BOY&BEAR
Continued from page 26
“Downhearted,” just to understand how
its saxophone solo worked within the
mix. And – when Boy & Bear was
rehearsing for its current world tour – the
members decided to throw some new
covers in, just for kicks. Already, their
version of Crowded House’s “Fall at Your
Feet” (from a 2010 Finn Brothers tribute
album He Will Have His Way) had become
an unexpected radio smash in Australia.
“So in rehearsal, we did a song by The
Band, a Talking Heads track, a Ryan
Adams song, “Dirty Rain,” and Van
Morrison’s “Sweet Thing,” which was
cool,” Hosking recalls. “So it’s been fun,
diving back into some covers.”
The artist has even developed a theory about how learning other people’s
material can be beneficial to your own
group. “I think it stimulates a different
part of your brain,” he explains. “And it’s
an ironic thing. You play covers for so
long, it becomes hard to play your own
stuff. But then you do this record like we
just did (“Limit”), and you’re so focused
on piecing this puzzle together, and you
get a lot of joy from that. Then you go into
rehearsals, and you’re focused on getting
these new songs ready for tour, so it’s
labored over a lot. So there’s this different
sense of enjoyment, versus that moment
when you’ve got a Talking Heads track
kind of clicking. And there’s a freshness
in it, because I don’t sing those sorts of
melodies, and Killian (Gavin, B&B axeman) doesn’t play that sort of guitar. So
Ki
Ci
throwing covers into the set list is fun,
and just purely enjoyable, with no pressure. And you can really learn a lot from
them.”
Hosking started out solo, recording
primitive demos at home. He imagined
himself a Dylan-skeletal folksinger at
first, and developed his craft accordingly.
But gradually, he fleshed out his Boy &
Bear concept by adding fellow university-student buddies until he had a full
quintet. “They were different songs back
then, much softer and folkier, and I didn’t
know any different,” he admits. “I just
knew the versions of songs that I had
written in my bedroom, and that was it.
But I wanted to do some live shows to try
to replicate them, so I got some friends
from university to come play some
instruments. And I kind of enjoyed the
extra people onstage.”
Now, Boy & Bear has progressed to
the point where it recruited renowned
English producer Ethan Johns – son of the
legendary Glyn Johns -- to helm “Limit,”
which he did at Peter Gabriel’s posh Real
World Studio in Britain. What’s next for
the group? A full-blown covers compilation? Hosking snickers. “Well. I’ve had a
lot of practice at it, and it would be a lot
of fun,” he concedes. “But it is a slightly
dangerous game. In the old days, we
would take an electro track and do it
acoustically, but the novelty of that is just
gone for me – I think it would be dumb
for us to do a covers record like that now.
“But at the same time, I think that covering Daft Punk would be really, really
cool. So I’ll to seriously sit down and
think about
this….”
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