Spacey Jane On ‘Booster Seat’, Their New Album, And The Song They Can’t Stand To Play
"We've finally finished what we started a year-and-a-half ago."
On Saturday, January 23, as the Hottest 100 countdown inched closer and closer to the top ten, Caleb Harper was beginning to fret.
The frontman of Perth band Spacey Jane knew it was likely he’d be hearing their breakout song ‘Booster Seat’ up the business end of the poll, but as the top ten began to creep by, and the stakes subsequently rose, Harper and his bandmates grew increasingly anxious.
“The top ten was very intense for us,” he says a month later over the phone from Perth, with a sigh of relief. “We were hopeful that it would be somewhere up the pointy end, but then when it got to the top ten we expected to hear it any moment…so any song that played that wasn’t ‘Booster Seat’ we were like ‘Oh shit it’s getting close’. We kinda always knew ‘Heat Waves’ was the one, it was such a massive song that year. It was pretty amazing, we were stoked.”
‘Booster Seat’ ended up landing at #2, second to Glass Animals’ ‘Heat Waves’. It was an impressive result for the four-piece — which is completed by drummer and co-manager Kieran Lama, guitarist Ashton Le Cornu, and bassist Peppa Lane — and a nice accolade to round out a year in which they confidently shuffled to the forefront of Australian indie music.
Let The Light In
Sunlight, their glistening debut album which landed in June last year, was the result of years of grinding and gigging around Perth. Caleb and Kieran started jamming together when they were in high school in Geraldton — they even made an Unearthed profile for their budding band, SICCHINO. After a move to Perth, and lassoing a couple more bandmates into the operation, Spacey Jane was born. Lane joined the band in late 2019, after the departure of original bassist Amelia Murray.
Five years of intense gigging followed, as did frenetic EPs like No Way To Treat An Animal (2017) and In The Slight (2018).
“In some ways it feels like we’ve been doing it for ages, but also everything moves quite quickly in that sense also so it feels like it’s all come out of nowhere sometimes for us too,” Harper says. “You’ve suddenly exploded out of their periphery and into their consciousness…I guess that’s what happens when you reach a certain size and level in Australia, people know about you.”
But suddenly it was time to focus — the band now had a record deal with English label AWAL and had to bend their brains towards their first big mountain: their debut album. Writing for Sunlight kicked off in earnest about two years before its release, and it was only about halfway through writing the record that Harper realised what the finished product might sound like. The themes — relationship breakdowns, anxiety, reckoning with yourself as a young adult thrust into life — started to repeat themselves, and the rest of the songs began to fall into place.
Harper’s writing is confessional and confronting — he addresses exes and friends and family directly through Sunlight, and is open about mental health struggles, sobriety, and being “fucked up“. A press release ahead of the album noted that it would sound almost like an “apology”; prior to the release, Harper had to come clean to those he’d written about.
“I had to warn exes and family members and be like ‘Look, there’s this line or this song and no one else will ever know…but you have to know that this is what I’m talking about’,” he says. “Those weren’t the nicest conversations. And like…I would hate it someone wrote shit about me, but I don’t know what else to write about.”
Harper’s not too worried about airing such personal skeletons publicly — that’s the name of the game, after all. But when people drill down to the specifics, he still feels the need to hide.
“I would hate it someone wrote shit about me, but I don’t know what else to write about.”
Sunlight unfurls slowly — its easy, languid melodies a cloak for Harper’s blood-on-the-pages songwriting. Tracks like ‘Good Grief’ tackle his difficult relationship with his mother, ‘Head Cold’ is him trying to be sober for someone he loved, ‘Skin’ is about cheating, and analysing his own double standards about the subject. It’s a broad landscape, but the production knits it together — spacious, bright, and clear.
“[Producer Dave Parkin] first introduced us to this idea of creating as much space as possible, and only filling it if you really have to,” Harper says. “And that’s something we really took on and made our own in the record. I think the best thing he does for us is listen really intensely to our ideas, and let us take things as far as we can take them, even if he doesn’t think it’s great to begin with, and he’ll let us go until we figure out it’s shit. But he gives us the opportunity to explore.”
