HICKTOWN BARNABY

Writer: Joseph Maranta

Exiting her front door for the final time, he basks in the adrenaline and pain – knowing this particular moment will never be experienced again. Though heartbreaks are a certainty in life, you can never replicate the unique combinations of emotion that each individual break-up brings. It’s an ironic notion that something so painful and seemingly world-ending, can make you feel alive in a way nothing else can.

He knows that eventually he will have to reckon with what’s just taken place, but now isn’t that time – facing his emotions is too confronting of an idea. Instead, he gets in his car to visit friends to try and detach himself from a sobering reality.

Walking into the garage he eyes a familiar couch adorned with empty cans of 4XXX gold and PS4 controllers. The fellas are busy playing board games and tinkering with acoustic guitars, seemingly ignorant of life’s apathy. Throughout the afternoon and into night, his fragile emotional state sees him swinging from manic joyfulness to extended periods of desolation, the latter of which he attempts to hide from his friends, but to no avail.

He puts his friends first and calls an early night for himself. Arriving home, his heartbeat increases as he gets closer to his bedroom. His repressed emotions have now reached a critical mass, he slams the door behind him and throws himself onto the bed face down.

Awaking with a dry mouth and sweaty clothes, he opens his door to see daylight outside. The storm hasn’t left him, but for now he’s in the eye of it. He has time to reconcile with what’s been, and what’s yet to come.

This is Hicktown Barnaby.

The folk / rock trio from Meanjin consists of Logan Meyer (Vocals, Lead Guitar), Jaspin Chamberlain-Kent (Bass) and James Love (Drums).

Embracing soft-rock heritage with heavier and at times goofy live performances, Hicktown Barnaby and their latest album Crusher reflect on the tribulations of late adolescence and the borders between the blissful ignorance of youth and the callousness of maturing.

JOE: Thanks for coming to chat guys, how did you three end up in Hicktown Barnaby together?

LOGAN: I, myself, have been making songs since high school, so Hicktown Barnaby is the name I put the music under. I had some other friends who I used to play with, but us 3 are the final Hicktown Barnaby, the real Hicktown Barnaby. 

JAMES: It was kind of magical how it all came together. 

JASPIN: It only happened because I said I’d play bass in Logan’s band. I’d never played bass before. Then James said he’d play drums and he was wearing a radiohead jumper when he told me that, which I thought was really cool. 

LOGAN: We also all have the same haircut.

JOE: So if it all clicked into place easily, would you say that you all had similar musical influences growing up?

JASPIN: Nah, I didn’t know any music. I only really liked Radiohead. 

JAMES: Logan was super into Weezer. 

LOGAN: Oh I’m still super into Weezer. Things come and go, but I’m perpetually in a Weezer stage. 

JOE: It seems like you three were always playing at The Junk Bar, how do you feel about the venue moving to New Farm and what was the Ashgrove community like there?

LOGAN: Whenever we played at The Junk Bar we knew like every single person there. Gigs there didn’t even register as a gig in my head, it was just more hanging out with friends. 

JASPIN: Not having to prepare mentally to be in the valley was great. I’m interested to see the new Junk Bar, I really hope it doesn’t have a washed out vibe. It was a very fairy, woodland creature vibe before which I loved. 

JOE: You released your debut album Crusher earlier this year, how long was this album coming?

LOGAN: Probably like two months before we all met, so a loooong time. It was originally going to be a shitty punk type album. 

JAMES: We had all these songs that we really liked and we’d tried recording in a studio but it didn’t work and we didn’t like what we were recording so we ran in the opposite direction and went to do it entirely ourselves. It was basically just going to be an education in learning how to self-record but it quickly turned into a real thing because we liked it so much. We didn’t intentionally set out to make a record we put our entire being into, but it just kind of happened. 

LOGAN: Once you get started with something it’s really easy to become very perfectionist about it, and think about how good it could be. It’s easy to be like “Oh shit this bass track sounds sick, let's do a million more takes and spend another month on it.”

JAMES: And then a year and a half goes by. 

JOE: So what was the recording process like?

LOGAN: We recorded it in a much more complicated way than intended. It was essentially going to be a live album, but it turned into an overdub album. It’s so enticing to add heaps of little bits to a song, and never be done recording. 

