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Interview with
STEPHANIE ASHWORTH
from
SOMETHING FOR KATE

November 20th, 2020

Interviewer – James Bryan

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Photo – Daniel Boud

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Can you take us through the evolution of your latest album, “The Modern Medieval”?
It was recorded and mixed in 2019, so it’s been a finished record for a year. We finished making it in Canada last October. With the whole coronavirus situation things got derailed; it was meant to come out earlier this year, but it’s coming out next Friday which is good! You sit on a record for a year and you start to get impatient (laughs).

What made you decide to hop back in the studio again after such a long break?
We’ve been touring the whole time between the last album and now. I think it’s funny when you hear people say “it’s a comeback record” when we have actually been busy touring and doing a bunch of festivals. Paul had also done a solo album; to be honest we were sharing Paul with the David Bowie band who kept borrowing him. After David Bowie passed the band got back together and asked if he could sing, so he’d been travelling the world with them. So the Something For Kate album kept getting pushed back because he was so busy with that, and it’s hard to compete with those guys (laughs). I also had a child and moved back to Australia, so there was a fair bit going on. We had been writing on and off through the whole period but we hadn’t had much time to focus on the Something For Kate album where the 3 of us were in the same room.

Sounds like you guys have been pretty busy then, especially with Paul being in and out. Would you say that affected the process of writing a lot or did it still go smoothly?
Once we actually got him in the same country as us and we were able to nail down specific writing periods the album actually came about quite quickly. It was about a year of writing, drafting and redrafting of that set of songs that you hear on the record. We kept refining them and refining them until we just went “you know what, we’re there, we should stop now”. Once we were focused, it came together quite easily. We book studio time with our producer that we can’t possibly get out of, and that pressure works for us (laughs).

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Describe the sound and style of the modern medieval?
I couldn’t tell you what the style is; I’m glad I can’t tell you what the style is. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to describe Something For Kate. I think it sounds to me like a beautiful record about disturbing things. It’s lush with big production, beautiful keyboards and lots of guitars and powerful vocals. I think it’s gorgeous in terms of the high fidelity and the technical aspect. The subject matter is obviously much more barbed than that. The songs are all about different characters, who are deeply flawed and have serious issues. The songs are set in a post apocalyptic world not far from reality. There’s a song called blue bird which is about two people who run out of the apocalypse into a bar, to have a break from reality. So it’s sort of a little bit futuristic and a bit existential; relationships in the face of the apocalypse. There’s a song on there where in the apocalypse only a few have survived and they discover a bunch of frozen billionaires and they don’t know what to do with them. The Modern Medieval sort of encapsulates how we’ve all come so far and our world is so convenient and modern and we have all these technologies but ultimately our problems are still medieval. We’re still dealing with extreme wealth and extreme poverty, sexism and racism, even though we think we’ve come so far and we think we’re so sophisticated.

You mentioned how you have characters in “The Modern Medieval”, are they based on your real life experiences or are they just made up?
There’s different people, some of them are based on actual people but some of them are based on concepts. There’s a song on there called “Inside Job” where Bernard plays the character of a guy Paul met in a pub who was a conspiracy theorist and who was just absolutely mad, believing in all the classic conspiracy theories being true. So Paul and Bernard play out these two characters in that song, they have a conversation and you see this guy’s bizarre perspective on reality.

What sort of process do you guys go through when you want to make a new song?
Every song comes about differently. Some of them Paul already has ideas for that he brings to the studio that we listen to and then flesh out. Some of them come from a bass part or will come from a vocal melody (very rarely) so they’re all different. It’s not often that we are in a situation where we HAVE to write something, usually we’re writing because we want to. It’s that thing where you make something out of nothing and there isn’t any sort of predetermined ‘need’.

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Do you ever have ‘jam’ sessions where you just play around with ideas and see what happens?
Yeah absolutely! If I’ve got a bass part that I’m really into I’ll say “Can we work on this, I want to take this somewhere” and then that’s what we’ll do, or Paul will have a series of chords or a riff or something. We then sort of stretch and pull and keep on refining until we get it where we want it to be.

As the bass player, what would you say that you bring to the sound?
The bottom end (laughs). Bass is one of those instruments where you get to do a big part of the rhythm where you anchor things together with the drummer, and then at the same time you’re also getting to play melody. So it’s sort of the best of both worlds; I’ve always approached bass as one of those instruments where you could just play very basic stuff to hold it down, or you can depart from that and sort of make your own melodic impact on the songs by doing more – so I tend to be one of those types of players that frustrate a guitarist probably (laughs). I guess I try to be the glue in the band providing rhythm but at the same time offering unusual and obscure melodies in there just to throw things off.

How would you say your sound has evolved and changed since you guys started making music in the 90’s?
Well I think we’ve just changed as people. A lot of people would like us to make the same album again – people always get attached to that first album and ask “why didn’t you write that album again”. It’s because we’ve done that and we’ve changed. Everything is an influence: conversations, books, movies – everything. You’re the product of your whole life and your life experience, so when you put 3 people in a room and you have the product of 3 people. We’ve become better at what we do, much like anyone who practices their art like a  painter or a writer. We’ve refined our skill and I like to think that we’ve learnt a thing or two. I think we know how to articulate what sounds we want better now. We know how to achieve what we want to achieve. I think Paul is a much better singer than he used to be. There’s also a freedom in getting older and thinking “Fuck it. This is what we do, and we’re not gonna apologise, this is what we do and we really hope you like it but we can’t control whether you do or you don’t so we’re just gonna do what we want to do regardless of what everyone else thinks”. I think that confidence comes with age. I also think the production and sounds have gotten a lot better and the ideas are clearer. Pauls really discovered his whole vocal range – baritone right up to falsetto. I feel like there’s a real letting go and a freedom and a whole lot more enjoyment these days.

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I think it’s great that you guys just make what you want to make regardless of what people think!
I think so too because it’s authentic, it’s actually not motivated by something else. You can tell when a record is a vehicle to get somewhere and there’s nothing real there; I think people underestimate how much you can sense that. At some point as a band you have to be at ease with what you do and not be trying to change it, “this is what we do, and no apologies” (laughs).

How did you guys all meet each other and form the band that you are today?
Paul and Clint met in high school and signed a record deal as teenagers. I was in another band and joined a few years later, I had seen Something For Kate play a lot and was a big fan. I found myself touring with them in my other band and they asked me to join when they needed another bass player, and so I did. I guess we were all in the same music scene back then – everyone kind of knew each other. They were really young but had done a lot by the time I joined.

What are some of your favourite things to do when you’re not in the studio?
I just love travel, going places and seeing new things. I’m a big photography fan and I do a lot of the bands artwork and album covers. I love taking photos in other cities and discovering stuff, that’s probably my favourite thing of all!

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AMNPLIFY – DB

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