I had occasion to chat with members of the band caroline, for these two different interviews below. The first one is with Alex McKenzie (woodwinds) and Oliver Hamilton (violin): two London-based musicians who are members of ‪caroline and Shovel Dance Collective, but also collaborated with many other projects (Naima Bock, Able Noise and more). We discussed the creative process of contemporary folk group Shovel Dance Collective, and their affinities with caroline, including some anticipations from the upcoming album “caroline 2”.

In the second part, together with Jasper Llewellyn, one of the founding members of the band caroline, we discussed the songwriting and production process of the album caroline 2, with details about some of the tracks, including the single Total euphoria and the collaboration with Caroline Polachek on Tell me I never knew that.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

AR: What I find interesting about Shovel Dance is that there's this research of popular chants or traditional music that you want—not really to give them new life—but to make them your own and find their, maybe, original meaning.

Alex: Everything that we do in Shovel Dance is all traditional music, or at least sort of—99% of it is very old, normally very old traditional music. Or maybe more recently, it's either that or it's very improvised, and trying to kind of put those two things in dialogue. There's often a question of the contemporary relevance of some of these songs.

Oliver: And I guess musically that’s a big element—making it something that’s very in this moment, responsive, and about this kind of group dynamic and playing together, and then drawing from something that is very old. That will bring that source material into the present by default. That’s the aim.

AR: From the songs that you pick, there is a lot of experimentation. You elaborate them, then create a whole new structure. And I was wondering how is the process to get to what you have on the album. Especially, I was thinking of The Merry Golden Tree—it became such a majestic, massive piece compared to the other recordings that I have in mind. And I was wondering what led there.

Oliver: Yeah, we definitely lean into the epic.

Alex: We were asked by Campbell from Broadside Hacks if we’d like to perform at a Shirley Collins tribute night—and she was going to be there. It just didn’t quite end up happening, but we’d arranged The Merry Golden Tree with that in mind, because it was a song that Mataio [Austin Dean] just loved and chose—because it’s one that Shirley Collins sang. So that’s actually where the idea of doing that song came from.

Oliver: Then Mataio slightly changed the melody line, put his own slight change on it. And I think a big part of it also is—Mataio changed that, but also Nick’s harmonization on the organ—I think that provided the core of it, which is what a lot of the songs grew from. There’s something really satisfying about each time, it just keeps getting a little bit bigger. It was just very infectious to practice—it always felt very euphoric for me to kind of keep... yeah, and it doesn’t have to go anywhere—you can just keep doing this. It’s very addictive.

Alex: And then something we do a lot in Shovel Dance is build up and then have some unaccompanied group singing. That’s, I guess, a musical trademark of us now, which is very clear in The Merry Golden Tree. It’s droning and it’s slow and it’s got these kind of experimental textures, but a very sweet, beautiful melody and harmony on top. And then at some point, everything drops and there’s this big group singing at this kind of high point. I guess that really sums up a lot of what we’ve done as a band

Oliver: but specifically with The Merry Golden Tree, we were probably unknowingly channeling the style in which Mataio sang that. He was really bringing it—that very... he’s giving a lot of epicness to a very simple story of this boy on board this ship. It’s this kind of lowest rung of class on board this ship, and he’s giving a very epic retelling of that. So I think we were also subconsciously matching that in how we were arranging it. It would have felt wrong, with how he brought that song in, to do something more subdued. Either way, his performance—I think we channeled that a little bit. So I think through our improvisation, we’re always kind of channeling what the source material is doing. It’s telling us, I think.

AR: Do you think there are similarities or aspects in common between the performance of caroline and Shovel Dance?

Alex: I mean, definitely there’s elements in common

Oliver: there must be, yeah.

Alex: Like improvisation. There’s the wonderful strings player and the woodwinds player...

Olver: the strings and the woodwinds seem very similar.

Yeah, I would say that’s the main thing.

Alex: Yeah, definitely. I mean, there’s the improvisation, there’s a lot of group listening. Both are very concerned with listening to each other and playing together. Space. Improv. Things happening in the moment. So very like... in the present.

Oliver: I’m thinking like a ten-minute-long BRJ that has a similar feel to some of the improvisation we do in Shovel Dance.

Alex: I guess time—the use of time—like neither band is afraid of having a song that’s ten minutes or longer, maybe, you know?

