Mojo wears her influences proudly, she waxes lyrical about detective fiction luminaries Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammit and the classic films of Jim Jarmusch, clearly inspired by film and fiction as much as music. “I’m a total nostalgia-file, always looking backwards, but you have to be relevant. You are not evolving the form if you’re not taking it somewhere”.
She sees her new album as a collection of short stories as much as set of songs, and her band do a great job setting the tone for the rich world she evokes with her lyrics. The rhythm section of drums and upright bass nod towards the Vegas grind of ‘50s strip clubs and Mojo’s tremolo guitar sound entwines with the guttural moan of Darcy McNulty’s (Clairy Browne, Harry Angus) baritone saxophone to conjure up a sordid underworld of gin soaked nightmares and cigar smoke stained dreams.
“I work with musicians on what I think would serve the song rather than going in and arranging for them. A lot of melody lines are written on guitar but I’d be a fool if I didn’t say here’s a block section where you can improvise. Everything that comes out of that guy (Darcy McNulty) is genius”.
Mojo tells me her greatest song writing hero is Tom Waits, and that can be heard in the bittersweet melodies and dark underbelly of her songs. In a way, the new album feels like its picking up where Waits left off on his 1980 opus Heartattack and Vine, taking in both the musical world of off kilter jazz, gorgeous lullabies and gritty urban blues and the lyrical themes of hoods, bad girls and broken hearts.
“I’m also a fan of ballads, when Tom Waits was writing ballads, that was my favourite era, even on his latest album, it’s those songs I come back to”.
The yearning melancholy of her own ballad Train Down The Hawkesbury is one of the standouts on the new album. The band drop away and Mojo’s sweet and sad voice is accompanied by only electric piano. She sings of the broken dreams of the passengers on the train from Newcastle to Sydney. She tells me she wrote a helluva lot of songs on that train line when she was based in Newcastle with former band The Snake Oil Merchants, and has just been back there shooting a clip for the song.
Based in Melbourne for the last three years, some of the new album was recorded by Loki Lockwood (Graveyard Train, Toot Toot Toots) at Atlantis but the bulk of the songs were recorded by Calf – the same engineer who recorded her old band The Snake Oil Merchants – who did the tracking for this album at his studio in the beautiful old deco-period Nicholas building in the Melbourne CBD.
“They have old fashioned lift operators there,” Mojo excitedly tells me. ‘It’s kinda eerie at night, but beautiful”.
While the album is already out on CD and download, Mojo is thrilled for its imminent release on vinyl with some extra tracks, including a version of the old country song Psycho by Leon Payne (previously made famous by The Beasts Of Bourbon). She explains that she’s taken the song down a Doo Wop line, bringing in the Clairy Browne’s backing vocalists The Bangin’ Rackettes to add their distinctive flavour to the track.
“It was one of the very last songs we recorded. While we were tracking, our drummer actually tore a hole in his snare by accident. He hit the snare, we said, ‘Wow that’s perfect. If we can nail this take before that skin dies, we gotta use that’. We somehow got through it and managed a perfect take, it couldn’t have worked out better”.
Mojo has made the transition from hard working independent artist to being signed to Universal Records (licensed to the ABC) and managed by Russall Beatty from Sydney agency Tenderloins. She is clearly happy with the genuine support of management and label, allowing time to focus her creative mind and energy on the art rather than the business.
“All my musical idols, the people have inspired my creatively – writers and filmmakers – they have not had flash in the pan careers, they are people who have had a long slow burn”.
With her hectic pace of touring, filming clips and doing press for the new album, that slow burn just grow into a raging fire.
BY MIKELANGELO
