Interview: Age Pryor and his Invisible Lines

Wellington musician Age Pryor (Fly My Pretties, Wellington Ukulele Orchestra) releases his new solo album, Invisible Lines today.

The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda got Age on the blower and had a good, long chat about making this, his first album under his own name, in many a year.

Click here to listen to the interview:

Or, read a transcription here:

M: The album is called Invisible lines, it’s due out on August 6th and it’s pretty much your first solo album in quite a number of years so I guess the first obvious question is what brought that on?

A: It was just doing lots of group work, doing a lot of work with the Ukulele Orchestra. That group started as a little side project back in 2005, in fact it started as a joke like literally we were just mucking around and it kind of took over my life for a while. We ended up touring around the world and around New Zealand a lot and it just got bigger and bigger and it became more of a business and it was really great. I was performing and managing the group and doing a lot of, just spending a lot of time on it and it’s basically just consumed my whole musical life. When we, we did a couple of tours of the USA, which were pretty big projects, and the second one of those was in 2016 and after that we just decided that we all had more things that we wanted to do in our lives and we needed to give it a bit of a rest and it was at that point where I was like, ‘wow, I’ve kind of become ukulele guy and I don’t want to be just that’ and it’s time to bring the folks back to original work which is where I’d started from but I hadn’t done it for a while.

M: So the songs that comprise the album, when did they start coming together for you?

A: Yeah, well it’s pretty crazy. I’ve got this vague system that I use in my studio which is basically a way of capturing ideas. So my goal, a long time ago when I set my studio up years and years ago, my goal was to be able to walk into the room and play, just play. And if I liked something I was doing, I’d be able to push start and it would start recording, I didn’t want to set anything up or plug anything in or whatever. And so I set it up like that and all the way back to…I think the earliest material that’s on this album started in 2013 and it was way back from then, like even before then I was doing that thing, going into studios, editing, capturing bits and pieces I liked and then saving them for later. When I finally had time in 2017 is when I really started working on this album, when I finally had time to go back and look at things that were worth kind of checking out again, I was just delving into anything that I kind of marked as a keeper. So one of the tunes, the seed of the idea, in fact a lot of the tracking came from 2013, some of the tracks come from 2015, one of them I wrote last year. It’s a really broad range. Like I finished the actual mixing of everything in January this year but I probably first did the tracking during lockdown last year so some of its historical material and some of it’s really recent.

M: When you revisit something that you recorded back in 2013, how do you react to it so many years later?

A: (chuckles) It’s funny aye? Part of my system is to highlight things. I’ve got a map so I just highlight in the find window with a colour and anything that’s green is something that I’ve either decided that when I made it, it’s awesome or I’ve listened back to it a week or two later or even a year or two later and gone yeah this is awesome and normally those ones will be awesome no matter how, when I listen to them. Like if I had one piece I’ve listened to over a space of time and it’s always like yeah, this is really cool then I know it’s worth working on and it’s got something in it and yeah. So I guess that’s…but the other trick that I’ve found is that you need to be, like I’ve kind of developed these little ways of working with the stuff and one of them is that you need to be, you need to have a whole day ahead of you when you do your first listen to one of those demos. Like if I’m gonna go, ‘oh I wonder if this is still good?’, I need to know I’ve got the whole rest of the day free. Because if I listen to it and I’m like oh this is good, oh it would be good with this on top of it or maybe I could go this way with it, you need to be able to act on that straight away you don’t want to be going, ‘oh ok this is good, I’m gonna do something more with it but I can’t do it now, I’ll do it tomorrow’. The next day you might feel differently about it again.

M: It sounds like being in isolation was probably a good thing for you to be able to do that, to be able to put days aside for each song. Did you feel that way when it was happening?

A: Definitely, although at that point I probably finished at least three quarters of the project and it was really useful in terms of getting a chance to, yeah, I mean I did do that with a couple of final pieces. And you know how it can get quite hard at the end of a project as well just getting over the line? So I feel like the lockdown was really an amazing opportunity for me to really just push across the line and get it all done. But part of the process as I was working song by song, I was actually mixing the songs one at a time with Neil Baldock. It was just a way of, because I knew it was probably going to be a long process because I’m always doing other things and it was kind of coming and going. I just wanted to feel some sense of satisfaction as I worked that I was getting the best song mixed as I went and that was the way I was collecting material and it meant that if I wanted I could release an EP instead of an album if it was getting too much or whatever. But we did the Congress Of Animals album in between, that took up a year of my life in the spare music time so that took over the album priority for a while and so it’s been a bit piecemeal.

M: So when did you realize that it was a full album and that this was the way it was going to be?

A: I knew I was going for an album the whole time. I guess the EP was like a safety belt option if I needed it but I was always going for an album. And I kind of knew that I’d got it.  I don’t know. I knew I had the material. It was just a matter of how long I could stand staying in that process. There’s a lot of pain that goes with having to be patient and waiting for the, like allowing the process time and also waiting for that moment when you can say ‘yeah, I’ve got the music finished’, like that’s kind of, like it’s really easy to be in a hurry and to just want to get to that point and I must say I’m relieved to be at that point now! I’m really pleased.

