Sean: Hi Paul, it’s Sean from The Rockpit. How are you?
Paul Mahon: Great thanks mate.
Sean: Normally I would be sat in my office in sunny Perth in Western Australia but I’m currently sat in a kitchen in South East England with my laptop perched on a cooker hob, while linked to a old Samsung mobile hotspot and its 2 degrees centigrade outside [laughs].
Paul: It sounds grand [laughs].
Sean: Firstly, a huge congratulations for the new album ‘Sundowners’. It’s fantastic! Seven years we have had to wait and what a return.
Paul: Thank you. I’m so glad you liked it. When you say seven years it seems such a very long time and at one point I seriously thought we wouldn’t get the chance to do another record so I was very happy to get the call from our manager when Golden Robot got involved and we got the opportunity to reform the band again and record ‘Sundowners’. We were very happy to get the opportunity.
Sean: Do you think those seven years really helped freshen things up because the album sounds so vibrant.
Paul: Yeah, I certainly think so. We were probably allowed to be much more objective that we were before because with the break I really thought we wouldn’t get back together and as the years passed I kind of mentally removed myself from The Answer and it gave me the opportunity to give myself time to listen to the albums more as a fan which gave me a different perspective on things. I was keen to start writing again and it definitely influenced how we went about it. Any band who has done it for as long as we have and who have six albums under their belt gain a lot of experience and you kind of know what worked and what didn’t. You look at what you can change and do differently. Having that break allowed us to get in that head space and allowed us to come back at it from a different angle and much more reenergised. I think we have made a much better record than if we had just followed up right after ‘Solas’. It’s been really positive.
Sean: We were treated to the first single ‘Blood Brother’, which was absolutely superb and really whet out appetites from more, and just when we thought it couldn’t get any better the next two singles just teased us with how good ‘Sundowners’ was going to be. I’m still finding tracks on the album that sit forward even more for me. It’s so great when you listen to an album from start to finish and hear so many potential singles right there in front of you.
Paul: I think so too. ‘Want You To Love Me’, ‘Livin On The Line’… there were a couple of other tracks, maybe ‘Cold Heart’… they were talked about as being singles and maybe ‘All Together’ as well. We were quite fortunate that the songs came out that well, once we came to recording them. I also think there are some album tracks on there that are filler [laughs] – they don’t stand on their own as such and need a few listens to grow on you and give the album some longevity.
Sean: Funny you mention ‘Want You to Love Me’ as that is one of my favourites on the album at the moment.
Paul: OK, well that one came from one of the very first sessions we did once we got back together. It was one of the first riffs we did and that came out exactly the same on the album – we had that format straight away. It was actually one of the ones that we were sure if it would make the final cut.
Sean: Really?
Paul: Yeah, it was kind of one the B-list when we finally went into the studio but we listened to it when we got in there and we thought that we definitely had to give it a craic. I remember hearing it back for the first time once that backing vocals and keyboards were on it and I thought, “Oh wow! That’s incredible!” We knew we had something there. It’s so trashy it kind of pulls a different kind of sonic for us which we have been trying to get on previous albums and never quite achieved it. I don’t know whether it was by accident or through producer Dan Weller who really helped to get us into a different kind of sonic that we have been trying to achieve before and never quite got exactly what we wanted, I think. Production-wise we are the happiest we have ever been than with all the albums we have done previously.
Sean: I see it was April 2022 that you guys headed into Middlefarm Studios in Devon. How was that chemistry like getting back together in the room after so long?
Paul: It was really good. I think to kind of step back from it a little bit was good for us. We met up for three sessions together before covid hit… we kind of knocked the cobwebs off by then and the chemistry was really flowing by then. It was a real bummer when covid hit because it kind of killed the momentum. After so long a break and getting back in to it and everything was good and we were all really excited, it suddenly looked like we might not get to finish what we started. I think there was uncertainty for everyone all over the world. We kept writing and talking over zoom, like we are now, once a week then we had one week together in August 2020 when we did some demos in Ireland and then we didn’t get to see each other for another year. We did the same thing across zoom, firing demos back and forth, got together in Ireland for a week and then went to Devon. So it was kind of a very different way preparing to write an album with zero pre-production and even with the producer Dan, we’d never actually met him in person until we arrived at the studio which is vastly different for us because we always did around three weeks pre-production with the producer in the past, you kind of really get to know them, know if it’s going to work or not. But this time we were all very relaxed and maybe in some ways not being super prepared this time allowed the songs to breath a bit more and allowed us to discover new things in the studio as we did it so your kind of hearing the same as we heard it for the first time, whereas before everything was really planned within an inch of its life. Maybe moving forward this is a better way for us to do it.
From: https://www.therockpit.net/2023/interview-paul-mahon-the-answer/
