Life Pilot Reflect On Self-Titled Debut Album

Long running Adelaide five piece, Life Pilot have released their highly anticipated debut full length album. The Self Titled album speaks on numerous themes; fear, doubt, frustration, self reflection, compulsions, night terrors, societal expectations and how these all play into personal connections and our interaction with the world around us.

It is a deeply personal record for the band members and lyrically, it is predominantly introspective with a focus on close relationships. It is a path mostly untrodden by the band until now. Now matured, Life Pilot are able to more personal and raw than ever before. Musically and sonically, the song forms are carefully designed and sculpted, modernising and evolving the band’s sound while keeping true to the rough sound the band has always leaned in to. With a definite mix of new and old elements from each prior release, it feels like a fully realised Life Pilot. Drummer Eli Green talks to Hi Fi Way about the album and tour.

Congratulations on your debut album, you must be really excited and maybe a little bit relieved that it is finally out?
Oh, mate, we are ecstatic that it’s finally out. It’s been a very long time coming for us to put this whole thing together and finally share with everyone what we’ve been working on with what has been our lives for the last four or five years. It’s a great feeling to finally have it out and to have people enjoying it and telling us that they really like what they’re hearing, and that the wait was worth it. That means a lot to us.

Does that make it all the more sweeter that you’ve done it yourselves?
Absolutely. We’ve always had a pretty strong DIY ethic in our band partly because we just haven’t had the budget to involve people and teams to do all this sort of stuff and what we do, but also because we believe really strongly in what we do and how we do it. So, to take it to its fullest extent now to do this record ourselves and every aspect of it, we recorded everything, produced everything, we even built the damn studio that we recorded it in. It was a huge effort to get it. It was just why it took a bit longer than we had initially planned, but the end result is great. The only thing that we outsourced was the mixing to Declan White from Melbourne, who’s an amazing engineer and producer. He’d worked with us before on one of our singles and he is a good friend of ours. We knew that if anyone was going to bring our vision of what this self-titled record was going to sound like to life, it would be him, and he did a great job. So, yeah, other than that, it’s all us baby.

Being the first album, is that also the hardest in some ways as well in terms of sort of saying to the world, this is us, this is our sound, and like you said before, this is our vision?
Yeah, we’ve been doing this for a long time, we’ve been a band since like 2012. So, in a sense we’re used to crafting new material and developing a block of work. But this is the first time that we did it on such a scale. I mean, everything we’d released up to this point had been six, seven tracks max. This is the first full length album that we undertook and we definitely wanted it to feel cohesive. We definitely wanted it to feel like a statement piece. We’ve evolved a lot as a band since we started in the early days. Those who have experienced Life Pilot in passing before, I think this is a different Life Pilot now, but it is still very true to what we initially set out to do, which was write some pretty aggressive and chaotic tunes, but they’ve always got a lot of heart to them and a little bit more depth as well. It’s not just noisy, angry crap. There’s a lot of stuff there as well for people to dig into. We’re really happy with how it turned out. It was a labour of love for sure. There was a lot of thought that went into every aspect of it for sure.

Did it get to the point where you needed to block out some time to get the album finished?
Definitely, we started this plan at the end of 2019, we released Pretty Like A Pistol single, we did some touring in support of that. Things were starting to sort of move forward for us and we went, right now’s the time, let’s do a full length record. Then the world exploded like two months later and then the whole music industry obviously took a long time to recover. At the time, lots of the people in our band, myself included, were sole traders, artists, musicians, making our living doing things that now no longer was really viable. So, it took us as individuals a while to find our feet. When we finally did get back into the swing of everything, our guitar player had a baby and all this sort of stuff, we were kind of like, well, it’s already past the time that we would’ve wanted to have released this record.

Let’s just like take our time with it and do it the way that we want to do it and the way that we need to do it. We were doing it a bit more ad hoc. We would work on one song at a time having the luxury of our own studio space was great. I would lay down drums when I would have time between teaching drum lessons or whatever, and then the guys would come in later in the week and lay down bass and guitars and sort of chip away at vocals. The whole recording process probably took us maybe a year just to record it, and doing all the post-production and everything that we wanted to, but that was because we were doing it in dribs and drabs. I don’t know if we would do that again.

I think that was very much just a necessity of this particular record and coming out of where we had been with Covid and everything that had happened prior. But now, I think we’re in a much better space to be able to do exactly that opposite thing and just say, hey, we’re going to block out a month, we’re going to record this record, get it done, and, and get it out, which will be very exciting. So, we’re actually quite excited for whatever the next record is going to be. But this first one is really exciting to just have it out.

Do you think it would be as personal a record as what you may have or originally intended?
It’s definitely a very personal record. I said in another interview the other week that a lot of our first sort of forays into EPs and longer releases were a lot more, I guess youthful in their mindset of it, of us against the world. I think this record is a lot more us against ourselves, or at least being a little more introspective and looking inwards at some of the themes and lyrical content. There’s a lot of talk on the record of feeling like life is maybe passed us by or missing loved ones who’ve departed. There’s a little bit more from the heart, I think we’ve always been pretty honest, and we take our music very seriously, but there’s always a bit of a tongue in cheek kind of nature to what we do. I think this record definitely has a lot of heart to it, which is the way I would describe it for sure.

