing talents (and friendship) of Grammy Award-winning pedal steel player, Lucky Oceans, who also played accordion. I was already an avid ‘Planeteer’ who would listen to Lucky’s world music show on Radio National “The Daily Planet” so I had to try not to fan-boy during recording sessions (but I probably did a little.) My good friend Daniel Di Paola played drums and percussion (including the tabla). Rob Grant at Poons Head Studios is behind all the production once more and he pulled a big beautiful sound out of acoustic music. My cousin Heath Properjohn took the photos and designed a great album cover.
It was Lucky who gave a copy of Deaf Side Songs to Bern. At the time, she was the new Afternoon Show host on ABC Perth and they’d often travel home on the same train to Freo, swapping music and book references. He said “There’s a guy you’ve got to hear, he’s right here in Perth, he’s like our very own Devendra Banhart.” I’m still not sure about that similarity but I’m damn happy he gave her my album … she sought me out for an interview on her show and the rest is a beautiful history.