JASPIN: Things really started to happen when we realised what we could do in terms of the sound. We got obsessed with the beach boys and became infatuated with the idea of what double-tracking could do to the songs. We went into the recording knowing we wanted to experiment a lot with the sounds and recording process.

LOGAN: I love recording with tape. A lot of my favourite music is recorded to cassettes, a lot of my favourite bands like Good Morning and Dear Nora use cassettes to record. I really love the idea of little gizmos, like humans manipulating natural things in the world to do what they want. With a computer it’s just a magic box that does whatever you want, but with a tape I can see that there’s a little strip of shavings that align with the electric currents and signals that change it's strength, it’s just so interesting to me. 

JAMES: It also makes us think more about what we’re doing, when you only have 8 tracks you have to make every part as purposeful as you can make it. 

JOE: What was the first song that made you realise how special music can be?

LOGAN: Oh I have a record for this, it’s ‘Forever’ by Joy Again. It was so inspiring, it made me realise “Oh my god I can do this!” It’s this music that is so potent to me, but it sounded like a transmission - it was the coolest thing ever to hear that album. Another one is Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s first album.

JAMES: There’s a lot of albums I can attribute to my ‘awakening’. I was in year 11 / 12 and I was unsure if I wanted to do music, because I didn’t know much about Brisbane’s scene, but then I found Ball Park Music, who I think are just great - like Sam Cromack is such an amazing songwriter. The fact that they make such good music specifically from Brisbane, and their music is so Brisbane-coded, it’s just so cool and was very inspiring to me as someone who was unsure if they could be a musician. 

JASPIN: Probably Deep Forest for me. It’s like these french guys and their goal was to sample Pygmy people and they went out and got these samples, and in the end none of the samples they used were from Pygmy people. It’s goated, regardless of the context surrounding why they did it. 

JOE: I personally hear a midwest emo influence on the album, is this something you intended or were inspired by?

LOGAN: We were having this argument because James says it doesn’t sound emo. Slaughter Beach, Dog was a band we were listening to heaps when we made it. But it wasn’t meant to be an emo album, I think it’s half happy half sad songs. 

JOE: What are you looking forward to next year?

JAMES: We want to get right back into it, another album. 

LOGAN: We’re waiting for a tape recorder to get fixed before we start. 

JAMES: We recorded Crusher as a way to get better at recording, so we can record this other stuff. So now that we’ve finished Crusher we can get onto recording the new stuff. 

JASPIN: The songs Logan wrote were from when he was 16 / 17, and we’re 21 now. We perceive the world so much differently now and those past songs were about high school stuff. Sometimes when you’re on stage it’s like I want to be feeling songs that are written about what we’re experiencing now. It feels like we’re somewhat stuck back here at the moment but also it’s not so bad, because the reason we feel like that is because we have so much other material now. 

JOE: Are you looking at touring or playing festivals next year at all?

LOGAN: I was meant to apply for BigSound this year but I forgot. Everyone posted about it when it was happening, but not when you were meant to apply. 

JAMES: I think we’re going to start doing some more regional shows next year though.

JOE: How do you now reflect on the album and how it’s impacted the status of your band?

JASPIN: I was worried before releasing the album that people thought we don’t care because we’re all pretty strange. I worry that we come across as if we don’t care about our music because we act goofy or whatever, especially on stage. But it’s different now that we have an album out, it shows that we’re serious about being silly. 

LOGAN: We tried to make the album as funny as we could, but it comes off quite sad from what I hear from people. 

JAMES: When we play live, especially Crusher songs, we just slam them out. We go really crazy, and we had a pretty heavy band who wanted us to open after seeing us live and then they got back to us saying “Oh you guys must have changed your sound” after listening to our album. 

JOE: Despite your sound not being a traditional ‘Brisbane’ sound, you’re still very involved in the scene. So who would be some of your favourite Brisbane bands doing the rounds currently?

HICKTOWN BARNABY: Phantasm Street, definitely. 

JASPIN: I like FENRIR, I like FENRIR a lot. 

LOGAN: I love Rosemine, his guitar playing is so cool. Also Joe’s Band because Cale, the drummer, lives in my house. 

JASPIN: General Folly, because the drummer lives in my house.

UPCOMING SHOWS: Live Recording at Junk Bar, November 22nd - TICKET LINK

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