“I guess it kind of stems from when I was 16 and I got really deeply into Jack Kerouac and his kind of style of writing,” he recalls. “I would go to house parties and I’d come home and basically start writing every kind of detail; every character I’d meet, every event that would happen and so that’s what formed the basis of each song on the album. So I kinda wrote from experience; the whole album is basically just like my experience of when I was 17, 18 growing up.”
As well as novelists such as Kerouac, Hannam also had some early exposure to a number of musical acts who would go on to have a lasting effect on him and the songs he would write for Halcyon Days. “When I was growing up I listened to a lot of my dad’s collection; stuff like Neil Diamond, Simon and Garfunkel, Roxy Music; those bands people kind of laugh at these days,” he says jokingly. “But I think that kind of instilled a sense of melody in me. I’ve always been really interested in writing really strong melodies, not so much catchy ones but just like really kind of emotional melodies.”
On first listen, Halcyon Days comes across as an album you would most likely attach to a band well into their career. The fact that the members of Glass Towers are all still in the early 20s only adds to the impressiveness of the record and its glistening, melodic indie pop. And when it came time to enter the studio, for a first album, the band had a very clear idea of how they wanted it to sound. “I wanted to make a really kind of layered, really deep record,” says Hannam. “Because I’ve always been interested in producers like Alan Moulder who’s my favourite mixer. Like really kind of lush records.”
Enlisting the services of local producer Jean Paul Fung, the band bunkered down in the studio and with Fung’s guidance began to shape and refine the songs which would come to form the record. “We went up to his (Fung’s) farm on the Central Coast and we did pre-production there,” recalls Hannam. “So we basically did the songs live for him, in a live setting, and we recorded them and then he went back to us with things to change. For instance our latest single Halcyon – that was originally six minutes long when we first wrote it so he shortened it and made it into a single friendly song.”
Having had this collection of songs with him for so long, the release of Halcyon Days will most certainly be a triumphant moment. “All of the songs on this record have been written for about five years,” says Hannam. “I wrote them when I was 16 so it’s really, really fucking exciting.”
The next venture for Glass Towers will be a national album tour which will see them breaking new ground by taking in every major city around the country. The tour will of course include a stop in Melbourne and for the young Central Coast band it will be a chance to increase their standing in the music crazed city. “Music is really special in Melbourne obviously and so I think it takes people a while to really gel with a band and really understand them,” says Hannam. “I think we’re just starting to finally, I hope, crack Melbourne. The last couple of shows we’ve played there have been really good.”
The band rightly can’t wait to hit the road and Hannam promises that they are going to do their best to make this run of shows their most memorable to date. “We’re going to try and do something special for it because it’s our album. I don’t know what we’re going to do yet but we might try and do some crazy stage show thing; obviously not like dancers or anything, I mean like make it special,” he laughs. “And we’re playing our last show in Byron so that’s going to be really special because the album was written in Byron Bay so we thought it would be cool to play our last show there as well.”
BY JAMES NICOLI
