I love Andy Bull as a musician and as a dude. I got to have a chat to him about his new album, Sea of Approval and here’s what happened:
Andy Bull isn’t picking up.
Here I am, a big-shot fancy-pants comedian who’s very busy eating and masturbating in a hotel room in regional Western Australia, taking time out of my busy schedule to talk to him about his little ditties or whatever, and he can’t be bothered picking up his phone at the arranged time.
Turns out, of course, that he’s been in the studio, playing keyboards on some new hook-laden indie pop gems with Bluejuice.
Bloody typical.
Bull has been spending a lot of time in studios over the past few years. It’s what he does. When he hasn’t been on the road playing shows all over the place, Andy’s had a habit of getting his mates to help him conjure up perfectly pitched collaborations (‘Dog’ with Lisa Mitchell, ‘Last Waltz’ with Hungry Kids of Hungary).
‘Dog’ in particular found itself in high rotation on triple j, and for a month or two I had the pleasure of playing it on the station’s breakfast show most mornings. Sure, at first I couldn’t quite tell if this “Andy” character was a boy or a girl, but I still really liked that song and that still totally counts, you guys.
When the man himself came by for our Like A Version segment one Friday morning and sent chills up the nation’s spine with his rendition of ‘Everybody Wants To Rule The World’, it became official: I was an Andy Bull fan.
He’s consistently interesting, funny, smart, lovely and assuredly talented.
Plus he’s got a jawline so defined you could use it to cut a hard cheese.
2014 brings us Sea of Approval, Andy’s second LP, home to three already much-loved singles and much more. His distinctive voice and acoustic piano are married with synthesizers, vocoders, organs, samples, glitches and vocal layering to create an absorbingly rich world that moves from mood pieces (Just One Expression, Just One Line) to power ballads (Nothing Is Wrong) to dark floor-fillers (Talk Too Much) to spacey, sexy jams (Loved Like You).
Listening to the record is genuinely exciting. You can tell this is Bull throwing himself at a bunch of new things, exploring fresh ideas and sounds. He tells me that ever since he gave us the Phantom Pains EP in 2010, he’s been “mucking around with this electronic stuff”.
“I don’t want to be a traditional singer-songwriter and I don’t want to be purely an electronic producer, but I feel like I’m somewhere in the middle,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to try these things, so I guess this record was about taking the time to do that.”
It was also about breaking away from the practise of collaborating with other producers and musos and just going it alone. Andy produces and plays pretty much everything on the album.
“I needed to leave that way of working to figure out what I wanted to do. There were a couple of different records that I could have made, but I feel like I’ve settled on the right one.”
Having that time and freedom, he explains, allowed him to make mistakes and work all hours of the night, his addled mind coming up with left-of-centre-but-still-worthy lyrical ideas.
“There’s a lyric in there that goes, ‘I’ve been looking for you face down in a shallow stream’, and that came from me late at night just looking through my Facebook feed and realising that it’s like a stream – a shallow stream that you can drown in.”
In fact, much of the record centres around a dream-like state of consciousness: Andy has recently found himself lucid dreaming and keeping a dream diary to document his adventures. With Sea of Approval, he says, he wanted to represent those dream experiences through sound.
Impressively, he manages to talk about all this stuff without coming across as a wanker.
“(Album opener) Just One Expression, Just One Line is like the first scene in a film. I imagine it like there’s a guy in his house, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, losing touch with reality. He’s depressed and he’s sleeping in the middle of the day. Real or imaginary people are calling him and leaving weird messages for him as he’s mulling over in his mind the meaninglessness of his actions, while a kind of David Lynch pixie descends and informs him that he isn’t who he thinks he is.”
And so begins the story of Approval’s central character – whom Andy refers to as ‘The Actor’ – and an exploration of those juicy, timeless themes: love and identity. We’re all acting, Bull explains, born into a “perverse performance”, constantly looking to an audience for approval and validation, tweaking our actions and ourselves for the sake of others, always caught in a struggle for a sense of tangible authenticity.
Of course, as someone who’s addicted to yelling dick jokes onstage in an effort to gain laughter and applause from strangers, I can’t relate to this at all. But you might be able to.
The Actor is wracked with uncertainty throughout the record. He only has “one expression”, he thought everything you have would be his and he’s very keen for you to tell him how he should have done it.
“He’s asking all the wrong questions in [Keep On Running],” laughs Andy. “When is the audience going to tell me that I’m right? When am I going to get that approval?”
Running has the synths working overtime, provoking memories of the past and thoughts of the future. Everything on Approval was played live on hardware to give the songs a tactile feel and to ensure that the listener could “hear a person in all of it”.
“Plus I need to be able to play everything live onstage with the band. It’s a little bit old-fashioned.”
Sometimes the old ways are the best, Mr. Bull.
The 80s make their presence felt here. Prince and Tears for Fears are favourites for Andy. My ears also pick up elements of Kavinsky, Depeche Mode, some Kate Bush and even some Hall & Oates (Andy isn’t too sure about that one).
“I’m a child of the 80s and I don’t know, there’s just something I like about that era and its music. In a lot of that pop there’s a push and pull between music and lyrics. The lyrics are dark but the music promises something else. There’s a nice irony there because life is never one thing; it’s an ambiguous mishmash of emotions.”
A personal highlight is the record’s moody closer So That I Can Feel Better, particularly the downright sad (and true) line about returning home:
I go driving in my old town
To see my old friends
It reminds me why I left
So I can leave again
That certainly touched the heart of this artsy fartsy gay kid who grew up in country Victoria.
“It was getting towards the end of the record and I had to head back to my parents’ place (in the northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga) to finish it. I think creative people have an odd relationship with their home town. There’s a sickly nostalgia associated with it. It’s familiar, which is nice, but at the same time it’s icky.
“A home town has a lot of resonance because it’s the place where you had your first imaginings and it’s the place that first rejected you. It’s the first place you realised you don’t quite fit in.”
Trying to fit in, authenticity, integrity, yearning for approval – this is the stuff that Andy Bull is swimming in. I once read in an interview that he liked visual art that was “violent and spontaneous” and wanted his music to sound like that too, visceral and carefree. For what it’s worth, I truly think he’s achieved that here. And I think it’s awesome that, in the true spirit of the album, he’s not hanging all his self-worth on its critical success or failure:
“The process of making Sea of Approval was imperfect. Sometimes I walked away from tracks that were fine, sometimes I spent too long on things. But every moment in life is imperfect. The important thing is that along the way you act authentically.
“Regardless of how the album goes, I have my personal integrity. I used to think that’s what you claimed to have when you were a failure. Now I’ve come to be a little bit older and I’ve failed at lots of things and I realise that that’s the goal of life: to stay sane and keep your integrity.”
We finish our chat agreeing that St Vincent is heaps awesome (Andy caught her live show the other night) and laughing about how he recently blocked me on twitter by accident (or so he says…). He’s just a lovely bloke; a lovely bloke who’s spent a lot of time making a record that is a layered, engaging expression of who he is and how we’re all struggling to define who we are.
I’m only too happy to listen to it again.