Have/Hold is an enigmatic rock band with a history of creating tracks with a spectrum of feeling – bombastic, poignant, dynamic and heavy with longing.
We got into their heads to get the down low on their latest album ‘We Are A Ghost Now, You & I’.
1. How does the album making process begin for you?
Have/Hold have always been determined to maintain a particularly democratic writing process. Usually
we’ll all come to a rehearsal room with an idea and elbow out the corners for a few hours. Then, I’ll
mumble and moan syllables to turn into lyrics later, almost like automatic writing. This album was a
little different in that I sat down over the course of several months to purposefully tell a story, as
opposed to spewing diary entries.
I had collated a heap of musical themes on piano and guitar and was
reading a book at the time that really set fire to my imagination so it all came flowing pretty thick and
fast from there.
2. Do you write the music or the lyrics first?
Nine times out of ten it’s music first for me. I write a lot of word sketches and poems in notebooks
when I’m in transit but until they put their hands up over some din I’m toying with they rarely amount
to much. If there’s a piece of music floating around trying to talk to me though it’ll nag me for weeks
until I give it some lyrics to play with. They can be annoyingly persistent things these songs. Haha!
3. What time of day do you prefer to write music? When are you most creative?
It happens to me late at night a lot, in those precious yet all too rare still moments after everything else
has melted away and I finally have a chance to sit down and think. I’d love to get up in the morning
and do a nine to five day full of writing but life just gets in the way sometimes, eh?
4. What challenges did you face while making the album?
I think for me personally the challenge has been keeping all the requisite plates spinning over a
reasonably extended period of time. I started work on this suite of songs a little over two years ago and,
while it’s almost ready to venture blinking into the wide world, it feels like it’s taken it’s time to
gestate. The upshot of this is that we’ve all been able to listen to it with a unique sense of objectively,
which is an odd joy.
There is always a moment once a record is finished where it finally feels so, but
rarely are you able to listen to something you’ve made without hearing your fingerprints.
We got the test-presses back the other day and sat together in a room to listen to it from start to finish and it was
like nothing else. We all sort of looked at each other agog, we’d just listened to a record we liked
unanimously and the fact that we were the ones who had made it was a secondary notion. It was almost
like a creative out-of-body experience.
5. Who was the first person you played the album to in its entirety?
Partners always get priority listening… the poor things. Haha
6. Describe the album in three words.
Searching, cataclysmic, romantic.
