Ainslie Wills
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Ainslie Wills

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“When I got to the VCA, it was a pinnacle for me,” Wills says thoughtfully. “Holy moley, the breadth of talent I was surrounded by [was] both inspiring and daunting at the same time. I suppose you have an idea of where you think you sit [in class]; I was like, ‘You know, I’m not doing too bad’. Then I got to VCA and I was like, ‘OK, I need to work a lot harder’.” She laughs unabashedly and continues on about that pivotal time in which she met her partner in musical crime, Lawrence Folvig. “We would bring in our own compositions and we’d play them, and that’s when we started hanging out and getting to know one another a bit more,” Wills says.

During college the two didn’t take their collaborations outside of class but once Wills graduated, shit started to get real. “I started trying to write my own EP, which I [did] in my bedroom because I had nothing else to record with so you know, I had a program on my desktop that I didn’t really know how to use,” she laughs. “Talk about learning curve. I actually asked Lawrence to come in and play a couple of parts on that EP.”

The two then started playing shows together, added a drummer, and remained a trio for some time, recording Wills’ debut EP Somebody For Everyone. Just as they were about to tour, their drummer “pissed off to bloody Berlin” and after this the band as you now see it evolved: Natalie Lewis on synths, Jules on bass and Aaron on drums. “It is quite a long process I suppose when you look back at it, starting in 2009, but we finally got here,” Wills says.

The new album, You Go Your Way, I’ll Go Mine, came out last month. It is, by the way, a spectacular release. It contains the brilliant first single Fighting Kind, plus a number of other colossally emotive tracks: Lemon Japan’s drums sound like huge, dull metal barrels with sensitive skins; Stop Pulling The String contains an unbelievable instrumental middle with all manner of synths; and first track Mary contains some sort of pedal steel, strings that fade in unexpectedly like a dam being opened, and a distinctly Radioheadish guitar melody that flips around Paranoid Android-style. It’s difficult to imagine how the great falling, percussive counter melodies are re-created on stage.

“I’ve never done the looping thing, [although] I’ve practised at home,” Wills explains. “But Nat is incredible. Vocally we have a very similar tone, and she works really hard at trying to create a similar tone to my voice. Nat doubles a lot of the vocal parts; sometimes she’ll sing in unison with me or do the harmonies, but also the boys … both sing as well, and the points where we really need those harmonies I try and get the whole band to sing them.”

Wills and Folvig arranged all the string parts on the album themselves. “I’d always wanted to have live strings played. It’s such a beautiful sound, and we were lucky to get three fabulous string players,” Wills says. Her recording engineer and co-producer was able to get the musicians some time in a section of the Northcote Uniting Church, which turned out to be on a “sweltering” day, but through difficulties involving the instruments going out of tune due to the heat and moisture they managed to record.

“Both Lawrence and I wanted to make an album that had a kind of cinematic, kind of – dare I say it – classic sound,” says Wills. “And I suppose we wanted something that was quite full and textual, and as grand as we could make it. Big and warm. We were so lucky that the strings came together and it sat well.”

Wills, Folvig and the crew are gearing up to tour You Go Your Way, I’ll Go Mine across the east coast. “I’m just really looking forward to playing the shows,” she says warmly. “We’ve been in rehearsal mode, it’s like, ‘Uh, come on! I want to play in a room with people in it, not just us!’”

BY ZOË RADAS