Jackson McLaren

The light cracks the ceiling, another day as before / A poor kid has to sing a song to greet the dawn If you head 265km south west of Melbourne you’ll end up in a beautiful coastal town called Warrnambool. It’s one end of the Great Ocean Road, its dairy industry has a well-deserved reputation for quality cheeses, and it also boasts an unexpectedly impressive musical pedigree. Warrnambool’s alumni range from country legend Smoky Dawson through to the hard-rockin’ members of Airbourne. Triple J’s Tom Ballard and Alex Dyson both called it home. And now it has a new favourite son: Jackson McLaren. By the age of 17 his folk-inflected songcraft had caught the ear of Josh Pyke, who produced Jackson’s debut self-titled EP. A move to Melbourne later, the breakthrough came with ‘A Whole Day Nearer’ from 2011’s Mirrors and Strings EP. In 2013 it was followed by the haunting single ‘Some of My Friends’ – a waltz-time tribute to the way that life changes us all, driven by an insistent fiddle and a melody Mumford & Sons would have killed for – and now McLaren and his trusty sidemen, the Triple Threat, present their debut full length album: Songs to Greet the Dawn. “I took the title from the Philip Larkin poem Aubade, which is such a lovely word,” McLaren explains. “It translates as something like ‘love songs to the morning’ and I thought ‘that’s a nice place to start your first album.’” The album’s been a long time coming, but that’s because McLaren knows you never get a second chance to make a first impression. “Over the last few years I’ve had opportunities to make an album, and there have always been plenty of songs, but I’ve really wanted to keep pushing myself further and further to see what else I can do and get some other ideas in there.” The result, produced by John Castle (Josh Pyke, Washington, Gossling) maps the development of one of Australia’s most exciting young songwriters. “I think the earliest song is from 2008, and others are from only a couple of months ago. I just wanted my first album to be a big, cohesive picture of what has been happening for the last few years.” The result is hard to pigeonhole – is it country? Roots? Folk? – but easy to describe: it’s a collection of stories from a gifted observer of human experience. Take the driving ‘Here’s a Memory’ – a huge, jubilant celebration of escape and experience that should show Of Monsters and Men a thing or two about how to do big folk-rock crescendos. Contrast that with the intimate, atmospheric finger-picking of the title track, with McLaren barely breathing strings of single images into the microphone as the Triple Threat slowly build the song behind him. “The last song that I wrote for the album is ‘Gold Turns to Green’. It’s this guy talking about his life in these little vignettes and snapshots and different phases of his life, and as the album weaves its way through there are lots of references to youth and age and a bit about death. So it’s a good way to kick it off,” he laughs. If the themes of change and reminiscence seem strange concerns for a writer who’s barely left his teens, maybe it’s because McLaren was following his dreams to the big smoke at an age when most people are still weighing up who to ask to the school formal. “I guess there’s some of that, packing up and moving to the city. The oldest song is ‘Farewell This House’, which is my ‘see you later, country town: I’m going to the city’ kinda thing. I was pretty much just stuck in Warrnambool as a kid, but I’ve always had this sense of wanderlust and I think the songs have a lot of moving and travel in them: when you’re in the city you want to be in the country and when you’re in the country you want to be in the city.” Life as a touring musician, therefore, is suiting him perfectly. “It took me a while to figure out that the thing I like the most is the variation of moving and not really caring too much where you’re ending up. It’s nice just being on a train or a bus – I like that feeling of momentum.” The album is full of stories he’s accumulated in his journeys, both personal and physical, peppered with details – a postcard on a mantelpiece here, a half-remembered line from a favourite song there. “I think some of them are fairly personal, but they’ve been weaved in such a way that you’re not really sure if they’ve happened to me or to somebody else.” It’s not surprising, given his musical models were songwriters who weren’t above some mythmaking of their own. “My old man was a big Stones and Bowie fan, which I love, but then I found Dylan when I was in year seven and that really turned me on. And then it was Robert Johnson, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Neil Young. Speaking of Neil Young, I’m reading his autobiography Waging Heavy Peace at the moment. Actually, there’s this great passage I just read about ten minutes ago…” He grabs his copy and recites: “‘Have you ever wondered what goes into writing a song? I wish I could tell you the exact ingredients, but there is nothing specific comes to mind. It seems to me that songs are a product of experience and cosmic alignment of circumstance: that is, who you are and how you feel at a certain time.’” Sound familiar? “Oh yeah. That says it all nicely.” Free download of 'Some Of My Friends': http://artisancouncil.com/jacksonmclarendownload http://www.jacksonmclaren.com https://twitter.com/jacksonmclaren