The things you know and love define you. Lose the parameters of that, and it becomes difficult to outline yourself accurately. The edges become blurred – a leap into the unknown often means losing sight of those things, and so begins a journey of retracing those steps and desperately trying to grasp them again. For Spacey Jane, much of ‘If That Makes Sense’ stems from that journey. Their third album finds the band far out of their comfort zone, in new depths, but doing their best at treading water regardless.
Moving from their native Western Australia, where their first two records were brought to life, to the vastly different LA, everything they knew was thrown into various disarray. So began the process of making ‘If That Makes Sense’ – in a new environment, with new challenges to grapple with and old lessons to contextualise.
“It was a unique and novel experience, and honestly pretty challenging a lot of the time,” reflects Caleb Harper, the band’s lead vocalist. “I moved over here for the best part of two years, and all that stuff like getting a driver’s license, figuring out how to get a rental here, not having a doctor anymore or health insurance. We felt like fish out of water. We’d become very comfortable in Australia, and getting out was a healthy and important thing for us to do. The discomfort we felt played an important role in how the record sounded. I think it made us work harder.”
The element of change seeped into the very pores of the record in every way possible. From working with entirely new people to approaching writing from a different perspective, ‘If That Makes Sense’ was brought to life in a wholly different way to what Caleb and his bandmates Peppa Lane, Kieran Lama and Ashton Hardman-Le Cornu were used to. That initial move was a catalyst – the rug pulled from under them that forced them to see things through a different lens.
“You know who you are often in the place you are from based on all these points of reference,” says Caleb. “The friends you see all the time, the places you go. There’s repetition and comfort in that. I think that’s where you find your greatest sense of identity, in those familiar things. When you lose that… I’ve spent the year being like, ‘Oh my god, who am I without these guardrails?’. I didn’t realise it at the time, but the record feels very reflective to me because I was looking at all these things from the past and building this picture of who I am and what happened in isolation of the comfort of home.”
Distance often provides clarity, and ‘If That Makes Sense’ has that in droves. Throughout the album’s thirteen tracks, there is a sageness in its reflective tone. In this new body of water, the band are diving deeper than ever with a new level of lucidity. Spacey Jane’s lyricism has always been a huge part of their appeal – on their third outing, it is sharper and more frank than ever. Part of that stems from new faces and new approaches in their musical world.
“From a songwriting perspective, it was really unique having different people write on the record. I’d never done that before. When I first came out to LA, it was the first time I’d ever written a song with someone else, and that was a pretty interesting start. I didn’t like it at first. It felt like someone was really in my business, and I didn’t know how to advocate for an idea that I liked if someone else didn’t like it, or how to tell someone I didn’t like their idea. I was afraid to be too vulnerable and put things forward, which is a weird experience. So, it was a really good learning curve for me. I became more sure of my taste, and I think it transformed me as a songwriter; that was cool.”
Though more people were suddenly involved in its process, the writing is miraculously more personal. Succinct and clearer it may be, but it is still as unguarded as one might have come to expect from the band, as though the vulnerability of sharing those thoughts with others in the initial stages has been bottled was infused into the very lyrics.
“It’s funny because I didn’t think it would be more personal,” says Caleb. “I felt like, if anything, I removed myself from my bedroom – everything we’ve ever made was written at my desk next to my bed, and that, to me, is the most personal setting there is. I thought being outside of that, being in a city with other songwriters, would make it less so. I always felt like you didn’t have to say something that made complete sense if you felt that it made sense to you. I still agree with that; a lot of my favourite songwriters – Jeff Tweedy from Wilco, he’s like that. I don’t know exactly what he means, but I feel something, and that’s beautiful. But certain people I worked with, like Sarah Aarons, who I wrote lots with on the record, really think laterally in terms of how we tell a story. Does this make sense? How does this relate to this? It’s word by word. I took a lot of that on board and became more specific and intentional lyrically because of that. I wouldn’t just put a line in because it felt right; I’d be like, okay, it feels right, but does it make sense as well? Does it form part of the narrative of the song and the record? I can’t help but do it now, it’s almost like I need to write that way.”
“No experience is that unique; there are a limited amount of human emotions”
The songs span a great deal of unique experiences and are specific in detail, but there is an unshakeable resonance built into the songwriting and driven home by the many layers of the band’s sound on this record. ‘Whateverrr’ fizzes with anxiety that is wound into its bassline, whilst the desperation and angst of ‘I Can’t Afford To Lose You’ is made impossibly more intense by the all-out rock of the track’s riffs and percussion. The emotions are relatable regardless of the reasoning from there because they shimmer on the surface of the sonics of each track.