I mean, in the recent Shovel Dance sets, we’ve been playing sometimes like a 15–20 minute continuous piece. And we recently did an hour-long continuous performance with Shovel Dance. And not being afraid to maybe demand something of the listener. Maybe challenging them a little bit—hopefully not too much—but challenging them in certain ways. Oliver: It’s nice to have music which isn’t so immediate. Something you’ve got to take time with and sort of immerse yourself in it—and then it kind of keeps giving. But hopefully—maybe—that journey in the two groups is not like an arduous or a task of being patient, or like it’s hard work to go on that journey. You’re still being kind of taken through it.

Alex: There’s an intention for generosity. They both intend to be, yeah, maybe demanding in some ways—but also generous. Like in Shovel Dance, you’re going to sit through this scratchy, difficult texture, but then we’re going to give you some loud, beautiful group singing and you can join in with us. You’ve earned that. And with caroline—it’s like, you know, here’s some similarly scratchy, difficult textures, and then here’s like a rock song. And you can just rock out and that will be satisfying. And then it’s going to go weird again—but you can enjoy these. You’re balancing between those two kinds of tones.

Oliver: I think those are similar discussions that happen in both groups—within the rehearsal room, in the writing room—like balancing between those two different...

Alex: keeping it not too cheesy, not too challenging.

Oliver: Maybe dynamic range might be quite similar. This is all from the previous touring with caroline—so I’m going back to that, like a year ago. But going down to maybe one high note on the clarinet or one harmonic on the strings, to go into a very, very big sound. That feels quite similar between the two groups, I suppose. Shovel Dance is limited at how big it can get—there’s no full drum kit and two guitars in Shovel Dance. But we push it as loud as we can possibly get the instruments. So I think both extremes—as loud or as quiet as you can play any instrument—that bit of dynamic extremes are kind of the same, similar between the two bands.

AR: Another thing I had in mind was also that I think both performances feel quite organic in the way you coordinate each other. As in, sometimes there are—like in the previous caroline show—there were a lot of actual breaks without a time signature, just a moment of silence, and then you would cue each other with a look, or breathing, or a gesture.

My last question is about the process with the new caroline album, because I was curious to see how it was for the two of you—the writing process of the new tracks.

Alex: We did a lot of full-band writing, which was definitely different from the first record. My main memory is from when we were writing—there’s a song on the new album called Song Two—we were writing that in the barn. That’s a very vivid memory for me. That one came together so quickly and it was so clear—“Oh, this is album two.” This is like a departure song. This one felt like it’s way more of a straight song in a more conventional way. It’s still very caroline and weird, but it was like—this is what our energy is telling us to do right now.

Some instrumental changes between the albums—I’m mostly playing bass clarinet on the new album.

Oliver: Oh yeah, it’s quite a big deal. Alex is going from clarinet to bass clarinet. That’s a completely different sound. Freddy’s going from trumpet to trombone. So all of a sudden, there’s more of an emphasis just on bass frequencies. Magda going to viola...

Alex: The way I’ve been summarizing the new album and the new material to people is that it’s more experimental and more pop—it’s taking those two extremes further than the first album, which was maybe much more rooted in slowcore and post-rock and stuff.

Oliver: I can't wait to play them live,

to be honest, that's what I'm looking forward to most, we're looking forward to get on tour and play them!

AR: Today we're going to talk about your new album. But first, I want to get into the composition of Caroline as a band. I understand that you, Casper, and Mike are the founding members and also the main initiators of the songs. When you started writing for the first album, was the eight-piece already completely formed? Were you already thinking about the entire band when writing the first songs?

Jasper: The first album was formed quite differently from this one. It was more of a compilation of things we had made over years. Me, Casper, and Mike developed the songs with various different people over quite a few years, really. Some members of the final eight—those in the band now—weren’t even part of it yet. But obviously, the songs developed further when we played them live, and those people added great parts. It was more a strange accumulation of stuff rather than eight people trying to write an album from start to finish.

This album, though, was different. It was eight people writing from the start. It was initiated and led by the three of us, but the actual writing sessions involved a lot of group writing as an eight, interspersed with the three of us working alone. We’d go away for a week and write together in the countryside—residential writing sessions. So it was a varied process, but definitely the eight of us from the start, as a band that had already toured together.

AR: Do you think your songwriting—maybe even personally—changed now that you had in mind exactly who could play what, especially after touring and playing together so much? Did you start writing with specific bandmates in mind?

Jasper: Yeah, definitely. It was completely like that. All our ideas—both from the three of us and the full eight—were written with full awareness of the people in the band and what they could do. That was quite different from the first album.

