Ross Wilson Interview

Ross Wilson is back with anew single and album both titled I Come In Peace. It’s already being acclaimed as a work as good as anything he’s done in his storied career and it marks the beginning of yet another decade of cool for one of Australia’s rock n’ roll treasures. The album was recorded in Nashville last year, produced by Mark Moffatt and features a crack band of Nashville’s finest.

HHMM: Congratulations on the album. To me its sounds like a really focussed record. Sometimes when there is a bit of time between albums there’s a temptation to throw everything into it, but this album sounds like it was well self-edited and very cohesive.

RW: I felt like those particular group of songs did have a cohesion and they belonged together. The last coupleof solo albums I’d done were done a bit on the run, a session here and a session there and then you put them all together. They were pretty good and all the individual songs were good, but this one has actually got some themes running through it. And there is the fact that I did it all in one shotwith pretty much the same band over two days, so there is a cohesion in the sound from the core players, the rhythm section.

HHMM : We did get a preview of a couple of songs at the 50 Years Of Cool Concerts – A Hell Of A Time and Loves Journey. At what stage was the album at when that concert was one.

RW: The album was all cut and there was three songs mixed. I came back to Australia and I got offered the Five Decades of Cool Thing. We were going to shoot the DVD of it and I thought “well, you cant do too much at once”. So I put the album aside and just concentrated on the Five Decades of Cool. It was quite a big deal to do those two shows and it was a way of clearing the deck of doing the old stuff for a while. I thought it was a great way of rounding that whole thing out – not only the well known stuff but the obscure Parry Machine songs and all that.

HHMM: It was kind of interesting to me at the Five Decades Of Cool show that the last song of the night was a new one, Loves Journey and it said to me that while we were all wallowing in the nostalgia, you had already moved on to the next album.

RW: Well spotted! Once we got all that out of the way I was ready to move on. There was a couple of extra vocals I wanted to do and some harmonies so I did them here with Doug Brady. You can do everything on the net now and so I’d cyber the parts to Mark Moffatt in America and he dropped it in and started mixing it. We’d send the mixes back and forth and that’s how we did it. Its also good that I’m not hanging over his shoulder all the time. That’s why you have producer so they can bring some sort of objectivity to it. Then I had to decide the sequence which took a while. There is an actual reason why I put the tracks in the order they are in.

HHMM: To me there is a theme on the album and that is “life and how to live it” – people looking at their lives and realising what’s important and not important.

RW: I think so. The first two songs are about “this is where we are”. I Come In Peace is about “What are you choosing, are you gonna choose love or are you gonna choose trash tv. Are you gonna choose people or rubbish”. That’s the questions it’s asking. Here On Gods Island is saying “Well this is where I live and I cant get off, so what am I gonna do about it?”

HHMM: To me, on that theme, it seems to me that these songs are kind of descendents of Living In The Land Of Oz.

RW: I guess so. Sometimes I realise that I do have the odd thing to say and it just comes tumbling out. Living In The Land of Oz was peculiar at the time because it was different to known for. Party Machine did do some social kind of songs. But you’re quite right, Living In The Land of Oz was similar to Here On Gods Island because it’s asking “what am I doing here, what exactly is going on around here?” So yeah, you’re right.

HHMM: The other two that are like two sides of the one coin are I got You and Land of Contentment. One talks about real contentment and the other talks about the illusion of contentment.

RW: I think they both talk about the illusion of contentment. Those two songs are about the idealised life. I got you, we stand together, we live in a lucky country. Land of Contentment came from when I did a semi-acoustic gig at a housing estate out in Pakenham. It was about 41 degrees and there was about ten people there wilting in the sun. My mate Eris O’Brien came out and saw the gig. It had the lake and the community hall and all this stuff and after that he went off and wrote the song. And that was a descendent of another song he wrote about when John Howard made that statement about being relaxed and comfortable which he always thought was really funny. So in those two songs you have the idealised life and from that point it all starts to get a bit confusing as the protaganist starts to wonder what’s really happening.

