Latest / HEAVY Music Interviews / From Little Things Big Things Grow With BABYSHAKES DILLON From FULL FLOWER MOON BAND
Transcript
- 0:00Devils got Fire and his hips. When it gets too sick and goes down
- 0:05to the river man people on no way doop. I have to tell them
- 0:11it's just Louise Birdy's brood. It's just Louise Birdy's brood. Well, Hello,
- 0:28I'm Baby Shakes from Full Flower Moon Band, but you can call me
- 0:31Kate. We are about to release our third album, Megaflower, and go
- 0:36on an Australian tour, the biggest one we've done yet. Beautiful Kate,
- 0:42thanks for joining us today, worries, So we'll start off on the album.
- 0:47So, Full Flower Moon I said to release your new album, Megaflower,
- 0:51on July the nineteen, So how are you feeling about it? Well,
- 0:56I just came home from listening to the test pressings and I'm feeling really
- 1:00good. I finished the record a few months ago and haven't had that break
- 1:07to hear it with fresh ears until now. And yeah, I just had
- 1:11a full listen through and I for the first time and say, I'm pretty
- 1:15proud of it. Oh God, that's going to be here if you weren't,
- 1:19because there's not much you can do about it now. Yeah, So
- 1:25can you tell us a bit more about the album from a musical point of
- 1:26view, and what are you going for with it? Well, our last
- 1:30record, Diesel Forever, was sort of an album that gained us a larger
- 1:34audience, and it was a heavy rock album. And with this record,
- 1:41I just really wanted to be as expansive and generous as I could, like
- 1:48in terms of it it being a studio album and being genre bending, I
- 1:55felt like I had two choices. I could double down on hard rock riffs
- 2:00and continue to I guess play into the last record, or I could be
- 2:12I guess a little bit more adventurous and take a bigger risk, and I
- 2:17chose to do the latter. It's actually a good point that your raise like
- 2:23because Deeds Are Forever was so well received, like the Temptation, just to
- 2:27rehash that formula because you know people liked it, it'll be massive, but
- 2:30you'd also as an artist, you'd want to break away from that and sort
- 2:34of test yourself a little bit more as the comfort zone, I guess.
- 2:38I was definitely faced with a choice. And while I am a massive like
- 2:45hard rock fan and I will one hundred continue to have hard rock influences,
- 2:53I just wanted to be as brave as possible, and only for me as
- 3:00an artist, but also for the audience, Like I just felt like I
- 3:04had an opportunity to go somewhere, somewhere that I hadn't been before. And
- 3:10I hope it's received with as much love as was put into it. But
- 3:16by no means am I done with the hard rock genre. It'll come back
- 3:23again, and it's still It's still there, And just Diesel Forever was such
- 3:29a live album, like it was tracked live, it was tracked quickly,
- 3:34and I love being in the studio. I love I love finding sounds that
- 3:38aren't necessarily gonna be able to be played live. So I don't know,
- 3:46just I made my job harder, but I hope it will pay off.
- 3:52You've released so far, You've released the track Star west Side, Illegal Things,
- 3:55and Devil. So are they a good sonic representation of what to expect?
- 4:00They are in the sense that each of them kind of like push into
- 4:04a new genre, and structurally each song moves in really weird structures, Like
- 4:14a lot of this record have songs that are almost in like three or four
- 4:18parts of ideas, and they move through the arrangements in like ways that I
- 4:26find really interesting. And so each of those songs does that, and I
- 4:31think the album as a whole also does that, like keeps moving and branching
- 4:36off and coming back. And yeah, I think it is a good representation
- 4:43because it's doing the three songs do so many different things like the whole album.
- 4:48Yeah, So to elaborate on that a little bit more, like you're
- 4:51quite saying that most songs on the album went throughout metamorphosis before being completed.
- 4:57So can you go a bit deeper into that, Like what do you mean
- 4:59by morphosis? So that relates to the songs moving through phases genre shifting.
- 5:12The metamorphos for me was instead of saying, oh, here's the lick for
- 5:16devil, you know, E to G for the whole song, I said,
- 5:21oh, here's the lick for Devil e to G, but here's every
- 5:26idea that's coming out of it. And I didn't cut or I workshopped the
- 5:32songs to the point where not very much was left on the cutting room floor.
- 5:38And I don't think that you could. I could that could be interpreted
- 5:43as, oh, so you just threw everything at it, But the metamorphois
- 5:48was workshopping it and workshopping and workshopping it until it felt like a fully grown
- 5:53tree instead of anything that was out of place or pruned back. I just
- 6:00tried to be as generous as possible with how how many ideas I had for
- 6:05the record, and the artistry was making it fit instead of cutting cutting things
- 6:15out. Yeah, now you're also produced and recorded the album yourself, So
- 6:21what are some of the advantages and disadvantages of keeping it in house like that?
