We had a chat to our homies Shortstraw all about release of their third full album ‘Youthless’, you can find all the info you need on pre-ordering this sucka HERE. (Plus, you get 6 tracks early on Christmas day if you pre=order the album)

 

1. Youthless – Where did you get the name? 

Tom came up with the name. The theme of the album is age and our loss of youth, as well as the fact that we still don’t know what we’re really doing, hence the play on the word ‘useless’. We’re older, but still haven’t grown up. We’re Youthless.

 

1. How much alcohol & “other stuff” went into the making of this album?

Ha! A fair amount. We were lucky enough to have a pretty much endless supply of really good red wine, courtesy of Sarah Rogan’s super generous dad. So we had black teeth through most of the recording process. We didn’t do any “other stuff” apart from dagga, which we did quite a lot of. Can you ‘do’ weed? Yes. Yes you can.

 

1. What were some of the most random proposed names for the album?

We knew we wanted it to be based on age from the get go, because Al had written most of the songs about it, so nothing too random. Juvenescence may have been one, but that’s just cos there’s a thesaurus on my computer. It is a synonym for youth for anyone who doesn’t have a thesaurus on their computer. What kind of computer do you use?

 

1. Weirdest thing that happened while recording Youthless?

Jacques at High Seas Studios is a real champ, and he’s been renovating his studio since we met him two years ago. It might not be that weird, but during the course of recording this album, he rearranged the studio setup about 4 or 5 times, trying to find the room’s sweet spot (where the bass bounces off the right spots and other technical stuff we don’t fully comprehend), even changing rooms at the beginning. It sounds pretty dang good to us, but he’s still moving stuff around today. This is also why we love Jacques. It’s always an adventure when you go to High Seas.

 

1. What are your favourite moments recording this album?

The actual writing part is always my favourite. Like, a song is never as exciting as that first time you fucking nail it and you go “hell fuck yeah, we have a song!” So it was really nice to have the budget to do proper pre-production for this album. So we were able to live record every song as we were writing them, then tweak different things and go back in to re-record that and then use these recordings as the skeletons for the final product. Having the freedom to write a song in studio is a great luxury for us, so that was nice. That was also pretty much the only time we were together in the studio apart from listening sessions towards the end. The listening sessions were pretty great too. We’d all sit all cosy in the room (whichever way Jacques had it arranged) and drink a couple bottles of red wine and just listen. It’s a really great thing to do that I think a lot of people don’t appreciate anymore.