HHMM: And in the next song the guy changes estates to Patterson Lakes and gets on his boat and sails past Seaford on his way to Sorrento.

RW: I like the way that people say, “oh it’s great that you name suburbs in our backyard” but its quite a challenge. People in the States do it all the time and people like Chuck Berry made a career out of it. Country artists here do it but rock guys don’t do it so much. Paul Kelly did it a bit but it is a challenge how to incorporate place names into your songs. But you can thank Eris for that because he lived for a long time in Frankston.

HHMM: The single I Come In Peace. If that song had been released in 2010 by John Mellencamp it would be described as “a stunning return to form”. How do you rank it in your list of top songs.

RW: I’m proud of it, it’s a great song. I did the demo of it quite a long time ago. When I wrote it with Rick Brewster we did a home demo that wasn’t bad and then I did a studio demo that had all the elements including the Spanish style guitar which I think is a real feature of it. And when I recorded it in Nashville we had the amazing acoustic player who just nailed that part. There are a whole lot of elements about the acoustic work that really work for me tonally and harmonically.

HHMM: Do you look at that song and think there is no reason why it couldn’t be a big hit?

RW: I’m optimistic. That’s why I did a video for it. Everyone was saying, “oh there’s no point doing a video, no-one will play it, you’re too old”. And I thought, “Fuck that, I’m gonna make one”. I know some talented people and a person named Carolyn Mackintosh was the driving force in pulling people together. We did the main shoot in December and just used people we knew and made a pretty good video.

HHMM: So when you go to rank your songs what criteria do you use?

RW: Can I listen to them over and over? It’s the same criteria I use on songs by other people. I got this I Tunes mix of songs and it’s got all these songs on it like We No Speak Americano and Pump Up The Jam by Technotronic. Just different things. Some pop music is really great.

HHMM: When you make an album like this what are you’re ambitions for it. Do you want to be able to listen to it in ten years time, do you want to sell a lot of records, do you want to impress your friends?

RW: It’s about being able to say “I’ve done this thing and it’s good”. It’s a calling card for business. I’m on the road the whole time and you want to have something to stimulate people. It’s the same as its always been really. I like doing this because I can make decisions. I can ring Mark Moffatt and tell him I wanna do an album and he tells me how much it will cost and I work out if I can afford it and off I go. It’s an expensive business but if I do five or ten thousand albums I’ll be in front. Everyone has been enthusiastic and I’m getting airplay. I’ve got regional networks in every state playing it so that’s just great.

HHMM: It’s pretty obvious that people like you and Joe Camilleri and Stephen Cummings are all doing stuff every bit as good as anything you’ve ever done.

RW: I decided that I was gonna play the game. You have to be seen to be doing it. So I’ve got a record plugger, I’ve got a publicist, I’ve got a manager, I’ve got an agent for the live shows. You do all that at people say “Oh Ross is back and he’s serious about this album”. I’ve reached the conclusion that unless you do it on that level is purely mechanical. You have to be seen to be doing it and perception in any kind of show business is important. If the reality can match the perception well that’s even better.

HHMM: If you were living in the US or UK you’d probably be perceived as a peer of Nick Lowe or John Hiatt or John Fogerty. Over there there seems to be a real respect for longevity.

RW: It’s starting to happen here. Triple M did this whole thing about “we’re back and we’re playing classic and we’re playing new”. They’ve done a thing on the Hoodoo Gurus album.  They’d play an oldie and their new one and they were looking joining the dots between where it came from and where it is now. They’ve done the same thing for me. The point is that they are welcoming and they are not saying, “oh we can’t do anything for you”.

HHMM: So if a young artist came to you and said they wanted to do a five decade career retrospective concert in 40 years time how would they go about that?

RW: I quite often get asked “is it harder for someone starting out now than it was when you first started?” I can honestly say “No”. And that’s because there is a lot of crap music and some that’s pretty good and very few that are really good. So if you are really good then there’s not much competition! Of course you still have to work really hard and have a bit of luck. I’ve had a fair bit of luck.