- 6:27Well, it's easy to say that I recorded it myself, but I
- 6:31in truth this was probably the most collaborative record I've done. I just ended
- 6:38up still having the final say in the editing of it. In my process,
- 6:45it's not just songwriting and recording, A lot of the final product is
- 6:50inside the edit. So I had Ali an engineer, track most of the
- 7:01record with me out at his studio Swanporn Studios in Scenic Rim, which again
- 7:09it was my It was challenging because I usually do do it entirely my I
- 7:16usually am a little more hands on, so it went me a lot of
- 7:25people that I've never worked with before. So ali Adee Parker did some percussion
- 7:30and since Tony Butchen came in and sorry, I always pronounced Tony's last name
- 7:38wrong. I think it's Booken, Sorry, Tony, Tody B. Yeah,
- 7:43Tony B. They came in added themselves in their positions as engineers,
- 7:54producers, mixing, and then I kind of like took it back myself again
- 8:01and touched everything. I feel like I can't release something until I've touched every
- 8:05bit. And also in terms of the band, Caleb Christian Marley Luke,
- 8:13this was our most intense brainhive to make something come together. I invited them
- 8:22in a lot more to the emotional arc that I went through in making this
- 8:28record and leaned on them as much as I as much as I could just
- 8:33to get to the finish line together. So yeah, I love producing and
- 8:39I love engineering and editing and recording, and it's important for me to still
- 8:46touch it. But I did challenge myself in a really positive way by inviting
- 8:54in as many people as I as I could. There was also some guest
- 8:58guitarists involved Connor McDonald. There's a track on there I recorded with JB.
- 9:07Patterson a few years ago that I put on as well. So yeah,
- 9:11that's probably something that I haven't really put in the press release because it's it's
- 9:18a lot of Yeah, it was a lot right down, but it's easy
- 9:22to say. Yeah. I've noticed there's no track on the album called Megaflowers,
- 9:30so suggest to me that the title holds a bit more significant. Yeah,
- 9:35it's I'm often a bit tongue in cheek with things, and I sort
- 9:39of knew that by saying megaflower people would think I'd probably gone heavier, and
- 9:45it's my way of saying, Hey, imagine if bigger wasn't heavier but still
- 9:52big. So I'm I'm stretching. I'm stretching as far as I wanted to
- 10:00realize, and that's my mega as opposed to oh did you this? Wow?
- 10:07Look, how have you got a disco happening? Yeah? Comes and
- 10:11goes yeah, and I I've had a lot of new pressures on me for
- 10:20this release too, because I think I was saying earlier my first time was
- 10:24a big audience, my first time with industry on board, and I felt
- 10:30like the title megaflower is kind of how I felt about it, like mega
- 10:33flower, like go big or go home. And You've got an album tour
- 10:41coming up to promote Mega Flowers, starting in Melbourne on August at twenty third.
- 10:46Then goes through Castlemaine, Adelaide, Brisbane, Newcastle, Sydney and finished
- 10:50in Wollongo on September fifteenth. So what can we expect from those shows?
- 10:52What do you get lined up for us? Well, I'm very grateful to
- 10:58the audiences that have attended our shows for the last two years since Diesel Forever
- 11:05came out. My main goal is to be as generous as I can with
- 11:11the live show by rearranging some of the older songs, really focusing on like
- 11:20a live show. I'm not going to be trying to recreate the record exactly.
- 11:28That would be impossible, So all my efforts now that the record is
- 11:31finished is to kind of switch gears mentally and say, Okay, now I'm
- 11:37a live band. How can I do live arrangements as artfully as possible and
- 11:46keep it fresh and exciting for the shows that we can have extra players.
- 11:52I'm going to be bringing on, you know, some friends, and I've
- 11:58got some surprises in store for our hometown Princess Theater show in Brisbane, because
- 12:05I want to be as mind blowing as possible on all fronts. Very good.
- 12:13We're definitely not a band that sounds exactly like the recordings. So I
- 12:18think that's important. You want to come to a gig and get a gig.
- 12:24We don't use track or anything like that. It's it's important to me.
- 12:28There's like an authenticity in the room that might only happen that night,
- 12:33you know. Oh yes, okay, Well, thanks very much for your
- 12:37time today, k It's been a pleasure again today. A Full Flower Moon
- 12:39will release the third album, Megaplow on July the nineteenth. Sure kicks off
- 12:43on August to twenty third, so check out all the socials and keep up
- 12:48to date. Thank you so much, Chris, and can I just say
- 12:50thank you for having me. The band was super excited to hear that we
- 12:54had an interview together, So thank you so much for your time. Devils
- 13:00fire in his hips. When it gets too thick, he goes down to
- 13:03the river. Man people go on and know way dips. Yeah. I
- 13:07have to tell him. It's just the way his body's proground. It's just
- 13:16the way his body's prokeground. Devilon knows got a big rom lip with the
- 13:37big sad pitch and the big split tip. Devilon knows got a pig long
- 13:43nos and the devil. I don't know he could have nothing. Yeah,
- 13:50he could have nothing. Tilman knows, got a big split lip with the
- 13:58big strong grip in the big back to devilone knows God all of this,
- 14:03and the devil I don't know. He could have nothing, Yeah he could
- 14:11have nothing. Devilne knows God all of this. If it gets too thick,
- 14:45and take him down to the river. Man O, the Devil's one,
- 14:50do that bit delved all of this. I'm sticking flying man. The
- 15:01aln knows, got a big gun, the big rocks, clip in the
- 15:05bigs bag pet that hongn knows God, all these tracks, it's just spark.
- 15:15That's just just spark. God, he's got big rooms. It's got
- 15:31a big drunk. It don't mean about all the calls and talks and marks
- 15:56and conversations alone. Most last we can get. Most to last, we
- 16:33can get something cold less, a shut back. You take it to