Also, knowing how people play, you can imagine things they haven’t done yet, but that they could do. For example, bass clarinet and trombone weren’t instruments that Alex and Freddie had played before, but because we’d played together so much, we thought they could. They’re such good players, and they did end up playing those instruments—those actually became their primary instruments on this record.

AR: A lot of trombone?

Jasper: Yeah, loads of trombone. Freddie was mostly playing trumpet on the first record, and he does still play a little bit of trumpet, but now he's playing mostly trombone and bass, electric bass. But like, trombone — it was his main brass instrument, and he's a brass player.

AR: Do you think that the songwriting went to a different direction? It feels to me... maybe there are more melodic hooks.

Jasper: We were genuinely interested, when we made the first record, in one thing happening for a long time, and kind of organically transforming itself through repetition. And that came about kind of, in a way, just on a practical level — just through the fact that we couldn't really do very much technically as musicians. We were quite limited, especially when it was just the three of us at the very start. We could only really play like 1 or 2 chords. We were very rough as players, and we didn’t really have the ability to write more complex chord progressions. So we just did one thing. And then we realized that one thing was quite interesting if you did it a lot. I think the whole record was really about that. It was about digging in to one thing — to loops, like loops upon loops.

So this record, it didn’t even almost need to be discussed that we weren't going to do that again. By the end of making the first record, we’d kind of moved on from there. And we were more interested in collaging things together. We were more interested in juxtapositions, basically, and pushing them further. And yeah, so the songwriting is very informed by that. Structurally, the songs are way more: one thing, then another thing, then another thing. And it changes quite dramatically. Sharp shifts, like right-angled turns and things.

A way in which we made that kind of still a satisfying experience to listen to and to make was by also having these melodic elements — in a way, quite conventional or quite like, sweet. That was a way in which you kind of hold together something that's very choppy and changey.

Like “Total euphoria” — the guitars and the drums are three different tempos. There's no rhythmic correlation, really. It's very like... but then the vocal is kind of binding it. But it’s not like a conscious decision really. It’s more just what comes about when you're playing together. We are satisfied by these changes. But then like somehow, the sweet vocal became a way of like holding it together, I guess.

I think it's just like, there's something that we're really interested in about scaling things up and down, and proximities and the distances — going from really close things to really big. Like really loud things that are really quiet. Things played really hard but mixed really quiet. Things played really softly, that are mixed really high. I don't know, just like creating these weird zooms in and out.

I think that we were just excited about that, and the whole record has to do with that. The whole record has to do with how you make sense of two or more really contrasting things happening at the same time — and how you kind of like... it's kind of become about that. Over the course of making it, we realized that was in all of the songs, really.

AR: I mean, of course, there are some moments in which maybe what they're saying is literally there — in “Coldplay cover” there’s really...

Jasper: yeah, two songs at once. And “When I get home” also has two songs. The song that’s in the club, you know, the kick drum, and it has the acoustic guitar on the top.

AR: Yeah, like at the beginning, there's this kick drum

Jasper: it’s like a whole song, just filtered. It's really a whole song that our friends wrote for it. It’s a kind of Ibiza 2001 banger, really.

AR: Since the song structures are quite abstract, the moment that you write the basic structure of the song — the skeleton — how would you present it to the entire band?

Jasper: We would often figure out the overall structure together — together as an eight. And it really depends on which song you’re talking about.

Like some of them — for example, “Coldplay cover” — that was very clear from the start. We had this song that I wrote. We had this kind of guitar-up-on-stuff that I’d written and some vocals. And then we realized that it would be a really good song to use for this two-songs-at-once kind of concept we had. We had explored this concept of having two songs at once and we kind of realized that it would work really well. So it was kind of very self-explanatory — self-explanatory in the way the song just unfolded, that's obviously how it was going to be. But other ones we tried, with the eight and as a three, we tried lots of different ways of changing the structures to make it work, reordering sections. So it was a trial and error process of working as a bigger group, working as a smaller group, working as a bigger group. That's kind of always how the process works.

AR: Do you know the movie Mommy?

Jasper: The Mummy?

AR: No, Mommy by Xavier Dolan like from “mom.”

Jasper: Not “The Mummy Returns” with Brendan Fraser?

AR: When I listen to “Total euphoria” there is this moment, this outburst of distorted sound that reminded me of that movie because there is this scene which is, in a way, a moment of euphoria. Spoiler: until that part the movie is framed square or just part of the screen and then the character opens it up and this moment really reminded me of that a lot, this distorted moment. To me it feels like it's a great representation of what's going to happen after compared to what has existed before in the Caroline universe.

