Gurry Wurry by Josue Rodriguez
Dave King finished his last album feeling happier than he had since he was seventeen. He knew it wouldn’t last. That album was called ‘Happy For Now’. His third album ‘Glue’ is what came next, thirteen songs about a relationship falling apart, produced by Frightened Rabbit’s Andy Monaghan and catchy enough that a BBC presenter recently heard his single ‘Have You’ and said it made her feel full of joy. The lyric she was responding to is about someone walking out the door. King found this funny. It is the same trick he has been pulling since he started making music as Gurry Wurry, burying difficult things inside sounds that make you want to sing along. On ‘Glue’ he does it better than ever, partly because this time the difficult things are harder to hide.
‘Happy For Now’ was built around a feeling of warmth you were trying to bottle before it slipped away. ‘Glue’ is a record about breaking things and trying to fix them. How quickly did life move from that place of hard-won contentment into the kind of pain that’s all over this new album?
Yeah it comes at you fast, doesn’t it? I think as with most bad patches, it came completely out of the blue. The funny thing is though, it’s very similar to that ‘bottling’ idea you’re talking about on the last album. When you finish an album it always seems to feel like you’re looking back on a version of yourself that doesn’t exist anymore. I’m over the painful stuff because all that negativity just got sort of soaked up by the songs.
When we last spoke you talked about Rod Jones convincing you to stop burying your vocals, to let their frailty be their strength. On ‘Glue’ you ended up using a late-night demo of ‘Maslow Was Wrong’ because twelve proper studio takes couldn’t recapture it. That feels like the same lesson landing differently. Is your voice still somewhere you find uncomfortable, or has that changed?
It is, unfortunately. I guess a voice is just such a personal thing. I constantly struggle with it. When I make mistakes on the piano I don’t feel like they’re a reflection of me as a person but for some reason dodgy vocal takes feel so shameful.
It’s also such an intangible instrument, some days it feels amazing to sing and then the next day everything just feels frail again. I’ve been working really hard on it though, I sing basically every day and I always feel like I’m so close to a breakthrough. The big issue with ‘Maslow’ was the tempo though. I’d recorded that demo stupidly late at night, all live with no click track. The timing was all over the place and I was having to concentrate so hard to find the pulse in the song that I just couldn’t put anything real into the vocal performance. It was a long fight but in the end the demo won.
Working with Rod made sense as a counterpoint to your messiness because of his cleanliness. Andy Monaghan is from Frightened Rabbit, a group known for a different kind of emotional rawness. What were you looking for this time, and did you find it?
It really was about opposites again. I’d been playing live a lot since the last album and the energy of a packed room just makes you want to play faster, more driven songs. That really influenced the writing – I actually wrote the vast majority of these songs completely a cappella with just a metronome on at 120bpm to try and find a sense of momentum and a decent pace.
But naturally I bring a sort of wobble to things – my playing is a bit more groove than drive. And I tend to favour slightly unexpected turns, weird sounds, weird chords, a bit of maximalism. In the same way Rod cleaned up a lot of the mess, I felt like Andy could really help me build up and drive this album forward. To make it all sound bigger and fuller and darker. And he definitely did. I had a great time in the studio, I think we were good foils for each other and created something neither of us could have done alone.
You wrote forty-five songs for this album. With ‘Happy For Now’ you talked about needing to whittle down to the right eleven. With ‘Glue’ you landed on thirteen. Was that just the nature of the material, or did something feel unfinished that you needed to keep going?
It was easy to cut about half of them, you’re always going to write quite a lot of rubbish in the process. But it started to get tough around the 20 mark. I’d got quite attached to some of the tunes and I felt like they all had merit. So I had to give them all a bit of time to breathe, and I got a few trusted ears involved to help me hear them more honestly. I made a bit of an impulse call with the last few cuts, the night before we went into the studio. So we went in with 13 assuming a couple wouldn’t work and we’d still have a full album of 10 or 11. In the end they all took shape and I just couldn’t get rid of any of them.
You found ‘I Doubt We Survived’ hard to get through in the studio. You’ve talked about using juxtaposition and misdirection as a kind of protection, the crass line after the sentimental one. Were there moments on this album where that armour wasn’t available?
Yeah I think there’s a few more direct and honest songs on this album. I’m pretty exposed at times. There’s maybe a bit less humour than normal, but there’s still some in there. ‘I Doubt We Survived’ in particular is pretty on the nose and I didn’t have anywhere to hide when we recorded that. But we were still able to do things musically with it to make sure it didn’t feel too overbearingly sentimental or sad – like the weird guitar solo and the big distorted drums.
You described ‘Happy For Now’ as something that came out sadder than you expected. Did ‘Glue’ surprise you in the opposite direction, or did you know from the start what it was going to cost you?
Haha, I hadn’t noticed that until you asked but weirdly yes, it’s come out the exact opposite. ‘Happy For Now’ was supposed to be upbeat and came out a bit depressing. ‘Glue’ is the saddest subject matter I’ve got into yet and so much of it has come out uplifting and catchy. One of the singles ‘Have You’ was on BBC Introducing recently and Phoebe I-H said “It just makes me want to sing along… it makes me feel full of joy”. I was laughing away to myself. The lyrics are ‘have you thought about, when you’re walking out?’. Maybe that’s what making music is all about – a sort of self-help process that lets you see the light side of your problems.
What comes next, and do you have any idea yet whether album four is going to be about picking yourself up or something else entirely?
So something we talked about, and battled over, in the studio was my maximalist tendencies. Andy really likes to strip a song down to its core and let it shine. I like to mess around with it and fill it with weirdness and misdirection. We found a great middle ground, but now I’m sort of inspired to see what happens if I make music with no hiding places.
I’d quite like to make a really minimal, focused record. Maybe set myself some rules about 4 or 5 instruments per song max. Maybe even try and do it live. I’m really drawn to slightly spiritual, sort of stream of consciousness stuff. Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is my favourite album ever made, and I felt like that Cameron Winter solo record really channeled the same spirit. Now I’m wondering what would my music sound like if I stripped it down to a live, small band setup? I don’t want to make a folk album or anything. But I want to know if I could keep my sort of idiosyncratic tendencies and weird choices, but do them in an exposed, understated way. I’m not really set on it yet, but whatever I do, I want each album to be different to the last.
Further information
Gurry Wurry returns with ‘Glue’:
- * Physical Release 29th May
- * Streaming Release 30th October
