Jeff Lang - Care to Listen?

Half Seas Over is the latest in a long list of releases from Australian folk, blues, rock singer/songwriter Jeff Lang. “It’s a little bit more of a storybook album this time around I think, the songs have a lot longer narratives and are a little bit closer in the types of themes and the types of songs to maybe traditional folk music than my other records overall.”

The first show of the Half Seas Over tour sees Lang play at the Maribyrnong Detention Centre, something that happened because “I got asked and I was intrigued. People in that situation are not exactly being catered to particularly, so I thought one small thing that I can do to hopefully make their life a little easier, depending on whether they hate what I do or not. It is just a nice thing to do I think”. This sort of gig sets itself up for lots of political overtones, but Lang doesn’t “particularly set out to be a political songwriter, I mean I’m a political person sure, I care about these things, I don’t set out to be any type of songwriter to be honest. I just deal with them as they come to me; if a song has a political context then I let that stand, as long as it doesn’t sound contrived or hokey”.

The songwriting process is integral to Lang’s music, “there’s inspiration and perspiration, it seems like you can use all of the craft in the world but if you haven’t drawn it out of a flashpoint of inspiration the whole thing is a little bit hollow”. This means he prefers to “wait for that moment of inspiration to strike and try to get down as much of that pure expression of inspiration as possible that occurs in that moment when the stuff’s flowing. I try and keep my conscious mind out of the way of what the story is about while I’m writing it, so if I get lyrics in my head I just try and write them down and not process it too much, because the temptation is you write down two or three lines and you want to read them, but if you do that you’re starting the process of editing it before it’s even all there and you can actually stem the flow somewhat”.

“As soon as the flow is stopped and I’ve got everything down that seems to be there, you can start to actually process – what’s this story about, who’s speaking here – sometimes it can be confusing. There’s a song on the new record called Five Letters that’s correspondence between three people. There’re two people speaking in the song, but it’s meant to be them writing to each other. They’re sending letters to each other and then in the end one of them is sending a letter to their daughter. It took a while to work what was actually going on when I was first reading it. It can be fun like that, because when it happens that way you get to discover it like a new song, like something you didn’t have that much of a hand in.”

Inspiration has come in many forms for Lang, but “some of the main ones would be people like Bob Dylan, Richard Thompson, Ry Cooder, Tom Waits, Neil Young, and then there’s a whole bunch of early folk music and blues music that I really like – Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson – they’re some of the people that have definitely been very inspiring through the years. My earliest musical memories would have to be of listening to Bob Dylan while in the car driving a long way. He’s always going for a raw connection. That’s the sort of music I care about”.

Connecting while performing is also important for Lang, “there’s no specific agenda that I’m trying to push other than presenting music as a catalyst for people to have some kind of communal moving experience. When you’re all together in a place and you’ve come there of your own steam and you’ve got your own life and your own stuff that you’re dealing with, you leave there feeling more of an experience, that there is a connection between all of us and that you have a little bit more empathy and understanding of other people, not through something you’ve been told but through something that you’ve felt. I find that really valuable. Who am I trying to reach? Anyone that cares to listen”.

Lang has a deep tie to the Australian music scene, “there’re so many good musicians and players here. Bands that if I’ve got time off, I’ll go and see. I think it’s definitely something that’s worth caring about – I don’t take it for granted. Australia has a very vibrant scene”.
He’s also been around the scene long enough to be able to dish out some good advice to artists, “the hardest part overall is maintaining some kind of self belief. The industry, as a business, kind of works in the opposite direction of creative artistic impulses, you’re trying to reach inside yourself and do something that’s a genuine valid expression, but the industry itself will, if you let it, transpire and conspire to make you judge your own work based on numbers. How many people are coming to your shows? How many records are you selling? How much money have you made off it? That’s the type of value judgement that the business will place on you. It’s got nothing to do with what you’re achieving artistically. Otherwise you could draw a straight line through the sand and say that Madonna is more artistically viable than John Coltrane because she’s sold more records. The idea of that is ludicrous. But that’s the biggest challenge of the business, and maintaining a career, it’s maintaining your sense of self worth. Everything else follows on from there”.

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