Initially, Harper was a little concerned about the change in sound from their earlier EPs — now, he can’t believe he ever held those doubts.
“Honestly, I can’t even believe that I thought that…to be honest,” he reflects, after a long pause. “Hearing the record now it could be even more detached from what we used to produce. If I think about it hard enough I can sort of see how we deviated a fair bit from our earlier EPs, but at the same time it feels like an extension of what we’ve been doing.”
The Ultimate Boost
One day, nearly two-and-a-half years ago, Harper was messing about with some open chords on the guitar, sliding gently between the 1st and the 4th of the key. It was a nice slide, and suddenly an image he’d been toying with for months popped into his head: a child in the booster seat of a car, legs swinging, unable to touch the ground. Something clicked.
He took it to Le Cornu, who came up with the distinctive riff (“he’s the master of unconventional guitar parts, that’s our secret weapon in the band”). They laid it down in a studio, only to have the producer (not Parkin at this stage) chuck it back at them, saying he didn’t like the riff. “He sent us back a version of the song without the riff to try and convince us,” Harper says. “It took us ages to write, it was one of those songs where we really thought about how to create as much space as possible — just getting the kick drum and the bass pattern right took about a day of work.”
“I don’t love playing ‘Feeding The Family’ anymore, that one’s gotten a bit old, but ‘Booster Seat’s good enough.”
“You’re helpless, you’ve kind of lost it, or you have the emotional maturity of a three-year-old, which is probably more the case for me,” Harper explains, describing the central image of the chorus. “That first setting — being held from the back in the front seat, it’s like imagining someone sitting behind you putting their arms over you. People always ask me where I’m sitting in the song, I’m in the front seat. That’s kind of the modern day, 22-year-old version of me being in a booster seat, being held by the person behind me.”
It was a hard slog to get it together in the form it appears on the album — one of the most complex songs the band has ever pulled together, Harper says. Another reason, he says, for why it’s so special to have audiences connect to it. There was initially a little concern that the four-and-a-half-minute long track, the longest on Sunlight, would be a little too slow and steady for fans to hook into, that it could end up being forgotten. The reality was the opposite.
“It’s become a hug for me — how much people sing it back to us, and when I play it…the weight of what it’s done for us and the appreciation for what it’s done…it adds another element to it I suppose,” says Harper. “It feels like a family member. I don’t love playing ‘Feeding The Family’ anymore, that one’s gotten a bit old, but ‘Booster Seat’s good enough.”
Spacey Jane at Summer Sounds in Adelaide. Photo supplied.
The band have only just got stuck into their Sunlight tour, after the, ahem, delay that was 2020, but album number two is already underway. Speaking with triple j recently, Harper revealed they had a few tracks locked and loaded, recorded during lockdown last year. Harper tells me now there’s definitely some second album pressure building, particularly off the back of their Hottest 100 success.
“We didn’t have anything to lose before — we were just excited to put an album out,” Harper says. “Now there’s an audience, and we feel like we want to impress people, and also put together our best body of work. The thing that we’re focusing on, especially me, is taking time with it and being really thoughtful about every little bit. With our first record there was a degree of intense pressure at the end…so maybe not everything we did was refined or manicured as we wanted it to be. With this one it’s about taking the time and making sure everything is very intentional.”
Right now though, the band gets to finally head out on the road and show audiences the album they’ve been listening to for nine months. For Harper, it’s the biggest relief ever: “We’ve finally finished what we’ve started…a year-and-a-half ago.”
Spacey Jane will headline Summer Sounds in Melbourne on Tuesday March 23 and Thursday March 25. They’ll also be appearing at the regional festival Fresh Produce later in the year, and fitting in a stack of shows before that as well. For all details and to grab tickets, head here.
Jules LeFevre is the editor of Music Junkee. Follow her on Twitter.
Photo Credit: Daniel Hilderbrand