“That song, I dreamt it. I have a crazy brain for dreaming. I just have all these epiphany-type dreams, and that song had been going around and around in my head all night and I was like, worn out by the morning with this melody.”
Recognising its emotional resonance, Moller immediately went and recorded the song.
He told Real Life he never intended to release it or play it with Voom – he just wanted to play it to Beth over the phone. He played the recording for his friend and bandmate Andrew “Mac” Macaskill first.
“He says, ‘So what’s it about?’ And I said, ‘It’s obvious, I’m apologising to Beth’… And he said, ‘Well, I didn’t know that was what it was about. You’re talking about the moon and the lake and something like that. Why don’t you just write exactly what you mean?’
“And so I went back down there and racked my brain and wrote exactly, literally what I meant, which was quite awkward because generally boys tend to sing in analogies or safe words or something. But I just wrote it very, very literally.”
There is no misinterpreting what the lyrics to Beth are about. Moller lays his heart on the table in the song, explicitly mentioning the broken promise he made to move to Australia, and admitting he still wanted to be with Beth.
“I worked very hard on them [the lyrics], you know? And then I played it to her down the phone and she cried when I played it to her. And I was like, ‘Yes!’ That was my only goal for that song.”
Unbeknown to Moller, though, the song was going to be heard by many more people than just Beth, leaking into the mainstream via record label owner Trevor Reekie and musician Johnny Fleury.
“We were signed to him and he asked me for a new song to put on the radio, and I gave him a song on a cassette. He was listening to it before he took it up to the radio station… And then the cassette carried on playing and flipped over, as cassettes did back then.
“And on the back of the cassette was that recording of the Beth song, which I hadn’t intended him to ever [hear]. And they both sat there in silence listening to it, and they go, ‘We’re taking that one up to the radio’. And they took it up without telling me.”
Moller didn’t even know it had been released until he saw a friend on the street who told him he loved the new song.
“He started singing those lyrics about Australia and stuff and I was going, ‘What? What do you mean? How do you know that song?’ And he said, ‘Oh, it’s No 1 on bFM’.
“And I just had this crushing moment of embarrassment, like ‘no one’s meant to hear that, that’s so embarrassing’.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Moller spoke about his experience of Asperger’s syndrome, being the “black sheep” of a family of engineers, architects and farmers, and releasing a new album after nearly two decades.
Real Life is a weekly interview show where John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing and the way they see the world. Tune in Sundays from 7.30pm on Newstalk ZB or listen to the latest full interview here.