Jasper: That distorted moment, I guess, to me is like we always thought of it as the speaker, like you're listening to someone kind of collapsing. So it's like, I guess it's this quality of... there's this thing of there's a song and then there's how the song is presented. So there's a kind of like, meta is a really annoying word in many ways but there’s a bit of meta aspect to that, that like, the song kind of collapses on itself.

AR: What I think is cool about the new album is that your sound as a band clearly takes a new path but also without sacrificing any elements that already existed. I was wondering what, you think, led towards a new array of sounds if there were new influences or a specific new sound that you were researching production wise, also because I feel there is much more production rather then recording a performance.

Jasper: Yeah that's all true. I'm really glad you said that. I really hope that it does still follow the thread of the first album but also go to a new place with lots of things and that way I think that I feel like that about it as well and I think we all do really. I think that that is a product of it being quite an authentic writing process. It was just what we were interested in at the time and towards the end of the first album, certain things came up and we just carried on pursuing them into the second album and pushing them further so it's all kind of a connected process, really. So it feels like a natural evolution to me. But in terms of the specific things yeah, I mean, we were listening to a lot more. I guess we were listening to more pop music. I was listening to a lot of this playlist when we were touring for the first album. I was constantly listening to this dariacore playlist which was basically... it’s on Soundcloud, lots of people could upload stuff to it and it’s just like these sped up, breakcore pop mash ups, really smashed up things but really euphoric as well, like really, really euphoric and lots of different people contributing. This playlist had like hundreds of tracks I listened to it loads so for me that was definitely a big influence in manipulating the vocals and also just like the kind of euphoria of those trancey chord progressions and like I think we wouldn't have had the confidence to just to have melodies as kind of poppy as we do on this record, for the first one we felt like we could lean into it so we could push in both directions. I mean, we could fragment the rhythmic aspects more but then also lean into the melodies that we were coming up with and especially when I was working on vocal melodies myself before I would have been “no I can’t have that” because it's too cheesy, whereas now I'm like “no, I can definitely, that’s good.”

AR: Why not?

Jasper: Yeah, exactly. I kind of felt like that wasn't allowed somehow.

Jasper: I think the album sounds differently also because of the vocal parts. Like the first one was very choral, but here there is also a lot more of variety in textures because there are more solo parts especially also with the featuring with Caroline Polachek and lot of more effects.

AR: Was that also intentional from the beginning that you wanted to have a lot of variety, like you can take any single vocal texture and there is like characters almost?

Jasper: Yeah, I was definitely interested for myself in having kind of two characters of like my natural singing voice and a low and low like... a lower formant voice.

So I kind of alternate between them at different points, like at the end of “When I Get Home” and in “Beautiful Ending” and in “Two Riders Down.” You know, I used a low one, but the rest of the time I'm singing a lot of close vocals and singing quite soft.

There’s a couple of times in the record where I sing a bit more off mic and a bit harder, like I do on the first, which is something I did more in the first album.

But yeah, so the vocals, just for myself, are quite varied.

But yeah, this thing of having a wider range of singers also emerged quite naturally. Like Magda, she started singing on “Good Morning (Red)” for the last record, and then we realized how great her voice was, and then she ended up singing more on this record, which is just really great. Her voice is beautiful.

But yeah, also Freddie sings a little bit more in this, and also Mike sings. Mike and Casper both sing solo bits at different points, which didn’t really happen much on the last one.

So I guess you have like the four of us singing, but then you also have — sorry — five of us singing, but then also me and Magda use like other voices, effected voices as well.

AR: The autotuned is Mike?

Well, I’m not sure if it’s autotune, but like a digital effect

Jasper: at the end of “Tell Me I Never Knew That”?

AR: No, I’m thinking about “When I Get Home,” the final part.

Jasper: Yeah, that’s Magda, so I’m doing the... I’m doing that low one right at the very end, but she’s doing the auto-tuned one like...

AR: So she also has two characters.

Jasper: Yeah, she has Autotune Magda and Normal Magda.

AR: It’s like a superhero character.

Jasper: So yeah, the characters — we are interested in this thing of having different, just having lots of different voices coming in at different times.

In “Song Two,” there’s this bit where the lyrics are like “he said, he said,” and then it’s like “lightning on the sky,” and that’s like a low formant voice which is meant to be almost like another person speaking.

I think I ended up doing it, but it could be kind of anyone in a way.

So yeah, like quoting, there’s another moment — the songs quote each other quite a lot lyrically, and some melodies are repeated across like two or three songs.

