WARMER COMING IN FROM THE COLD – A STORY ABOUT THINGS OF VALUE
- Bernard Zuel
- 8 hours ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 1 minute ago
SONGS ARE EXPENDABLE, these days without even spending, for so many people. Everyone says so.
They accumulate in a playlist, the flash of a ticket from some concert years ago found in an old jacket, or in the box underneath the house that you’re definitely going to get to this summer. When the cricket’s not on. When it’s not too bloody hot to leave the air con.
They tickle a memory occasionally, coming up in a sports highlights package or overheard in the Woolies aisle between eggs and instant oats. You might even sing one or two in the last hour of a Saturday night out, makeshift karaoke style. Nice, but hardly essential, and you might sometimes wonder why anyone – big name, small name, no name – still bothers making that stuff.
But talk to a man who’s been writing and recording songs for more than 40 years – making a living teaching and writing academic/general public crossover books about it (most recently on Ed Kuepper); spending a living at gigs, in studios, in rehearsal spaces for pop groups, avant garde ensembles, noisemakers, solo shows, tribute nights and party favours – and you’re reminded that this shit matters to some people.
John Encarnacao, co-lead of guitar pop types The Nature Strip, long ago solo odd bloke in Upsidasium and more recently the long-necked one expanding guitar experiments in Giraffe Solos, one third of the provocative Smelly Tongues and the improvisatory WEST (with Felicity Wilcox and Lloyd Swanton), and one quarter of OG power popsters The Flies and The Bernie Hayes Quartet (with, yes, Bernie Hayes) has also been this century the singer/songwriter/fulcrum of leaning-acoustic/still-poptastic/touching on jazz folk-rocking Warmer. A compilation/highlights packaging of Warmer recordings between 2002 and 2020, called Warmest, is out now, and the mood at casa Encarnacao is …rather good.
“It’s very satisfying. I found it quite a moving thing actually,” he says. “Nic Dalton, who runs Half A Cow and has put out most of the Warmer records, has been at me for a few years to put such a compilation together for streaming. That was one thing, choosing the songs, and then we got talking and it was like, we may as well do it on CD. Then I went hunting for the masters, for remastering, and I found it a very, very moving process having to listen to various versions of things, taking me back to when I recorded all that work over a 20 year span.”
Why moving?
“I don’t know the extent to which other artists feel this way, but I go through big periods of doubt, you just think no one is listening to me, and it’s probably shit anyway,” Encarnacao says. “Actually listening to all that stuff and putting it together in that way, I felt pride. I felt this is good work. You know when people say they are humbled by things? I’ve never quite known what they mean but maybe I do a little bit.
"It was gratifying in a way and kind of took me by surprise, so I looked to take stock of all that work and say, actually, I wasn’t being completely delusional foisting this on the world in the first place. I think it’s worthwhile and it’s worthwhile drawing attention to it again.”
(At this point it should be noted that John and I are positively ancient friends and conjoined musical adventurers for some 50 years – see link below – though this is the first time I’ve interviewed him, so I’m not without bias. But still, he’s right, it is worthwhile and worth drawing attention to.)
Warmer albums have been recorded in Sydney, Tasmania and soon New Zealand – Encarnacao and I talk two days before he flies to Wellington for a five day burst of recording the fifth Warmer album, with producer Dave Carter, who recorded the fourth, Wooden Box With Strings – and he’s made them with musicians he’d known for decades and with musicians he’d only known for hours. A song like Wooden Box With Strings’ title tracks sounds like not-Sydney to me; the earlier Kiss You On The Mouth sounds very Sydney. This may be delusional on my part of course, so in reality how much does location matter? Or is it mood that is more important?
“To me, the distinction is letting go of control of everything. The first three albums were recorded in Sydney, with people that I knew and a bit of a palette of different colours and textures. When I got the invitation to go to Hobart to work with Dave Carter, it was a leap into the unknown and I didn’t mind that at all. It ended up being such a privilege, such a luxury to have a producer hiring the musicians, me not knowing who they are, and I ended up in this different place for no other reason than to make this record.
"It felt like being a professional musician,” he chuckles. “I was in this little cabin writing the string charts at night and morning, and it was like a dream come true.”
It obviously had been a mutually satisfying arrangement as when Carter saw the compilation had arrived, he got in touch with Encarnacao and said let’s do this again, this time in Wellington.. “And I kinda called his bluff.“
“I don’t know if the different flavour of the Wooden Box album has to do with the fact that it was made in Hobart as much as it has to do with it was made with people I don’t know, with someone overseeing it, and that aesthetic rubbed off a bit on what happened. I think it was probably more the latter.”
It’s always wise to be wary of easy categorisations that something made in cold temperatures or tropical climes will reflect that environment when in the end albums are made in enclosed rooms in anonymous buildings at all hours. But it would be foolish to think locations and attitudes that might come with them, would not have some influence.
“It is a confluence of things,” says Encarnacao. “Wooden Box With Strings is the most acoustic of the Warmer records, it’s the only one in which I use a string quartet. I had a song called Wooden Box With Strings, I wanted to move away from the more rock orientation of The Nature Strip, so it made sense to concentrate on acoustic guitar. And then I guess Wooden Box With Strings taking in the string quartet became a metaphor for a new way of doing things. Combined with the fact that I was working with Dave as producer, that I was working in Hobart, which was not home, I guess you could attribute all the difference in the record to Hobart, but really it was the confluence of all those things that give it its character.”
That there’s a new Warmer album to come, and in fact a Nature Strip album already nearing completion, suggests fecundity. Indeed, Encarnacao reveals that since June alone he’s written 19 songs, which is a serious creative spurt by any measure. Was putting this compilation together a spur to go again? A reminder of what he can do in this particular space?
“There may be something to that; it’s not something I was conscious of,” he says. “That period of the middle of this year was leading up to the first anniversary of the death of my mum, and it was also a period where our little dog, we were starting to think about when we needed to say goodbye to her, and I also had the high stress of finishing my PhD [titled Album Studies: Writing About Albums As Cultural Artefacts] at the end of June. And towards the end of that I started turning to the guitar for comfort.
“It’s not something I have done for a long time: before six months ago sometimes I wouldn’t pick up a guitar for a few months if I wasn’t doing anything, or I’d only pick it up to rehearse or brush up on things I was going to play with the group. I think that’s what it was, this reconnecting with my songwriting self was a place of comfort and the place of wonder that I was able to turn to during quite a difficult and dark time.
“No doubt there is an element of songs as therapy, processing emotions or something, but more fundamentally than that the songwriting self is something that I feel like I have a relationship with and something that sometimes becomes distant from me for quite a period of time. But I feel really grateful that I still seem receptive. I feel like my brain is open to those processes all the time and it’s a beautiful feeling.”
Yeah, songs matter.
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