Wild Seeds: friendship blooms among the songs

Seeker Lover Keeper’s second album proved to be a far more collaborative effort.

Sarah Blasko, left, Holly Throsby and Sally Seltmann of Seeker Lover Keeper. Picture: Adam Yip

Without mincing words, Holly Throsby describes her writing room as “incredibly dingy and pretty shit”. It was in this small studio, under the flight path in Sydney’s inner west, that she and her friends Sarah Blasko and Sally Seltmann began meeting in the winter of 2016 for about three hours each Wednesday night.

Quietly, secretly, they were working on new music together.

Fuelled by dark chocolate, a couple of drinks and plenty of conversation, the three singer-­songwriters, known collectively as Seeker Lover Keeper, were working on melodies and arrangements for new songs.

The band had released a self-­titled debut album in 2011, a dozen songs in a style loosely defined as indie-folk. Each writer contributed four songs, written in isolation.

This time they decided to take a different approach. “This was our first time writing together, which was something we really wanted to do for this record, to solidify that feeling of really being in a band together and collaborating from the outset,” Throsby says.

The first song they worked on together during those weekly winter meetings arrived quickly: Superstar, which is also the first track on second album Wild Seeds. “You know who you are / You’re a superstar,” Seltmann sings in its chorus. “Hanging on my bedroom wall / Walking down the hall …”

Superstar is a song about friendship, and about encouraging those close to you to stop doubting themselves and realise their greatness. “It felt really good and we were really happy with our first song — but of course you have others that don’t come out nearly as easily,” Throsby says.

That first creation set the tone, however, for the 11 songs that followed.

“It kind of showed us where we wanted to head with it,” Blasko says. “It was automatically about nostalgia, and a lot of songs on the record are about that: looking back at who you were and reflecting on that in relation to who you are now.”

According to Blasko, first single Let It Out — whose music video features a star turn from actress Magda Szubanski — was the most difficult to finalise and almost didn’t make the cut.

“It had a pretty different sound when it started to where it ended up, but I’m grateful it did (make it) because it’s such a strong song,” she says. “That one was in peril at one point, but we’d only written 12 songs and we wanted to stick to 12 songs on the album.”

The trio was not thrilled with how the debut album came together across two hot weeks in New York: a couple of days of rehearsal, then 10 intensive days in the studio with producer Victor Van Vugt.

“I don’t think we found the process of making the last record extremely enjoyable,” Blasko says. “It was a bit crazy, so a lot of the way we decided to do the new album was based on what we didn’t do on the last one.

“We all invested a lot more of our time and ourselves in this record, and then we decided to produce it ourselves to make it the way we wanted it to sound.”

Much has changed for each songwriter in the eight years between releases, with solo albums, tours, documentaries, children and published novels littering their respective lives.

This time they opted to record closer to home, at Oceanic Studio in Brookvale on Sydney’s northern beaches. Owned by Midnight Oil guitarist and songwriter Jim Moginie, it’s the same spot where Blasko recorded her most recent album, last year’s Depth of Field.

With Laurence Pike on drums and David Symes on bass, the three primary performers largely stuck to their preferred instruments of guitar (Throsby), piano (Blasko) and Mellotron (Seltmann). The approach to vocal arrangements was more inclusive this time, too.

“I guess the person who generally sings the main part has mostly ended up being the person who brought the idea,” Blasko says. “But then on this record we definitely wanted for there to be more passing from one to the other in different sections. That was a really conscious choice for this record, to have us all really (singing) at the front together, and really passing it back and forward.

“And we wanted the harmonies to be way more prominent because that’s what we loved last time and that’s what we felt people really loved too.”

The artists first bonded in 2007 after a Seltmann concert. They drank together late into the night at Newtown’s Town Hall Hotel.

It was at that pub the notion of a joint headline tour was floated. Later, in an email, Seltmann offered an alternative. They could go on tour and sing their own songs and each other’s, she wrote — or they could start a band, with new songs. In that email was the band’s name, also coined by Seltmann, who simply loved how the words looked and sounded.

When they began meeting to write what would become Wild Seeds, Seltmann was the only experienced co-writer of lyrics. Her two friends preferred squirrelling themselves away in solitude, writing and rewriting lines before emerging with a finished draft.

“It was definitely confronting writing lyrics together. I found that really challenging at times — I actually kind of hated it,” Blasko says with a laugh, while her bandmates hover nearby, listening to the conversation on speakerphone.

“They both know that. It’s very difficult to all be happy with a line; we’re all writers and everyone’s got different ways of expressing things. But in the end it gave the songs a real strength because we knew what we wanted to write about. (Writing together) could flit between being really daunting and really amazing.”

For Seltmann, the experience of writing and recording the group’s 2011 debut has echoed throughout her art since.

“I remember feeling really influenced by Sarah and Holly for my songwriting after we made our first album, just by the way that they naturally do things musically,” she says. “I’m always inspired by seeing them. I guess we’re all similar in this way where we have an idea when we start a project, and then we finish it and release it into the world.

“A lot of people are very creative but they struggle with that as a concept; not having fear about releasing what you’ve done into the world is a really good quality.”

Thinking back to the few hours she spent each week at Throsby’s studio in Sydenham, Seltmann ­recalls leaving with a smile — and not only because of the high rate of productivity generated by three great songwriting brains in the same room, which meant they would usually arrive with nothing and leave with finished songs.

Beyond that was the sheer pleasure of their time together. “I’d often just feel grateful that I have two friends that I love hanging out with, that I can also work and make music with,” Seltmann says.

Wild Seeds is out via Liberation Records. Seeker Lover Keeper’s national tour begins in Springwood, NSW, on September 5 and ends in Belgrave, Victoria, on October 20.