M: I see that you have Chris O’Connor playing drums on most of the album where there are drums, so how did he fit into the plan?

A:  Yeah, so pretty much most of…all of the album is tracked and composed and recorded in my studio so I did most of the work but there were a couple of times when I went to somebody else’s studio and recorded a guest performer and I recorded Chris on one day at Nick Abbot’s studio at North-Western Recorders in Swanson, well Massey even.I think I might have been recording him for some other stuff as well, I think it might have been a TV ad. I was recording strings and drums for a TV ad. No, I was recording strings for a TV ad and I used the rest of the day to track Chris (O’Connor) on the album. That’s what it was. And I did another couple of sections with Deanne Krieg, who’s doing all the backing vocals on my album at Surgery in Wellington and it’s  just little moments in fact yeah. Those string players from the Auckland Philharmonia if I remember correctly, and as well as grabbing stuff for an ad from them I also grabbed stuff for the album at the same time. Like it was just like that, bits and pieces of other people. Thomas Friggens and Jacqui Nyman, Wellington rhythm section, they’re on the song Try which features Mary May, Mary May recorded her stuff at my studio so it’s a bit of a mixture yeah.

M: So it sounds like, quote on quote, a full band on Let Go or Hold On. Is that one of the tracks that you added Chris and the rest of the crew?

A: The only other person playing on that is Chris. And all the tracks have, I say every track that has live drums on it also had electronic drums on it. So I made the tracks at home with electronic drums, I played bass on almost all of them plus all the other tracking like the other kind of harmony instruments and that kind of thing and then I just chucked Chris on to play over everything and if I could get something that added life then I kept those parts.

M: So you mentioned Mary May, I assume that’s her rapping on Try.

A: That’s right, yeah.

M: So tell me how that came about.

A: Yeah, she’s awesome. It’s a funny line of a story, the general thing is that when Ukulele Orchestra played their second tour of America we were travelling, this was in 2016, we had three months travelling across the states, we had forty shows and a couple of the bands didn’t want to come over for the second time,  we had already been the year before and they family reasons or whatever, they didn’t want to come over and we needed to replace our bass player for that tour and the guy that we got for that was Hal Strewe and he’s a contact of somebody in the group. He was kind of Australian, New Zealand family, grew up in Australia, he was living in Berlin, we asked him if he could do it, he could. He came on tour with us and his partner is Mary May and the next time he came over to New Zealand, he brought her over. She wanted to play some shows over here and they asked if I could help them get a couple of gigs. So I set up a couple of gigs for them and I just said in return for the work of setting up the shows, can Mary do some vocals for me? And one of the shows that we did for the house concert, my house in Piha. And the next day I gave her about ten of those demos I was telling you about, these little snippets of ideas and she chose one and that same day she wrote all the vocals for that piece and recorded them in my studio. So she did the raps in it and leaves the chorus vocals and she just disappeared back over to Europe and she’s back in Paris. So I had her material and I kind of finished writing the song around that finished recording it all.

M: Did you have in the back of your mind someone was going to be rapping through the song or was that a surprise to you?

A: I heard her rapping…because once I got to know her, when Hal told me about her, and said they were coming over, I started checking out her stuff. When she came over, she asked me and Sean Anderson who’s a drummer in Wellington, to play with her when she came over so we checked out her music and one of the things I heard her do…there’s a track with a guy called Gus and she’s wrapping on that and I really like it, I really like the sound, in fact I remember writing back to Hal saying, ‘hey is that Mary wrapping on that Gus song?’ That’s really cool and so that was what I did just really wanted… ’cause I think that was the first hip hop influence in my kind of approach to my writing even though I’m not a hip hop musician at all and I really loved working with rap as a teacher and so yeah, I just really wanted her to do some rapping for me and so that’s how that happened.

M: And that track kind of goes from that into a very nice jazzy guitar thingy happening. I assume that’s you on the guitar?

A: Yeah that’s right. That’s my old jazz school days coming through.

M: It’s nice to be able to mix those things within one track. Do you enjoy keeping people on their toes and changing things around a bit?

A: Yeah, I guess to me they kind of fit in the world of, you know a crossover between soul and hip hop and jazz like there have been plenty of groups that have kind of explored those junctures if you can call them, and I guess my guitaring is somewhere in between funk and jazz styles and other things that I grew up playing first. Actually, do you know there’s a group called Nuyorican Soul? They have a song called Black Gold of the Sun and I think that that’s kind of a good reference point for that sound, it’s kind of got soul and jazz and I mean there’s no rapping in it but it’s got funk beats and I think of that as all being quite cross-overy.

M: Now another track I wanted to touch on is the title track, Invisible Lines, simply because it was a very intimate sounding fragile vocal from you and you hear you count in. Where were you mentally, physically when you recorded that vocal?