Taking more time with the record, lyrically did you find agonised a bit more over the words and how they all hung together?
There was more conversation around it. Most of the time, I would say like ninety-five or more percent of the time, we would leave the lyrical content to Angus, our vocalist, he’s an incredible wordsmith. He’s very clever with his terms of phrases and he definitely has no shortage of lyrical content with him. He writes a lot and packs a lot into the songs. So really for us, it was almost a case of trying to trim it back a little bit to the heart of it to come through instead of of just being lost in the chaos of it all. There were a lot of rewrites that he did. I know there were some moments where we’d been working on the songs for such a long period of time, he maybe would’ve had a first pass at a song thinking about one particular topic, and then coming back to it a year or so later when we’d get closer to recording, he would go, actually, you know, maybe I’m in a different head space now. We would write a little bit more, I guess, relevant to where he was at or where we were at as a band at that point, which was interesting. We’ve not really experienced that in a creative process before. Usually, you write the song and you smash the lyrics out and then you go record a demo of it, and that’s kind of how it stays for a while. But this one, because it was pulled over such a length of time, we really had the time to pull it apart a little bit more and let it evolve naturally, which I really enjoy because songs tend to evolve once you’ve released them anyway. This would’ve been a cool thing we could have done and maybe change it for the live show, but with this record we had so long to mess around with it I think how it feels now is actually everything’s fully realised.

Did everything go to plan in the studio?
It was good, I think it helped that we weren’t standing on each other’s toes for a month, just like living there. It was a little bit more ad hoc and it became like a nice weekly tradition. Everything went more or less to plan. We did have a few moments where we fully recorded one song and went, actually this song would sound way better if it was like substantially faster. So, there was some pretty drastic fixing of that had to happen and re-record. There are a few other little moments here and there as there is in any creative process. You don’t always get it exactly right first time. But I think in general, we had a pretty lengthy pre-production phase where I was really keen on making sure that everything was in place as close to fully realised as it could be before we hit the record button. This was my first time engineering a full record. I’d done plenty of little bits and pieces for clients and stuff before, and helped with some of the other band recording previously, but a full twelve track record is a pretty big undertaking, so I wanted to really make sure all our T’s were crossed and our do our I’s were dotted. All in all it went pretty well and we avoided major catastrophes.

Was that hard letting go of certain songs or letting go of the album once you thought it was done?
Yeah, especially after such a protracted time of working on it you’re always fiddling with something. There were parts that we were re-writing, little sections, but there were even some slightly more larger sections that got a work over as we were recording it. There was one song in particular where we completely rewrote the back end of the song, maybe a week before we finished all the production just because an idea happened and we went, oh, that’s better, let’s do that. But, you can only do that for so long until you end up kind of overcooking things and then just chasing your tail. At a certain point we were like, you know what, we could continue to mess around with this for like another five years if we really wanted to, but what’s the point? We need to put this out and let people in to what we’ve been doing and then we can move on.

Being hands on with the engineering side of the album how did you go listening to the album like a fan would?
I actually enjoy listening to it now, which is actually quite a difficult thing for me to do. I don’t listen to a lot of my past releases because I always have that mindset of like, oh, well, where I’m at now as a musician or a producer or an engineer, I would’ve done this different, I would’ve done that different. With this one, I think because we lived in it for so long and we answered so many of those questions about, oh, what could we change about this? Or is this as good as this could be? Or should this be something else? I know that the answers to ninety-nine percent of those things are no, this is what it should be, or this was what we agreed it should be and we feel good about it.

Definitely there’s things that I would maybe like tweak about the production by the time you finally finish and release something and put it out. Production standards change and trends change and you go like, oh, wouldn’t it be cool if we had this style of thing on it? But I think for the snapshot of the moment in time that it is, it’s, it’s as close to perfect of a Life Pilot release as we could ask for and we’re really, really proud of it. I guess the thing is, if there are things that we would tweak about it that we can take into the next record cycle thinking about and improving on, we get to grow from this point, which is very exciting.

Are you looking forward to getting on the road for this tour?
Oh, absolutely. A band like Life Pilot lives on stage, that’s where our heart and soul is, and that’s where we put our best foot forward. I think anyone who’s been to a Life Pilot show can attest it. It’s usually a pretty chaotic and crazy hectic time, but we’re so excited to be able to get out there and tour again. We haven’t had anything to go on tour for quite a number of years, so we’ve been missing our fans and our friends interstate. For us it’s just a great experience to just get out there for a couple of weeks, go make some memories, play some insane shows and just have fun. So yeah, we’re really excited for that one. It’ll be great.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Listen to Life Pilot here
https://hypeddit.com/lifepilot/selftitled

On tour on the following dates, tickets HERE…