Balancing act

Don McGlashan. Photo / Supplied

If it's Monday night, this must be Greymouth. Don McGlashan is in that anxious gap between dinner and showtime. Right now he's trying to find a place that's not too loud, but not too cold, to talk.

"The mountains are really snowy and really close," he says down the line as he wanders about, "so it does feel like a different place."

Eventually, he settles for a spot on the venue stairs where early punters might overhear the night's headliner talking about the new songs he and band the Seven Sisters will be playing in an hour, as well as the seemingly complex shape of his musical career.

"The cloning is working quite well. Though they are having a bit of trouble with the hair colour and the skin tone," he laughs, referring to how he's balancing being a band frontman, occasional solo singer-songwriter, soundtrack composer, and more recently, Crowded House studio ring-in.

"I had a reputation when I was younger of being really disorganised. Being the kind of guy that never would turn up at the right time. I think I have fought that for a long time and now I wake up to find myself to be considered to be quite organised.

"But for a lot of people making music there are large chunks of their life they don't have to publicise in order to get paid for and just about everything I do involves somebody organising some publicity so that people will come and see it. And therefore it looks like I am doing a lot."

This national tour for second solo album Marvellous Year started in Napier on Thursday a week ago, just as the city was paralysed by that day's shooting and stand-off.

"Yeah, it was a terrible time to be there. But people bought tickets so we did the show and tried to create a joyful noise in amongst all the dark clouds of the place."

The tour has been been zig-zagging its way through the islands then heads north to finish in hometown Auckland at the end of the month.

It's been bit of voyage of discovery for McGlashan and band - many of the songs from Marvellous Year haven't had much live mileage before or since their recording late last year.

Carting them around the country gives the tracks a chance to evolve - "give them a chance to see if they can go in a different direction or see what happens when everybody is having a great time and the solo seems to want to go on for two minutes rather than 30 seconds. All those sorts of things which you need a tour to discover."

McGlashan says Marvellous Year is his most relaxed and personal album yet. Fewer songs rely on characters or narrators - which have been a distinctive feature of his past songwriting from the early days of Blam Blam Blam, through the theatre/comedy/film outfit the Front Lawn, through to the Mutton Birds era - and more on where it's him doing the talking.

"I've felt it's a more confident record than I've made before in some ways. Not that I am ever going to give up different approaches to telling a story because I like what you can achieve with adopting a character to tell your story, but I have found with this one I felt like speaking from my own point of view and have enjoyed that freedom.

"Woody Guthrie wrote a song before breakfast every day - I may not ever get to that stage but I am speeding up and I am enjoying the freedom that allows me."

And that's whether he's contemplating the cosmos or life at home - and sometimes doing both. The album comes with two songs, the title track and C2006P1, that contemplate comets. It was an idea that kind of split into two songs - one raucous and one contemplative.

"I had been kicking around the idea of auspicious events because when my daughter was born there was a comet in the sky - whatever comet came through 14 years ago - and I remember writing Pearl one of those parental letters that you hope they will put away and read when they are 21 about the notion of cosmic events heralding important events on earth.

"Two songs seemed to want to come out. One was a big relaxed noisy thing just celebrating the flamboyant otherness of the comet and the other was a more thoughtful thing ... Maybe in my old age I am lurching blindly towards concept albums?"

Well, despite having come of age musically in the post-punk years of Blam Blam Blam, McGlashan admits he used to listen to 1970s prog-rock outfits like Yes in his younger years.

"Had I been in Yes and tried to write about a comet, I probably would have done half the song in Sanskrit, so count yourself lucky. And a lot of it would have been in 7/8 [time signature] - maybe that's the next album."

But McGlashan has other outlets for his more sophisticated compositional urges - he's become one of the New Zealand film and television industry's go-to guys for soundtracks.

His latest have included the films Show of Hands and Dean Spanley as well as the telefeature Piece of My Heart. His work on No. 2 generated his biggest hit, albeit sung by Hollie Smith, Bathe in the River, which he reprises under his own voice on the new album.

"The notion of a soundtrack being important, being more than a bit of glue to stick the licensed music together with, has led to filmmakers taking soundtracks a bit more seriously," he says.

McGlashan is also one of the nine composers who have written pieces for Sonic Museum - Auckland Museum's project to give its galleries headphone soundtracks - where he scored the Origins Gallery.

But does the multi-instrumentalist want to go bigger than pop songs and incidental music? Maybe knock off his own symphony?

"No, I don't really see myself that way. I get pretty bored with my own ideas once they have gone on for longer than the average song. And I found that even with the museum piece - that had a bit of a programme to it because you are walking around the gallery over the course of eight or nine minutes - but even then I kept thinking, 'This would be more fun if there were some words'.

"I do love instrumental music and the Dean Spanley thing I just loved - in some ways it was made easier for me because it was a period movie so I had a pretty clear style sheet to work from.

"But if I tried to make current classical music with a decent classical ensemble I think there are a lot of other people that would do it better."

He's not lacking for creative outlets. Having supported a revived Crowded House around the world last year, he's been a ring-in - a "utility mid-fielder" he laughs - playing euphonium, mandolin and percussion on early sessions for Neil Finn's band's new album.

His tie to Finn and his Seven Worlds Collide concert and album has also made another connection - he's been invited to open for American band Wilco, who were also participants in SWC, in the US later in the year. That's after he finishes another soundtrack. But first, he's got to rock Greymouth and a few other towns he hasn't played in a while.

These days it seems McGlashan, whose years of campaigning in Britain with the Mutton Birds have left him bruised by the music industry, is happier just to let his career take its own haphazard course.

"All those sorts of those stresses aren't there really. I have kind of organised things so that we are putting one foot in front of the other and the work itself is its own reward - that sounds pretty hokey but that is where I am at the moment.

"Surprisingly that attitude, which sounds really non-entrepreneurial, is paying off because we are selling out around the country - and everyone said this was a bad time to tour because of the recession. But maybe if you stop trying, good things happen."

On stage

Who: Don McGlashan

When: With the Seven Sisters, Friday, May 22, Clevedon Village Hall; Saturday, May 23, Leigh Sawmill Cafe; Friday, May 29, Monte Cristo Room, Auckland.

Also: Appearing at the Writers and Readers Festival talking about songwriting, tomorrow, 6pm, ASB Theatre, Aotea Centre, of which he says: "Their problem will be getting me to shut up rather than [me not knowing] what to say."