A: That was, physically I was in my studio in Piha and emotionally the song, that song’s coming out today actually, that’s the title track as you said, and it’s kind of directed at my mum who passed away when I was 20. She was a musician and she was a real free spirit, she was a little bit, I think sometimes felt a bit sad in the world of suburban motherhood. I sometimes have this feeling that there’s a possibility of vicarious living of her enjoying the life that I’m having and it’s the kind of thing I know she’s really celebrate. For example travelling with a band across America, she would have loved all of the colour and fun of that adventure. That’s really what the lyrics in the song were referring to but the invisible lines is also about unseen connections that kind of either guide us or influence our way through life. So emotionally I was really trying to get as close to that feeling as possible and so it’s very intimate and even though, it was pretty hard to get that vocal, I have to say.

M: You have another person helping out on the artwork on the record, somebody named Sam O’Leary who, my understanding is, he is a Kiwi in Portland, Oregon, is that right?

A: That’s right, yeah, he’s awesome. I’m not sure if you’ll know his designs, but Wellingtonians will. He’s done work for Good Fortune Coffee and what else has he done? He’s done a bit of work for I think Special Cabaret which is the cafe down in Wellington which I think is related to that, I think they were related and he did the poster for Congress Of Animals in New Zealand at the end of 2018, it was quite a wacky poster and that was my first time working with him and I really liked working with him because he just had the best of all those elements of understanding where we were coming from creatively, really clear in the way that he worked, really good communicator, which when you work with somebody across the other side of the world, you need them to be quite onto it and he’s really good with all that and he just seems to get the creative vision really well.

M: So did you get the tracks to him? Did he listen and be inspired by it? How did the process work?

A: Yes, and I was also explaining the concept of Invisible Lines and he really ran with that and in fact, the colours that he’s using in all the artwork, they’re the colours that come from my Pro Tools sessions. So they two things he used as reference points were my Pro Tools sessions because I said something to him about how when you’re working with Pro Tools you’re always looking at colour and that kind of stuff and that mixes with the experience of the music so he, that grabbed his imagination. And the other thing was this thing about invisible lines of the kind of fabric behind the surface that you don’t necessarily see that might be having a big influence on the things that you do and the places you go in your life. Those are kind of the themes behind the artwork and you’ll see if you look closely, I’m not sure how well you can see the artwork when you’re looking at things like Spotify but there’s some really beautiful touches in there where I think in most of the single artwork, there’s a little blue line that kind of comes and goes, whereas all the other lines are stronger and he’s done a very beautiful job, it’s very nuanced.

M: So when the album comes out on the 6th, what are you gonna do? Do you have any plans planned? Is there a tour in the works? What’s happening?

A: Yeah, I’m gonna breathe a big sigh of relief first of all and then, I am working with a group at the moment, we’re just getting ready to do our first show at the end of October, and that will be in Wellington. I must admit, we’re not doing a big album launch kind of thing just at the moment but that’s mainly because the group is so new and there’s a couple of things that are special about the group. Like we’re using Ableton Live on stage and we’re just getting our head around this kind of technology which is pretty fun but also quite daunting. So we’re just starting quite lightly with that and once we’ve got that up and running and we’re not working then I’d love to be touring. I don’t know if we’ll manage to get a tour in over summer but I definitely want to be gigging over summer and hopefully we can kind of do more and more and it will definitely be based on the album and connected to the album but it’s not an immediate release tour.

M: Well, thank you very much for telling me all about it. It’s been a real pleasure talking to you and looking forward to everything that happens after the 6th and we’ll see what you’re up to next.

A: Awesome, appreciate it.

M: Thank you very much.

Invisible Lines is released August 6th. Click here to buy the album. 

Notes on Invisible Lines:

Invisible Lines marks Age’s first solo album in 14 years. He’s poured so much into the record and it really is beautiful. The album title makes reference to the invisible connections that exist between all people, something that is also visible in the artwork Sam O’Leary has designed for both the album and the singles that Age has been releasing.

For Age, the album represents an intersection between his songwriting, live band performance and electronic production, which he’s really loved exploring. The record also forms an invisible line with his 2003 debut solo album, City Chorus, for the similarities in process and having the space to do what really, truly felt right.

Album credits
– Backing vocals by Deanne Krieg recorded by Age at The Surgery and The Secret Beehive (Wellington)
– Live drums by Chris O’Connor recorded by Nick Abbott at Northwestern Recorders (Auckland)
– Vocals on ‘Try’ by Mary May, recorded by Age and Hal Strewe
– Bass performances on Everybody by Age and Hal Strewe
– Bass and drums by Jacqui Nyman and Thomas Friggens recorded by Age at The Surgery (Wellington)
– Violin by Rachel Moody and cello by James sang-oh Yoo recorded by Nick Abbott at Northwestern Recorders (Auckland)
– All songs mixed by Neil Baldock (at Age’s studio in Piha, at Neil’s studio in Los Angeles, and at Depot Studio in North Shore)
– Mastered by Chris Chetland at Kog Studios
– Artwork by Sam O’Leary