Mammoths, Morphine and Mexico: Whitley

Perhaps some of you are welcoming in the new year at one of the plethora of music festivals held all over the country. Be it at Falls Festival in Victoria or Tasmania, at Peats Ridge in New South Wales, further north in Queensland for Woodford, or even across the Nullabor for Southbound. No matter which of these tickle your fancy, it’s sure to be an aurally distinctive way to reminisce about the twelve months past and warmly welcome those to come. However, it’s almost unthinkable to consider attending each and every one of these new year festivities - unless, that is, you are Lawrence Brian Greenwood. You may know him from his ethereal croons under the moniker ‘Whitley’.

These hectic schedules, perpetual touring and plane hopping that are part and parcel of the music industry might seem daunting to many, but not him.

“It’s going to be one of those weeks; sleepless plane flights, red eye, slightly grumpy, slightly giggly, weird weeks I reckon. I can already taste it. I know exactly what it feels like too. But I guess that’s all part of the fun.”

Yet, only one year earlier, it was the demanding agendas and over-indulgent lifestyle that lead Whitley to take a step back and find the straight and narrow road. Six months of drinking water and reading books, as he tells me.

“I decided I’d take a bit of a break, give my body and my mind a rest, which was good. I was just becoming really unhealthy, touring so much and just the indulgent lifestyle that goes along with it.”

“It was New Years at Falls Festival. I had just finished playing with ‘Seagull’, I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t party through the night, so I left. I decided that maybe I should go home, clean my house and not drink anymore. So that was my New Year’s Eve last year, I was just cleaning the house by myself,” Greenwood laughs. “It’s easy once you make the decision.”

He also took some time out this year following the completion of his latest musical offering, ‘Go Forth, Find Mammoth’. With a few months up his sleeve, Lawrence flew across the globe to Paracho de Verduzco, a small city in Mexico whose streets are littered with an assortment of music shops selling handcrafted stringed instruments. His mission: “to find my perfect guitar”.

“I was losing it after being in the studio that long. So I decided ‘right, it’s time to get out’,” Greenwood elaborates. Though his excitement of finally reaching Mexico was short-lived when he ended up in hospital following a bad bout of food poisoning.

“A whole bunch of us got really sick and I kind of decided to wait it out but I ended up in hospital. It just got worse and worse.”

“The nurse kept filling me full of morphine all the time. And I mean that’s okay, I think everyone loves morphine, but she was giving me so much that I actually knew it was too much for my body because I was starting to loose consciousness. She just kept coming up and saying ‘morphino morphino’ and I’m like ‘No! No! No! No! No!’ but she just kept loading me up. But you know, every cloud has a silver lining,” Greenwood jokes.

“I love it,” he confesses, before adding some words of wisdom for the kids out there, “but you gotta use that stuff sparingly, only in the hospital!”

So he lived to tell the tale. But did he find his ultimate guitar?

“No I didn’t actually, they were all shit. And then I came home and I realised that my old sixties Strat that I had was the most beautiful instrument in the world. The one I had the whole time was the winner.”

Back from his Paracho pilgrimage, Greenwood is preparing for an exhaustive national tour to boast his grandiose sophomore release.

“I really think it’s a much better album than the last one in one sense so I’m not worried, but there is an element of concern that anybody would have when they’re putting out a record. “

He tells me the inherent pressure he has felt in making a second record is not so much about how it will be received, but rather what lies ahead.

“It’s about getting into that life again, it’s about touring and interviews and press, I don’t look forward to that. I think I’ll come around this time with a lot more wisdom than the first time. I think with that knowledge comes sort of awareness that I know what to expect now.”

The ambiguous title ‘Go Forth, Find Mammoth’ signifies Greenwood’s own existential realisations. It’s a metaphor, he tells me, to encourage people “to go find whatever it is that they’re looking for.”

This deep-set importance in his own journey to ‘find mammoth’ is elucidated through one of his writings:

“When I was five years old I watched two television documentaries that were instrumental in forming the way I think. One show was about Mammoths, and the other was about scientific experiments concerning the human mind…In the Mammoth documentary there was a time lapse showing a dead Mammoth returning to dust…the second documentary taught me how the human mind stores memory, language and personality. A revelation occurred in my mind: ‘If the Mammoth’s brain became dust, and his life was stored in there…then what point is there to life?’ This album however, is about dealing with that knowledge that we all carry around, aware or unaware, and how to make sense of it by realizing that there is an intense interconnectedness between all matter and life, and there is no such thing as death because this is real only because we believe it is.”

A profound insight for someone with a mere twenty-three years to their name. Much in a similar vein, ‘Go Forth, Find Mammoth’ is drenched with a musical maturity exceeding his years.

This maturity caught the ear of some well-respected people in the industry, most notably Jim Mogine and Rob Hirst from iconic Australian group Midnight Oil, both of whom made appearances on the album.

Greenwood speaks highly of Mogine’s talents as a musician, describing him as “a bit of a genius, a bit of a rarity”, which brings us to the inextricable link between eccentricity and that ‘genius’ element to art. “It seems that there is some kind of correlation between eccentricity and exciting music and exciting art,” he explains. “I think the thing with people listening to music, they want to hear something new or deeper or more profound than they ordinarily would think of. Sometimes it takes people who are a little bit out of the normal social happenings and comforts to achieve that.”

Having done some of the studio work at Mogine’s place this time, Greenwood says the studio is “really great for the imagination…when you’re writing it’s very cognitive, very good for the mind.” As for playing live, “it’s really good for your little soul, it feels great to perform with your band, you feel like your cup fills up a little bit.”

Whitley will be touring extensively throughout the coming months, for all the dates go to www.myspace.com/whitleymusic.

Go Forth, Find Mammoth will be released October 30 through Dew Process.

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