KEY POINTS:
It has taken more than 20 years but Graeme Downes reckons he finally knows how to write a good song. And these days, the Verlaines songwriter's main inspiration for continuing to put out albums are the students he teaches on Otago University's rock music degree - official name:
MusB (Contemporary Music).
"It's more a case of us learning together," he grins over a pint at a Ponsonby pub. He's up here from Dunedin for a few days to promote the new Verlaines album, Pot Boiler, the bands eighth and first since 1996's Over the Moon.
Since getting the job as head of rock at Otago and researching a book he's writing about the "Dunedin Sound", a term used to describe bands like the Verlaines, the Chills and the Clean, Downes has learned a lot about writing songs.
"You see, I wasn't taught songwriting. I learnt as best I could from watching the Clean and the Chills," he says of the two bands he still holds up as mentors 25 years after first seeing them play in Dunedin.
"I knew about music and symphonic music but writing songs, I didn't know my arse from a hole in the ground. Even when I took up teaching I didn't and it only looked like I'd done enough on paper that I should know what I'm doing," he laughs.
"So they [the students] are a big part if it because I work with them and its good for me to have an album out that they listen to. I'm now starting to feel in control of my art form, instead of it controlling me."
This all sounds rather bizarre coming from a man who contributed three songs to the seminal Dunedin Double EP way back in 1982, wrote elaborate pop compositions on the Verlaines' 1985 debut, Hallelujah All the Way Home, and came up with 1987's brilliant Death and the Maiden, a signature tune for local indie label Flying Nun that was also home to the Clean and the Chills.
"Back then you've got enthusiasm by the bucketload but those big songs off Hallelujah were just what I wanted to say in a song. They are big and complex and they're symphonic, basically. They're not verse chorus. I wanted to write music as symphonic in its breadth as some of the Clean's and the Chills' stuff. And I wrote a lot of songs around that time that I never finished because I couldn't get a text to go with it. It's so hard with that amount of complexity, you kind of have to have a plot or a way of negotiating what you do with the text to somehow make it marry with the music.
"You could spend nine months on a song and not finish it. What a black hole of time some of these monsters were, because I couldn't really figure out the system that made this one work and why I was getting stuck on this one."
Although he simplified his songwriting process around the time of 1989's Some Disenchanted Evening it's only recently that Downes has gained a better understanding of his craft.
"Back then I was on some sort of automatic pilot and working subconsciously, but I've unlocked a whole lot of mysteries about a lot of people's great songs and how they work and now I can do things consciously. Now I have enough tools that even if I have a speck of inspiration I can grab it and go to the toolkit and say, 'right, how am I going to realise this?'
"It's kind of a newfound excitement because I know what I'm doing a little better, whereas back in 1981 I was doing things and it sounded good but I didn't have a clue why."
Not counting the 2003 retrospective, You're Just Too Obscure For Me, Pot Boiler is the first Verlaines album since the band (also made up of bass player Russell Fleming, drummer Darren Stedman, and guitarist Paul Winders) disbanded and went their own ways in 1996. Downes also released a solo album, Hammers and Anvils, in 2001.
The band got back together in the early 2000s when they happened to all be living in, or near, Dunedin again and "because Russell wanted to do it and I had a few songs lying round".
There are some great songs on the new album but don't expect to hear Downes' newfound songwriting clarity in abundance on Pot Boiler because he was "clearing out the closet of a lot of stuff that had been accruing since 2000".
He reckons the Verlaines' next album will be more representative of his songwriting nowadays and some songs could recall the grandeur and complexity of Hallelujah.
However, what you will hear on Pot Boiler are two of those unfinished songs he mentioned earlier. He wrote Tragic Boy and Don't Leave in 1981 but couldn't finish them because he didn't know how to.
"They both had a beginning and an end but I couldn't figure out how to write the song in the middle."
He says in the last year a few important things have fallen into place that allowed him to finish them. For starters, he's writing lyrics before the music. "That was the problem with the songs that never got completed because I could never get a text that would fit with what the music was doing."
Plus - and this is where it starts getting technical - he's realised that every chord change involves "firing off some emotional stuff".
"It [a chord change] is a highly charged emotional event and it's either a nice chord change, a dark chord change or ... It's on a grade scale and being able to codify what the relative morbidity of all the chords you've got available to you, and using the right one to underpin a word in the text that has got something negative about it. This is the Bruce Springsteen model," he explains.
"It's almost a paint-by-numbers, but it works," he smiles.
LOWDOWN
Who: Graeme Downes, songwriter, guitarist, singer in the Verlaines
What: Flying Nun stalwart, rock degree lecturer at Otago University
New album: Pot Boiler, out now
Past albums: Hallelujah All the Way Home (1985); Bird Dog (1987); Juvenilia (1987); Some Disenchanted Evening (1989); Over the Moon (1996); You're Just Too Obscure For Me (2003). As Graeme Downes: Hammers and Anvils (2001)