We are quite into that thing of characters and quoting different people, taking each other’s lines.

AR: So in “Tell Me I Never Knew That” there is a guest: Caroline Polachek. Is it because you needed a voice actor for a new character, or how did the collaboration begin?

Jasper: The collaboration began because we, as soon as we wrote the vocal part for that song, we thought — I think that’s probably even in the early demos of this — you can probably hear us talking about it.

We were like, “That sounds like a Caroline Polachek melody,” so then we were joking about it for a long time, you know, “We should probably ask,” “We should ask and she probably wouldn’t want to do that.” But like, we are such big fans of hers. So in the end, she followed us on Instagram. I mean, she’d shared some things of ours, of course, so we were like, “Maybe she could be interested.” So we just asked her, but it took us a long time, but then we asked her and she was up for doing it, so she came and we recorded with her, she wrote these beautiful harmonies.

And so throughout the whole song, you can hear her doing these improvised, like runs over the top.

So yeah, she ended up writing loads of these vocals and beautiful harmonies for the first half, and then we recorded the song and it was great.

And then we just worked on it for about a month back and forth about the final bits of mixing the record.

Yeah, that was kind of it really. It was really great.

AR: There are many sections that are sort of isolated parts — they almost sound like field recordings, so it feels like it’s the recording of a very fleeting moment that you wanted to capture.

I was wondering how that developed, if there is a specific reason you did that, and also how did you work it out in the production process to put those pieces together with the more produced parts?

Jasper: I guess it’s part of this interest in these hard juxtapositions between things. The field recordings were just kind of another — just like having different worlds, different situations.

I think that it’s definitely like, to me, there’s quite a visual aspect to it.

You have like the studio recorded song, which is almost in this kind of dead space where, when something is recorded in a studio, it’s almost like you don’t really want to — implicit in that is like, don’t imagine where this is happening. These are just sounds kind of divorced from any context.

And going from that, almost the kind of seduction of that HD, really crispy recording, rich sounding — you’re just in the sound, you don’t think about where they are really — and cutting from that to a very alive non-musical place, sort of situation, and then just transporting you suddenly from one place to another and then back again or whatever.

That just seemed really exciting to us and to try and actually pull it off.

AR: And are they actually sort of field recordings?

Jasper: Yeah, they’re iPhone recordings, and then some of them are more like staged than others.

So some of them are more like intentionally made, but still it’s like a different texture.

Yeah, it’s like a different scene — it’s like a different scene from a film, or like a scene from a play.

It’s like suddenly all the lights come on and you realize you’re in this massive room with hundreds of people watching you play.

And then all the lights change, and then it’s focusing on one tiny point, it’s a tiny spotlight.

It’s kind of that.

It’s that thing of just revealing different, different situations, different angles, like different perspectives.

AR: I imagine it’s fun for whoever is mixing the album to then put them together.

Jasper: Well, I mean, the thing is, you can’t give that to a mixing engineer, because it’s like the whole song, the pieces themselves are so reliant on all these different environments, all these different situations.

We had to do so much of that ourselves in order for someone to be able to mix them.

The mixing engineer who ended up mixing did a really amazing job, Jason Agel, but in order to get it to a point where he could work on it, we had to do so much work ourselves just to get it working, if you know what I mean.

Like “Coldplay Cover,” for example, which is a live recording, it’s done all live.

It’s like a group of people in one room and they’re playing a song, and then someone walks with the mic to another group playing another song, and you can hear the first group in the background.

And all of that was completely live.

And you had to — in order to make that journey clear, because obviously both situations were mic-ed up closely, as well as having this moving mic, they both everyone had close mics.

But we had to do like — we basically had to do all of the mixing really.

Like all of the actual nuts and bolts — he obviously refined them, but in order to make the song work, the two songs at once, you have to spend weeks

AR: on the production, on the setting with calculated movements.

Jasper: Yeah, just like doing all of the volume automations, just doing all of the turning down as the mic goes from here to there, turning down the close mics in here, so they kind of follow the same — as if you imagine, we’re trying to create the experience, we’re trying to create the experience as if you are the person walking from this room to that room.

So you have to bring up those ones as they get closer and bring down these ones as they walk away.

And then the song would be complete chaos if we didn’t do that, it would just be two songs at once, which fundamentally, to control them you have to have one much quieter than the other, otherwise the clash would be too nasty.

So yeah, it was complicated.

The mixing, the production, and the songwriting process are completely interwoven — you can’t really split them up from each other very well.