Slight Delay
On Album Birthdays, Record Reflections & Twenty Years
Tomorrow is the twentieth birthday of my second solo album Slight Delay!
I recorded it myself in the first version of Loose Connections, which was my little home studio. It was so little (one microphone, an 8 track digital recorder I used with headphones, and little desktop computer speakers that I found in the street which had a weirdly great sound), I could just pick it up and bring it into bed which I often did when I got tired but wanted to keep recording. It worked pretty well for the songs, which are slow and kind of raggedy.
My friend Jed Kurzel, whose band The Mess Hall I was/am a big fan of, helped me a lot with the recording. I’d put down my song, just guitar and voice at the same time, and when I was happy with what I had, Jed would come over and head up to the studio at the top of the rickety stairs, listen to the songs and spend the evening adding whatever extra he thought it needed; guitar, singing, harmonica, percussion. Because the studio was so little, I’d usually just leave him to it and sit down the bottom of the stairs for a cup of tea or a glass of wine where I could listen in awe to what he was playing. I had total trust in whatever he added, it always took the song to a new place, uplifting my fairly messy playing and tying everything together. It was a great, easy and fairly unusual way to record. I feel like not being in a studio where it was costing money and pressure was on, added a lovely, loose and dreamy vibe to this album. It always felt like time was standing still during recording sessions. Warren Ellis (Dirty Three), another friend I was a huge admirer of, kindly added haunting violin, mandolin and guitarica to some of the songs in the same fashion when he came over for a visit.
Here’s a pretty crappy video of us performing it in Paris a couple of years later. I love it anyway.
Rusty Hopkinson, serious music lover, wonderful man and drummer with You Am I, had recently started his own record label, Reverberation Appreciation Society, and offered to release the album on a very fancy limited edition digital CD with a foldout poster.
Aden took a photo for the cover in my tiny backyard. I did the artwork and layout on Quark Express, using a ruler against the computer screen to get the sizing right because I couldn’t understand how to use measurements on the computer, running up the street to Kinkos every couple of days to print out test versions until I got it right.
Everything just fell into place and came naturally.
This is what I wrote for the promo stuff:
With this record, I wanted to make something raw and true. I recorded myself, singing and guitar playing and generally stomping a tambourine, all onto one track, then just added sounds and asked friends to add sounds, til it felt good. I wanted it to sound like old blues, coming from the valley below or from a voice whispering in your ear while yr lying down by the river. I wanted it to shimmer in the dark and tremble with love. I wanted to make songs that could be your friend, that you could sleep with, that could sit on yr knee and tell you everything’s alright. I hope they make you feel good, I really do, and thanks for listening.” LC
Here’s a little excerpt from my book Lovers Dreamers Fighters about recording the track Six Strings of Pleasure:
The legendary Australian punk rocker Ian Rilen told me, with a wink, ‘Fuck up once, it’s a mistake. Repeat it three times, it’s art.’ Best advice I ever got, because it highlights how fine the line between right and wrong is, and questions if it even exists.
The first argument I ever had with Aden was shortly after we got together. I was recording my album Slight Delay (released 2004) in my little home studio, aptly named ‘Loose Connections’ due to my constant struggle to hook things up correctly. Late one night, I mentioned I wanted some harmonica on a song I was recording, and he casually offered to play it for me. I hadn’t been aware he could play and jumped at the idea – it was a love song for him, after all. I set him up in front of a mic, clamped some headphones on him and let him go for it. He did one take, and I declared it was perfect. To me, the song was already a ramshackle delight: a door squeaks shut at the front of it, a tambourine drops and clatters to the floor, chimes tinkle through delays, there’s offbeat percussion, and Casio samples of trains rumble by and blow their whistles, and I thought his lonesome harmonica added just the right note of melancholy, ache and distance. But he saw his contribution as nothing more than a stand-in and insisted I should hire a professional goddamn gold orchestral standard harmonica player to do it properly and couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t jump at the idea to do my song justice. I was determined that this would ruin the song entirely. It wouldn’t be right. It would be beyond wrong. Aden thought I was a crazy fool hellbent on destroying my album out of some ill-considered romantic loyalty. He called me stubborn and defensive and rigid. All I could do was cry. And continue to refuse. I was everything he accused me of being, but I was also right. Sixteen years later I’m still in love with that thirty seconds of harmonica in the outro of the song…
It got some really nice reviews and there was a great small tour playing with The Mess Hall to launch it. I was especially excited to find it reviewed in Plan B, Everett True’s music magazine from England - it felt almost impossible in those days to find a way to get my music heard outside of Australia, so that was a total thrill.
Velveteen vocals bubble through a pool of Barbarellas matmos, backlit by Ry Cooder on mescaline, Tortoise-style keys and somnolent beats Loene Carmen inspires devotion from hardcore bikers to art-house boys. Slight Delay, her second solo album, cements the myth in cherry red lipstick. (Natalie Apostolou, Plan B)
Loene Carmen has fallen into some lost world where late night country rock is bound up in medieval chains. Mazzy Star springs straight to mind, but the flesh in Carmen’s voice and the huge spaces around it bring out other associations as well, most especially the sexy whisperings of Prince and the Rolling Stones at their loose and lazy best. (
)I’d love to make a sister album for Slight Delay sometime, record it in a similar way.
I’d love to remaster and release it on vinyl one day too…. who knows, maybe I will! Let me know if you think I should…
Speaking of vinyl, and albums, I’d be remiss not to mention my eighth album Transatlantic Light will be out in just over a month! I’m so excited to be getting it out into the world!
You can preorder on Bandcamp or on beautiful limited edition clear pink vinyl from Impressed Recordings now.
August seems to be a productive month for me - I have another album birthday coming up in a couple of weeks! I like album birthdays better than my actual birthday, which I’ve never had much interest in celebrating - birthdays always make me feel a bit grinchy and self conscious and like I’m getting special treatment I don’t really deserve cos I didn’t do anything to earn it except survive. Which is definitely something to be grateful for! Anyway, viva Slight Delay, and I’m going to eat some cake later and give it a spin to celebrate.
If you happen to be reading this in Toronto, Ontario I’m going to play a couple of songs at The Communist’s Daughter (1149 Dundas Street West) at 7pm tomorrow night (Sunday 19th August 2024) - come on down and celebrate with me.