“When we put out ‘Sunlight’, I thought that was so specific, and I never expected that people would relate to it or it would resonate with people the way that it did. The lesson for me there was, and has always been since, that no experience is that unique. People’s experiences might be unique, but there’s a limited amount of human emotions. All of us have felt all of them, whether it’s grief or sadness or longing or anger. If you capture the feeling when you tell that story, someone will have felt that before, even if they haven’t had that exact experience before. It’s been an interesting lesson and journey for me.”
The grand scope of the album and the ground it covers means a central idea is hard to pinpoint, but it’s more realistic as a result. It is rare for one thing to plague your thoughts – in the context of change especially, a myriad of things tend to occupy your brain space. It is from that scattered state of mind the album’s title came to be. “When the first record came out, people really prescribed a theme to it, which I think is fair. It told a story that was this wrestling with coming of age. When the next one was close to coming out, I was asked what it was about and felt this real pressure to give it a theme and find all these throughlines, and I wish I didn’t in a lot of ways. I think it doesn’t have to be anything, you can just fucking make an album that is just a collection of songs and thoughts. The point of the title is to say, here’s a bunch of things that I’m not really sure about, but that’s what I have thought and felt; here you go. There’s something really freeing about that. I don’t know what it’s about, but just take from it what you will and know that we gave everything to it for two years and said exactly what we wanted to say. There’s no throughline.”
The phrase “if that makes sense” is often a throwaway comment conveying the uncertainty and confusion the album deals in, but the record finds Spacey Jane sounding surer of themselves than ever, musically. There’s no doubt that is due in part to the sheer time they were afforded to create ‘If That Makes Sense’ – longer than they had ever spent on a singular project, the four of them were able to truly sit with the songs and transform them into something fresher.
“We revisited songs – ‘How to Kill Houseplants’ was the first song we made on the album and the last song we finished. We went back and changed things on it because it felt like the record was telling us something needed to be different. When you spend three months on an album, you almost go a little insane. You obsess over so many parts of it. We went down so many rabbit holes, and we could’ve spent more time, but by the time we got to the end of that period, it was like right, this is everything we want to do to this. I think it helps the record feel more coherent and consistent.”
It lends the album a freshness that stays even with repeat listening. A new harmony, a hidden drum pattern, a lyric that went unnoticed the first time. There are tiny, gorgeous details buried deep in ‘If That Makes Sense’, making every listen feel like the first one. Working with Mike Crossey, the band experienced a new approach to studio life that allowed them to commit harder to their decisions and meant those moments of quiet magic had their place.
“Mike was amazing because he has strong opinions, which he holds lightly and delivers lightly, but he would be like, ‘No, this is how this needs to be’, and if I disagreed, we would go to war about something. That is actually really amazing if you can do it in a healthy, constructive way, which I think we got pretty good at. We learnt this shorthand between us and him, which meant we could work faster. For us as a band, the first stage of collaboration is the four of us in a lot of ways. We all got better at that internally, too, which is cool. We took lessons from our experiences with other collaborators and brought them into our own group, which is always a good thing.”
The tracks are bolder than before – ‘All The Noise’ is more fast-paced and angsty, whilst ‘The More That It Hurts’ is breezy in its indie sensibilities. ‘Estimated Delivery’ feels like the record encapsulated – the dreamy lens through which Spacey Jane have always unfolded things is locked in place, but it sees the four of them working in tighter synchronicity and playing to their strengths better than ever. It’s still Spacey Jane, but operating on a new frequency.
There could’ve been no ending more fitting or poignant than ‘August’ for this record – beginning as a story of leaving family to make this defining move before descending into worry over the pending end of a breakup, it has a note of finality at its core, but remains hopeful of new beginnings. That’s exactly where Spacey Jane seem to find themselves. The final words that play out on the album are Peppa singing the title, and it’s a deeply evocative note to conclude with. “I was crying listening to it and singing it, knowing something was about to end in my life in terms of the relationship and also this period of making the record,” Caleb recalls. “For me, it has a massive personal effect when I hear it that is actually quite hard to listen to, but for us it felt right. It’s perfect.”
‘If That Makes Sense’ marks the end of a defining, memorable period in both Spacey Jane’s personal lives and their career, but it also kicks off the next one. With a wealth of new lessons to take forward and the confidence of knowing they can prevail, Spacey Jane aren’t just treading water anymore – they’re happily afloat.
Spacey Jane’s album ‘If That Makes Sense’ is out 9th May.
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