HOW TO FIND MINOR GOLD: LOOK IN SHADOWS AND SUN
- Bernard Zuel
- Aug 26
- 6 min read
AT THE RISK OF THIS SITE becoming a haven for jokes about the hirsute, banter about the bearded or mockery of the moustachioed – and remember, what was said about Jesse Daniel earlier this month was said in admiration! – it is hard to miss the addition (or is it subtraction?) to the face of Dan Parsons since he was last in Australia and fully bearded.
The rich, ripe beast crawling alone across his top lip is striking, affecting a certain look that is equal parts geography teacher in long socks, shorts and Pelaco shirt, and one of those people appearing in the kind of films where characters are called Dirk Diggler. You can’t miss it. But don’t just take my word for it. Parsons reckons people were pulling up beside him on the road in Canada and the USA, giving him the thumbs-up of approval.
My scepticism may be showing because his partner in all things music and non-music, Tracy McNeil, chimes in. “That’s actually true,” she says. “I think it’s hot.” Aww. Isn’t that romantic?
However, if you think this music malarky is romantic, the morning after their night-time return to Australia, before jet lag even knows it’s supposed to kick in – and boy is it going to kick in – the two parts of country rock/Americana/double-denim pop outfit Minor Gold, McNeil and Parsons, have begun their month off from a couple of years of non-stop touring, writing, touring, recording, and more touring, with, naturally, work.
Taking this call on Parson’s family property in Queensland, they seem chirpy enough talking about the new album, Way To The Sun, and the Australian tour running from September to December, but somebody or something is trying to tell them this has to stop.
“It’s like your body knows,” says Canadian-in-Australia McNeil, who is coming down with something. “As soon as we got off stage at our very last show in Wisconsin – we had a fantastic show, one of the best – literally, Dan walked off the stage and he is like ‘I am so sick’. It was instant, the last note played and then his body crashed.”
Parsons reveals that he spent a large portion of the early months of this year quite sick during a harsh northern winter, but don’t cry because mostly they have been healthy, loving the shows, and loving the work that has had them on festival bills, venues on both sides of the Atlantic, and recording in LA with producer and cosmic country specialist, Dan Horne.
“That’s where all the darkness comes in,” jokes McNeil, anticipating my next question which is if everything was going so well why does the new album – the second as Minor Gold, the second since their late-arriving offstage love from their days in Tracy McNeil And The Good Life, turned into this globetrotting duo – sound so sad and occasionally quite dark among its gorgeous melodies and classic West Coast ambience?
“The first album there was a lot of release and joy about freeing ourselves and our lives, and now we’ve been in it for a few years, in the trenches, and while there are no regrets, it takes its toll. Living out of a van for three years will do it to ya,” she says.
Parsons chips in that “every single album I’ve ever made, and Tracy too, even in the joyous moments there is still some kind of melancholic reality going on.”
This lid on total happiness might be a little voice on the shoulder saying, careful something bad is around the corner, but then it might also be the fact that the bar of their expectations keeps being raised. By them.
“I don’t think either of us could imagine five years ago that we would be playing in North America. Then it was like, ‘Europe and the UK, that’s not us’, but now we are doing that,” says McNeil. “You just keep wanting more, and the goalposts shift and what’s important keeps shifting. But hey, not everything is autobiographical, that’s for sure. Yeah, sadness is the overarching tone but there’s a lot of hope in the record.”
That’s true, there is a fair bit of sun in this record. Not least the astonishing truth that two people can live this closely, every hour of every day for the past few years in a 1999 Chevrolet Astro van and not just avoid killing each other but write new songs and, most shockingly of all, still like each other.
“I gotta say, now that I’m sick and Dan is better, this is our first opportunity to sleep in separate beds for a long time,” McNeil says. “So Dan slept in the other spare room [last night], and I texted him him this morning that I missed him. It’s crazy. I think we found something pretty special.”
May be part of the answer is Parsons does all the driving, which has its upsides –McNeil (“I crash cars”) is not at the wheel when a song idea strikes her and she gets distracted – but a downside in that Parsons, who prefers to have a guitar in his hand to write, can’t do anything until they stop.
They did take a break off the road in March, hiring a cabin in Canada, to make songwriting happen. And, in the way of hardscrabble independent artists, they also spent part of that break writing applications for funding grants.
“Work on the grant, write a song, the fires burning,” McNeil says.
Such practicalities matter, but sometimes romance wins over sense. Like when earlier this year they thought they had the whole record done and Parsons said, hold on. At first McNeil bristled.
“I was holding onto the purse strings going, we can’t afford to go back and do more songs. This thing’s fucking done! It’s done, it’s gotta be done, we don’t have any more money. And he was like, it’s not done, we need more.
“So we went back to my parents’ [house in Canada] and we got Way To The Sun, Break It Fake It, and a third song that didn’t make the record.”
In passing she mentions that the song that ended up as the title track was written in about an hour, from riff to finish. Something was on!
“A lot of this album was pushing, pushing to improve,” says Parsons. “In every single area we could. So even though the album sounds kind of relaxed and carefree, it takes a lot of effort to look that relaxed. But we tried to raise the bar for ourselves.”
McNeil was adamant that they not “rehash what we know we could do, that we have done across 10 albums between us and one album together”. One aspect of this was working with producer Horne whose broad-concept sonic approach (“not just recording to tape everybody records to tape but the way he mixes, the way the sound comes into his old beautiful board, and his taste”) was central to their thinking. It says something that this new song didn’t just give the album its name but opens the record.
“It was a sonic statement as well as a lyrical statement,” says Parsons. “That was the centrepiece, sonically and we wanted to tap into a mid-70s kind of surf film vibe with the music, with the groove, and the guitars and harmonies. And the simplicity of it: it’s not a whole lot of moves, but what it does do it does very well. And we wanted that to be the ethos of the record.
“Lyrically, Way To The Sun encapsulated the journey that Tracy and I have been on separately and together, trying to get from a darker place to a lighter place. To a place of enlightenment, to a place of peace. And going from the grey, kind of nameless cityscape to a place of warmth and sunshine and vibrancy felt like a really cool way to tell that story. And that story gets told a few different times, in different ways, on the album. Break It Fake It even says ‘trying to find my way to the sun’, so it’s a very, very loose kind of concept.”
It’s interesting that Parsons describes the sound they were looking for as mid- ‘70s surf movie, though it may explain the moustache. With that hairy thing the record was either going to be a mid-70s surf movie or mid-70s porn film. Or maybe a porn surf film. Hey, there’s their next concept album.
“We should call it The Endless Comer,” says Parsons as McNeil collapses in giggles beside him.
Oh dear. On that note, we should probably draw a veil across jetlagged Minor Gold and let them follow the sun.
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For dates and ticket details for Minor Gold’s Australian shows go to https://www.minorgoldmusic.com/about-5
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